Blizzard hits California and Nevada, shutting interstate and leaving thousands without power

A powerful blizzard that a meteorologist termed “as bad as it gets” howled in the Sierra Nevada, closing a long stretch of Interstate 80 in California, forcing ski resorts to shut down, and leaving tens of thousands of homes without power.

More than 10 feet of snow was expected at higher elevations, National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill said Saturday, creating a “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe and blocking travel on the key east-west freeway.

“High to extreme avalanche danger” is expected in the backcountry through Sunday evening throughout the central Sierra, including the greater Lake Tahoe area, the weather service said.

“It’s a blizzard,” said Dubravka Tomasin, a resident of Truckee, California, for more than a decade. “It’s pretty harrowing.”

Kyle Frankland, a veteran snow plow driver, said several parts of his rig broke as he cleared wet snow underneath piles of powder.

“I’ve been in Truckee 44 years. This is a pretty good storm,” Frankland said. “It’s not record-breaking by any means, but it’s a good storm.”

In California on Saturday, about 32,000 customers were without power, along with about 30,000 in Nevada and about 9,000 in Idaho, according to an outage map.

California authorities on Friday shut down 100 miles of I-80 due to “spin outs, high winds, and low visibility.” They had no estimate when the freeway would reopen from the California-Nevada border just west of Reno to near Emigrant Gap, California.

Churchill said snow totals by late Sunday would range from 5 to 12 feet (1.5 to 3.6 meters), with the highest accumulations at elevations above 5,000 feet (1,500 meters). Lower elevations were inundated with heavy rain.

He called the storm an “extreme blizzard for the Sierra Nevada, in particular, as well as other portions of Nevada and even extending into Utah and portions of western Colorado.” But he said he didn’t expect records to be broken.

“It’s certainly just about as bad as it gets in terms of the snow totals and the winds,” Churchill said. “It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

A tornado touched down Friday afternoon in Madera County and caused some damage to an elementary school, said Andy Bollenbacher, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Hanford.

Some of the ski resorts that shut down Friday said they planned to remain closed on Saturday to dig out with an eye on reopening Sunday, but most said they would wait to provide updates Saturday morning.

Palisades Tahoe, the largest resort on the north end of Tahoe and site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, said it hoped to reopen some of the Palisades slopes at the lowest elevation on Saturday but would close all chairlifts for the second day at neighboring Alpine Meadows due to forecasts of “heavy snow and winds over 100 mph.” 

“We have had essential personnel on-hill all day, performing control work, maintaining access roads, and digging out chairlifts, but based on current conditions, if we are able to open at all, there will be significant delays,” Palisades Tahoe said Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The storm began barreling into the region on Thursday. A blizzard warning through Sunday morning covers a 300-mile stretch of the mountains.

Some ski lovers raced up to the mountains ahead of the storm.

Daniel Lavely, an avid skier who works at a Reno-area home/construction supply store, was not one of them. He said Friday that he wouldn’t have considered making the hour-drive to ski on his season pass at a Tahoe resort because of the gale-force winds.

But most of his customers Friday seemed to think the storm wouldn’t be as bad as predicted, he said.

“I had one person ask me for a shovel,” Lavely said. “Nobody asked me about a snowblower, which we sold out the last storm about two weeks ago.”

Meteorologists predict as much as 10 feet of snow is possible in the mountains around Lake Tahoe by the weekend, with 3 to 6 feet in the communities on the lake’s shores and more than a foot possible in the valleys on the Sierra’s eastern front, including Reno.

Yosemite National Park closed Friday and officials said it would remain closed through at least noon Sunday.