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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