Snow in Palmdale December 2008

In December of 2008, I flew to Ontario Airport in Los Angeles to begin a drive to Palmdale, California.  What started out to be a simple and quick trip became a pretty complicated trip because it snowed in the desert area around Palmdale and Lancaster, closing the pass between LA and the Antelope Valley.  The sheriff there said it had not snowed in 20 years.          

For some reason I had been given a very large Cadillac Escalade 4WD SUV for just me.  That turned out to be very lucky for this trip as I really needed the 4WD.  When the car rental place told me that the passes to get from LA into the Antelope Valley were closed due to snow, I thought the trip would not go off very well.  I spent the afternoon and night in a hotel at the airport watching the news about the unexpected deep snow.   The next morning, I waited in line on the highway with a lot of kids going snowboarding and I drove through deep snow across the pass.  I was one of the first cars through the pass and was putting down the tracks on the roads.  I had to call back to work several times to work out a route into Palmdale.

When I got to Palmdale, my host and I went to Fed-Ex to pick up a transit case but nobody but the manager had come in to work because of the snow.  He said that the workers lived over the mountains in LA.  He let us take my case and put it in the SUV.  Overall, I was only about 30 minutes late for our meeting and visit was successful, we sold a lot of gear from that trip.