Chapter 21, Weather
Weather in
Whitmore is usually compared to Redding since there is not an official weather station in
Whitmore. The temperature is about ten degrees cooler than the temperatures in Redding,
which reach one-hundred degrees or higher for forty days or more a year. The average
rainfall in Whitmore is over thirty inches a year.
Wade English of Mt. Shasta wrote about Sacramento Valley weather:
Most storms
reach California in the cool season, October through March. In northern California, 80
percent of the precipitation falls then. . . . An intense storm produced seven and
one-fourth inches of rain on Sacramento in eighteen hours, on April 20, 1880.
In 1876 and 1877
there was a terrible drought in California. Over two million cows died, according to John
Kite.
The California storm of 1890 must have been fierce in Whitmore. Keith Lingenfelter writes
about the 1890 storm in Crazy Weather in the Covered Wagon:
One of the
most thoroughly documented storms was in 1890. Winter [in Northern California] had set in
with heavy rain on October 30. . . . By the middle of December the surrounding mountains
were white with snow, then torrential rains came. More slides and washouts made travel
unsafe and uncertain.
The next few weeks brought more rain . . . At least one third of the 242 miles of track
between Cottonwood and San Francisco had been washed away or severely damaged with several
people drowned. January 15, 1890, a heavy snow arrived. It was reported that when Train 15
crept northward [through the Sacramento Valley] into the teeth of the snowstorm,
visibility became twilight level. Train 15 stalled at tunnel #11, one mile and a half
north of Sims.
There were 116 passengers on board . . . It continued to snow for over 60 hours and
reached a depth of eight feet on the level with deeper drifts. It was said that it snowed
so fast and furious that the [Sacramento] river covered over! . . . A relief train from
Dunsmuir was snowed in at Castle Crag. A Sacramento rescue train found two feet of snow at
Redding . . . Food was carried in and they were finally rescued.
Weather in other
years:
In 1909 it rained for forty days during January and February.
In 1910 Louise Biel Plumb was teaching school in Whitmore:
Straight
across from the hotel was a tall cedar tree which was struck by lightening one evening
when I was working at a table near the front window. A sharp clap of thunder and
lightening came together and I shot straight up out of my chair. The next morning, we saw
that the bark had been peeled from the tree in a V and the ground in front of it looked as
if it had been plowed.
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