canyonwalker: My old '98 M3 convertible (road trip!)
Here it is Friday night, in the summer, and once again we're halfway to somewhere else. 🎵 Woah, we're halfway there! 🎵

In a 1:1 this afternoon with my boss we were discussing weekend plans, and he said he finds it inspiring how much Hawk and I travel on weekends. I explained to him this Friday Night Halfway travel technique I started using years ago. The idea is simple: Drive a few hours on Friday night and stay in a hotel in some nondescript location to get a head start on going somewhere, typically in the mountains, Saturday. Use the extra time to do a fun thing on Saturday and get all the way home Saturday night so Sunday is an open day at home for rest, chores, etc.

If it seems like I've blogged Friday Night Halfway a lot recently it's because we've done it a lot recently— 4 times this summer, starting with one in June, and now 3 times in 3 weeks. This evening's trip is just in time, too, as it was just this morning that I finished blogging about these recent trips. 😂

So, where are we tonight? We're in Auburn, one of our usual suspects for Friday Night Halfway. It's a town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada along I-80. We like it because it gives us a good jumping-off point for adventures up in the mountains.

Sometimes Auburn hotels get pricey, though, so maybe half the time we come through here we also stay down in the Central Valley, hanging our hats for the night in or around Sacramento instead. Tonight our usual haunt, the Holiday Inn, was expensive, but I found a good rate at a Best Western. We'll see what it's like staying at a lower-rung property... without elite status. 😱😂

The drive up to Auburn this evening was rough. I'm glad we were able to leave early. What would've been a 2.5 hour drive without traffic took closer to 4 hours of driving. Adding in stops for dinner and ice cream (yay!) we arrived at the hotel just before 9pm after leaving home at 4.

Tomorrow we'll drive up to the Grouse Lakes Basin, another common haunt. We visit that area for hiking generally at least once a year, sometimes twice. Why keep going back? So. Many. Lakes. It can still feel a bit repetitive, so we mix it up with different hiking routes. This time we're thinking of doing a peak climb we've never done before. We should be able to see lots of lakes from up there! And staying tonight in Auburn means we should have only an hour or so pleasant drive to the trail in the morning.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
There's a winter storm coming to California today through this weekend. Here in the SF Bay Area that means rain and cooler than normal temperatures. In the Sierra Nevada mountains that means snow. And this storm is expected to bring a lot of snow— up to 10 feet (3 meters). Here's a forecast chart I saw this morning from the National Weather Service (NWS):

NWS Snow Forecast 28 Feb 2024

As an aside, I really like this diagram. One of my areas of study in grad school many years ago was the visual representation of data. This diagram is much more interesting than the typical chart snowing a map with color coding indicating amount of snowfall predicted. This one doesn't cover as large a geographical area but it does kind of tell a story: If you were to drive on Interstate 80 over the Sierra Nevada, how much new snowfall would you encounter?

For anyone who's actually driven I-80 a bunch of times (raises hand) the names of towns on this chart are all recognizable and help with visualization. Auburn, for example, is 30 miles west of downtown Sacramento. It's the first town you hit after leaving the Sac metro area and ascending into the foothills, at about 1,000' elevation. Colfax is a smaller town further up. And Donner Pass is, of course, the highest point on the road. (Always bring food to Donner Pass, you'll feed everyone one way or another.)

As for weather here in the SF Bay Area.... This storm is not one of the "Atmospheric River" or "Pineapple Express" rainstorms we often get in the winter. Instead of coming straight across the Pacific Ocean and hitting the coast (i.e., us) first this one's sweeping down from Alaska following jet stream as it bends south. The Sierras will get the brunt of it, we'll get a lighter version. Forecasts are predicting maybe an inch of rain locally with high temperatures low in the 50s— much cooler than normal for the start of March. So much for lazy yellow journalists trying to tell us winter is over.

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