Storm Provides Thrills, Chills

A crisp winter storm brought pounding surf and powdery snow to opposite ends of Ventura County on Monday, luring people with different passions to the beaches and mountains, and keeping everyone else bundled up against the cold.

When Domingo Zepeda, a 33-year-old landscape contractor, saw the county’s distant white peaks from his Oxnard home, he grabbed his two sons and a friend and headed for the snow.

“We don’t get to see this that often, so any time it snows we try to come up here,” Zepeda said, while hauling a sled along a snow-covered back-country trail near Pine Mountain, about 40 miles north of Ojai in Los Padres National Forest.

“It’s really beautiful . . . cold but beautiful,” he said.

The storm this weekend that covered the mountains with up to 4 inches of snow in some places, dropped about half an inch of rain in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks and generated powerful surf, prompting officials from the National Weather Service in Oxnard to issue a high-surf advisory that is expected to continue through today.

The big waves--some as high as 11 feet--lured Chris Kolendrianos from Santa Barbara to surf Rincon Point on the Ventura-Santa Barbara county line.

The 27-year-old graphic designer spent six hours in the surf riding storm waves that swept into the cove at Rincon.

“It was pretty windy and cold and it wasn’t as good as yesterday, but I got a lot of waves,” said Kolendrianos, still dripping from his long surf session. “It was fun.”

Both the large waves and the winter weather are expected to continue today, with rain likely this afternoon, said Bruce Rockwell, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

The winds, reaching 20 mph, are also expected to continue, but will likely change directions coming from the southwest, Rockwell said.

Today’s storm is likely to drop between half an inch and an inch of rain in the coastal areas and between 2 and 3 inches of rain in the mountains, he said.

It will be the third Pacific storm front to pass through the county since Saturday. Although the cold bands of moisture that drifted over California on Saturday, Sunday and Monday were drawn in by a low-pressure system located over the Great Basin, forecasters said that today’s rain would be generated by a storm in the central Pacific.

“It’s going to be cloudy and wet, but it probably won’t be as cold,” Rockwell said.

But there were plenty of people who didn’t mind Monday’s cold weather.

With mountain temperatures in the upper 20s and snow on the ground, conditions were perfect for Theresa Hartigan of Oak View, who brought up her cross-country skis, a friend and her malamute, Tanto.

Hartigan, an emergency room nurse, said she tries to make it up to the mountains after it snows. Last year, she went cross-country skiing with a friend and saw mountain lion tracks in the snow.

On Monday, Hartigan and her friend, Anne Fitzgerald, decided to leave their skis in the car and hike with the dog along a ridge trail.

“You get such beautiful views from up there,” she said.

Ventura County Flood Control District officials said that although rainfall in the county is 200% above normal so far this season, they have not had any significant problems.

“We’ve had quite a bit of rain, but so far we haven’t had the high intensity-type storms--those with a large amount of rain falling over a short amount of time--to cause us problems with flooding or mudslides,” said Robin Jester, an engineer with the district.

County hydrologists plan to monitor today’s storm, but are not expecting the rain to be a problem, Jester said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

County Rainfall

Here are rainfall figures from the Ventura County Flood Control Department for the 24-hour period ending at 8 a.m. Thursday. Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

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Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location last 24 hours since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 0.41 9.33 5.57 Casitas Dam 0.80 18.22 9.34 Casitas Rec. Center 1.12 17.12 9.43 Fillmore 0.80 14.14 07.81 Matilija Dam 0.56 20.69 10.26 Moorpark 0.67 10.09 5.90 Ojai 0.63 14.67 7.94 Upper Ojai 0.59 18.07 8.80 Oxnard 0.47 9.40 5.68 Piru 0.57 10.86 6.75 Port Hueneme 0.48 8.30 5.64 Santa Paula 0.96 13.20 7.11 Simi Valley 0.67 9.96 5.62 Thousand Oaks 0.80 10.31 6.02 Ventura Govt. Center 0.65 11.15 6.30

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