Winter Activities
The next time Stew and I got a chance to show our skill on skis was the “Winter of ’52”. Many still remember that winter and many words have been written about it.
It started snowing heavy in December of ’51 but carried over into January 1952. The snow became too deep for the plows; they could not keep the roads clear. And it still came down. No vehicles in town moved. No vehicles came into town, no vehicle went out. There was no mail delivery, no food delivery and no gas delivery. The whole Valley, in fact the whole northern part of California, was experiencing the same weather.
We were about four or five days into this ‘lock-down’ when we got a call from Phil Martin; he couldn’t get out to his barn to feed his cattle. He wanted to know if Stewart and I could ski out there and get some hay out of the barn to feed his herd; we could and we did. The barn was only a mile or so out in the valley to the north. We left town in the early morning and skied out to the Wiley Ranch where we made a short stop and told Charlie and Beulah where we were going and what we were going to do. Then we went ‘cross country’, skiing right over the fences. When we got to Martin’s barn, the cattle were all around the building and had tramped the snow down to a hard pack; but they could not get to the hay. We went in through the upper loft door and dropped broken bales of hay down to the animals.
We stopped again at the Wiley Ranch on the way back. We thought we might get a cup of hot chocolate from Beulah. However, Charlie intervened and said “these boys did a man’s job and they deserve a man’s drink”. Charlie, over the objections of his wife, then proceeded to pour each of us a shot of ‘Old Grandad’. This was a day of more than one ‘first’.
The day wasn’t over yet. We were heading back into Loyalton and the Wiley’s had an abundance of eggs that were going to go to waste if they couldn’t get to market. We loaded a toboggan with ‘umpteen’ dozen eggs and hauled them into Bowling’s Grocery Store and the Loyalton Meat Market.
That storm and the town ‘lock-down’ lasted more than a week. We had snow piled five or six feet deep in the middle of the road going through town. When the roads did finally get plowed open, the first truck into Loyalton was a ‘beer truck’. We had to keep the priorities straight.
These were just a few things happening around Loyalton in the winter. In that big snow of ’52, we were not alone; the whole Valley was snowed in. And over the hill near Truckee, the famous passenger train, The City of San Francisco, was stuck on the Donner Pass with a full load of passengers. This would be a winter that would be talked about for years to come.
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