Saturday's storm left a parting gift, dusting parts of La Crescenta, La Cañada and Burbank with snow and sending families streaming outdoors for some winter fun.
Joe Mohos and his two children, Chris, 8, and Cathy, 7, knelt on the Chandler Bikeway in Burbank scrapping together enough snow to form a small snowman. Mohos said he was startled to watch the rain turn to hail, and then soft white flakes as the day progressed.
“Why is everything white?” he asked himself.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert described the snowfall in Burbank as a once-in-a-generation event. But overall, the weather was “more curiosity than catastrophe,” Patzert said.
“The problem was that the rain, instead of arriving with the cold front, arrived in front of the cold front,” Patzert said. “So we got a little treat here and there but we didn't get the real deal. But it's fun.”
In the foothills, streets that have been plagued by evacuations during the Station fire and subsequent debris flows came alive as parents and children staged neighborhood snowball fights. Goss Canyon Avenue resident John Kornarens, who described his small dead-end street as “ground zero” during the 2009 Station fire, said it snows in La Crescenta every couple of years but rarely sticks.
