Opinion: It’s August. Californians are still skiing. Don’t ask.
This weekend, while I squeeze into a thick winter wet suit for a cold-water surf in foggy San Francisco — and while my cousin in Phoenix goes rock climbing indoors to escape 115-degree heat — hordes of Californians are smearing pink and yellow zinc oxide on noses, shoving feet into hard plastic ski boots and gliding over to the lifts at Mammoth Mountain for yet another day on the slopes. A reminder: It’s August. After so many years of drought, this winter’s snowfall in California was insane, a biblical onslaught of atmospheric rivers sucking up the Pacific Ocean, funneling enormous volumes of water thousands of miles through freezing sky and piling up a Sierra Nevada snowpack more than 300 percent of average levels in some areas.
-Written by Daniel Duane, author of “Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast.”