• New Year's Eve Snow Storm

Why am I writing about something that we all know about, and all have been talking about since it happened? Because I think it makes sense to have this as part of Wildomar Rap's details of the city in 2014. Especially since this was pretty historic... at least from my perspective.

At about 11:00pm my wife Grace woke me up and told me it was snowing. I got up, and took a look, but it really didn't seem like much, and I'd seen a light dusting before, so went back to bed. Who could have imagined it would be anymore than that?

I got up well before sunrise, and when I looked out to the backyard, everything was aglow. I also noticed that my trees were a lot shorter than I'd remembered them being. I went to the front yard and this is what I saw.

The view from my front yard, down the street (Hunwut). You can see a downed tree that is less than 100 yards away.

As all of us, undoubtedly, were in amazement at what we saw that morning, this is what my house and nearby streets looked like. Here is a brief video of the snow, a downed tree and a guy that had to spin his tires for fun.

What a remarkable day it was. I've lived in SoCal for all 50 of my years, and though it's "snowed" in the past, it's never done this before. We still have snow on the ground and my neighbor's yards are still white four days later.

A view of my house before most people had gotten up.

I was surprised to learn that we had ten inches of snow... I had been guessing it was closer to four. It was so heavy, and it wasn't melting, that I chose to go on my patio cover to shovel it off the next day. If it could break trees the way it did, why not my patio cover that wasn't designed for that kind of weight too?

A picture of CBS's weather report. 

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An aerial view of Wildomar near the freeway.  

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Here is a panoramic of Marna O'Brien Park. Click the picture to see a larger version of it.

We went out driving at about noon. First we went in the direction of Marna O'Brien Park. There were wome people there, playing in the snow, but not nearly as many as were playing on the hills across from Stater Bros and near where Sycamore Academy's new campus will be (southwest corner of Palomar and Clinton Keith). They were like a couple of ski resorts with all the cars parked about and kids in the fields.

Not be be a downer here, but I wouldn't have let my kids play there. Not so much because it was trespassing, though it was trespassing, but it's not as if it was an area set up for kids on sleds. Just a few inches under that white blanket of snow was the hard ground of a vacant lot. Who knows what hazards (nails, pieces of rusty metal, broken bottles) were laying but a few inches away from a child's hand or leg.

I didn't hear that anyone got injured, so I'm guessing no one was, and that everyone had a good time.

A panoramic looking west from Palomar.

Something that a lot of us experienced were broken trees. Our trees got hit hard. A lemon tree, a mexican lime tree, a loquat tree, some feijoa, a few big branches on some olive trees. We've been hearing the hum of chain saws around the neighborhood ever since.

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The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights. —Ivan Klíma

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays Wildomar Rap from the swift completion of their appointed rounds... or something like that.