By: Dennis Cassinelli
It appears that 2023 will be a year for record snowfall, depending on what mountain summit in the Sierras the measurements are taken. This will be good news for the lakes and reservoirs that have dropped dangerously low in several years of below average rain and snowfall.
For many years in the 1960s I worked for the Nevada Department of Transportation, at that time known as the Nevada State Highway Department. I was on a survey crew at that time and when winter came and the snow on Mount Rose and other summits got deep, I went out with a brother-in law of mine to plow the summits of Mount Rose and Slide Mountain. The State used heavy-duty plows made to handle snow when the snow exceeded 15 feet.
Many years later, when our landscape company was working for the community of Glenbrook at Lake Tahoe, doing landscape maintenance and snow removal under contract with the Glenbrook Homeowners Association. Though the snow at Glenbrook seldom got more than four feet deep, the area we covered was much larger than the mountain summits due to the number of houses and other buildings in the community.
One time, when I was away on vacation, my son, John, was in charge during my absence. He was using my John Deere backhoe to clear the snow from a hillside during the storm. He got too close to the edge of the hillside and the front wheels slipped slightly down the hill. John swung the backhoe around to push the tractor away from the slope, but instead, the tractor rolled down the hill.
He radioed his brother, Tim to come to help get the tractor out of the snow covered slope. It had rolled about 40 – 50 feet down the hill and landed with the tractor still running against a pine tree. They were able to drive the tractor to a road below where it had landed and drive it out.
Glenbrook was known for providing lumber from the Tahoe Basin and sending it by railroad to be used to build Virginia City and timber the mines.
This article is by Dayton Author and Historian, Dennis Cassinelli. You can order his books at a discount on his blog at denniscassinelli.com Just click on ”order books”
