sNOw Way!!! - Hail in West Los Angeles .... Snowplows in Malibu

Exhibit A: Proof of ice pellots hailing down on the lawn across the street from our balcony.

Today I saw some of the wierdest weather of my life in Southern California. Here in West L.A. we had a surprise hail storm. Pellots of ice the size of marbles were coming down in buckets.

The entire experience was surreal. Before the storm started, there was little warning. It was your typical sunny and blue skies most of the day, but then around 4:00 pm I started to hear the rumbling of thunder. The sounds of the skies were completely atypical for this region - they reminded me of the thunder one hears before a summer storm on the east coast.

Exhibit B: This is a picture of hail landing on our balcony chairs. (please click this image for a much better view - lots of detail!)

When I heard the noise, I looked out the window and saw that the sky above was dark. But in contrast to that, just off in the distance, about 10 miles away, I could see the typical clear, bright sapphire skies and sunshine hanging over downtown L.A.

When the hail started to come down I was mesmerized. Never had I seen such a thing in L.A. Then, as if to testify to the chaos, I started to hear sirens from several directions and helicopters flying above. I went to the balcony and started taking pictures of the enigmatic images I was sure to never again see in this lifetime.

Exhibit C: The crazy sky about 15 minutes after the storm had subsided.

After the storm had calmed, about an hour later, I looked out the window and saw another surreal sight. There were two children across the street searching for the few remains of frost on the ground to make snowballs. Trust me, to the naked eye, you could not see any left over snow - it had all melted that quickly. But these kids - by scouring the street corners - managed to pack up golf-ball-sized snowballs to throw at one another. Making the site even stranger was the fact that one of the children was wearing shorts, and neither of them had on winter coats...

Later I heard on the news that it had snowed in Malibu - the first time in 20 years. I heard the Malibu town authorities were struggling to find a snowplow to clear the the Malibu canyon roads. Adding to the chaos here in southern Cal, highway 5 was apparently closed down for the rest of the evening.

We had been experiencing a "cold snap" these past few days - causing some rare people (like myself) to bring out their winter coats from back east. Proving how atypically cold it has been here lately, this past week-end when I went to eat out at a restaurant in Huntington Beach, I saw that every customer in the entire restaurant was eating with his or her coat on. (It was too cold inside to take them off - heat was insufficient for those temperatures which dared skirt below 45 degrees!)

The craziest thing about this whole story to me is that only about a week ago, I was walking around the UCLA campus in a spaghetting-strap tank top, cursing how the weather - at the time, in the upper 80s - was making me "perspire" in the middle of January...