The first big climb of our SF-Pueblo tour will be the Sierra Nevada's Carson Pass. Carson Pass is not considered a huge climb, but it does top out at 8360 ft. The profile below shows that it is a gradual climb of about 65 miles and 8,000 ft from near sea-level in California's the Central Valley. The ski resort of Kirkwood is located just before the crest of the pass.
Normally, we would plan to climb the pass in two days; climbing halfway up the first day, finding a nice place to camp, and then finish cresting the pass and descending the next day. However, this has definitely not been a normal year.
As the SNOTEL graph for Carson Pass below shows, this part of the Sierra has had twice the normal amount of precipitation, and snow, as is normal. It has actually been a record snow year at many locations. If you look at the graph below, the Blue curve shows this year's Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) for Carson Pass, which is the actual amount of water contained in the snow. It peaked at almost 64 inches in mid-April. This means that the snow contained more than 5 ft of water at that time. The average SWE for Carson Pass is shown by the Red line, which peaks at about 31 inches. The old SWE record for Carson Pass was just over 60 inches.
Since about mid-April the snow has started to melt and begin its journey down creeks, streams, and rivers, etc. to reservoirs, or the ocean. The SWE yesterday was down to 46 inches of water and the compacted snow depth near the recording station was still about 100 inches. However, if you look closely at the graph, you might notice a little uptick at the bottom of the Blue line, which was the day before yesterday. Yes, that means they had a little more snow this past Sunday!
This huge amount of water in the form of melting snow must go somewhere. There are concerns of flooding rivers downstream in the coming weeks.
What does this mean for Ian and I? Well luckily, State Route 88, which goes over the pass is constantly plowed and they try to keep it open all year round. So the road should be open on May 27-28 when we plan to cycle over the pass.
However, another concern is that there will still be so much snow at higher elevations that the higher campgrounds will not yet be open when we cycle thru. Camping on the snow is not an option that we care to consider. If we cannot camp up along the middle to upper reaches of the climb, then we will be forced to camp much lower on the climb than planned. This would require that we then do a huge chunk of the climb on the 2nd day to get up and over the pass. This would not be an issue on a one day ride with road bikes. However, with our heavily loaded touring bikes it would make for one very long day.
So we're hoping for warm sunny weather to melt the snow. However, too much melting, too quickly could lead to flooding, possible bridge issues, road closures, etc. You know that we will keeping an eye on road and campsite conditions as our trip approaches.
Mike
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