Snow? Graupel? Whatever Is Falling, It’s Making Californians Giddy

SACRAMENTO — Stay in, the meteorologists had said. Historic blizzards are coming to California. There will be snowplows.

And yet, some things must be seen to be believed.

In Silicon Valley, in the hills above Los Gatos, Bart Giordano awoke at midnight on Friday to watch the snowfall piling up on the pine limbs and blanketing his patio lounge chairs, drifts like nothing he had seen in the area in his 46 years.

To the north, Danny Cullenward, an energy economist up with a fussy 4-year-old, looked out the window and saw lightning and heard a rumble and then glimpsed a distinct kind of falling slush that he recalled from his childhood in the Midwest. Snow is so rare in most of California that residents went deep into the weather glossary to describe it.

“Thundergraupel in San Francisco!” he joyfully tweeted, playing on a suddenly buzzy word for precipitation that is not quite hail or snowflakes.

“I was like a giddy kid before Christmas,” he later confessed.

California is a big place, and its high elevations and ski slopes are as snow-prone as those in the next state. Even the warmer parts of Southern California get an occasional dusting.

But snow is not the Golden State’s claim to fame, generally speaking. The storm is so extraordinary that it came with an almost unprecedented blizzard warning in Southern California for Friday and Saturday. State and local officials warned residents to stay off the roads and avoid the mountains, out of concern that many could be stranded in frigid conditions they had never faced before.

Already on Friday, the storm had forced the closure of the main north-south route, Interstate 5, at the Grapevine between Los Angeles and the Central Valley. At various times, it shut down Interstate 80 over the Sierra Nevada and caused vehicles of all sizes to spin out on various roadways.

Still, amid dangerous conditions and serious threats to motorists, many Californians emerged to see what fresh novelty the sky had dropped — and to take selfies, naturally.

Social media generated its own blizzard: snow days in Yucaipa, snow on the Bakersfield Cemetery tombstones, snow in the mountains in San Luis Obispo, snow on the Victorian homes of Eureka.

In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Melissa Leib was so struck by the winter wonderland outside her house that instead of her normal Friday posts about feng shui, she paid tribute to the “Freaky Friday” weather in her backyard.

Darshan Gooch, a well-known Santa Cruz surfer, had laughed out loud as snow fell on Twin Lakes State Beach, an “epic” moment he had pulled over to capture as he headed across town on Thursday morning to pick up some wet suits.

“I knew we had an unusual storm system coming through, but I was a little shocked when it actually happened,” he said on Friday. “It didn’t stick, but just to see it was beautiful.”

In Los Angeles, residents became obsessed with determining whether snow had actually fallen on the Hollywood sign. Some believed it had to be snow, while others said it was hail or even a more exotic form of precipitation.

The National Weather Service was on the case. “After a little investigating and with the help of the ALERT CA cameras, we are confident in saying snow or graupel fell on Mt. Lee (where the Hollywood sign sits),” the service tweeted Thursday evening.

By Friday morning, Eric Boldt, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, could confirm it had been graupel, which he defined as “basically snowflakes wrapped in ice.”

At that point, a brief flurry was again swirling around the Hollywood sign. Watching it through his window, Craig Robert Young, an English-born actor who has lived for 22 years in Los Angeles, three of them in the Hollywood Hills, said that the familiar sign had been coated in white the day before, as had his patio chairs and table.

“It was kind of bizarre,” Mr. Young, 49, said. “I wanted my husband to have a snowball fight.”

In the Central Valley community of Patterson, known for its apricots and its huge Amazon warehouse, the hills to the west are coated in white. Chuck Marble, 64, a retiree whose pastimes include following the weather on radar, said he had noticed on Friday morning that snow had fallen nearby and drove through a torrential rain to bear witness: “I said, ‘I’m not going to miss this!’”

By midday on Friday, the thrill was fading. In the lower elevations, snow had turned to rain, and in the higher ones, the heavy amount was starting to become worrisome. In Southern California, Mr. Boldt, the meteorologist, warned of winds of up to 80 miles per hour and white-out visibility in elevations higher than 4,500 feet.

In Northern California, Mr. Giordano, a father of three, said his family’s power had gone out as “at least a foot” of snow had accumulated, snapping off tree limbs and blocking ingress and egress.

“We’re on generator power with backup internet,” he said. “We’re stocked up with food, and the kids are out on their sled having a good old time. But what started as a very charming snowstorm is turning into, you know, how are we going to get out of our house?”

Corina Knoll contributed reporting from Los Angeles.