At first we thought it might be snowing at 6000 feet at Castle Lake. Sorry! It was blowing wind and rain at 20 to 30 miles an hour at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. It was pretty miserable out in the open at the lake. My friend looked at me and said, "You know this is the crazy kind of thing we used to do 40 years ago." I had to laugh because he had just skied out onto the lake 30 feet without testing the ice. When he did it went down through 5 feet of snow on top of the lake but there wasn't any ice supporting it! Time to get off the frozen snow! So, even though a couple of weeks ago it had been zero degrees Fahrenheit there it was raining right then.
If you have been in snow before (even in a wind) you are usually okay in the right clothes. But in rain at 37 degrees unless you are wearing something very very waterproof you really don't want to be out in it long or you might get hypothermia and then you start hallucinating from low core temperatures and then you are in real trouble because you can no longer make good decisions to stay alive.
So, from about 5 degrees Fahrenheit to about 30 degrees Fahrenheit with the right clothes I'm usually pretty happy to be skiing as long as there is someplace like a Car or a lodge to warm up in when I stop skiing so I don't just turn into a Popsicle too fast. So, even in a blizzard as long as I can see to navigate through a Balaclava with my mouth covered and ski goggles on often I'm okay even in 20 mph winds.
But, you really don't want to be out without completely waterproof clothes from about 33 degrees up to about 40 degrees in the rain because it can easily be fatal if you get hypothermia from getting wet to the bone at these temperatures.
I had a close call with my wife on Mt. Shasta during the 1980s. It had to be about 1981. I accidentally high centered my wife's old VW Westfalia camper van 1971 and we were stuck about 5000 to 6000 feet. However, about 5 miles away (if we ran in the 33 to 37 degree rain we could get to a friend cabin. We were both 32 years old then and our kids were on some other adventure like either going to school or after school activities or at friend's houses or something like this. But then both of us could jog 5 miles each and were both very athletic. So, we did.
Was this a good idea?
It was almost fatal as we reached my friend's cabin because we both started to hallucinate and shake and shiver so the last mile or so it felt like I was taking a bath in ice water because I was wet to the bone and so was my wife.
So, we broke into my friend's cabin and he arrived a few hours later after we built a fire in the wood stove. He had a 4 wheel drive with a winch so he winched my wife's westfalia off the high centered rocks and we were on our way back to our kids. I don't know what would have happened to us if we hadn't run down despite the hypothermia because we didn't have sleeping bags with us then for an emergency at that time and though it was raining at his cabin by the time we got back up with our friend and his 4 wheel drive it was snowing. So, maybe it was worth the risk of getting hypothermia to be able to get back to our kids as soon as possible back in Mt. shasta city.
After we went to get Vegeburgers at a new great Burger place run by a French Chef my friend knows one of my friends and I decided to drive up to Bunny Flats to see if it was snowing there yet. When we arrived it was mostly raining but already starting to turn to snow. By the time we got down to 7 mile curve (there is a ski route from Bunny Flats to 7 mile curve by the way if you know it) for mountaineering and Cross country skis (However, I have found it is much safer if you hit ice if you have metal edges on your skis so you don't slide sideways 500 feet into a tree. I've had some pretty scary experiences until I ONLY skied both cross country and downhill with metal edges.
Metal edges can really save your life if you hit ice so you don't just slide off and die when you hit a sideways ice patch on a steep slop. You dig your edges in and then just traverse it carefully.
Digging your edges in means putting all your weight on the up slope part of where you are so you can't slide off. But, your ankles have to be strong enough to do this too. So, this means often that the right part of your skis isn't even touching the snow. But, this way you don't slide off and die in an emergency. Poles are really important to your survival about then too. You can jam the tip of one of the poles into the ice so you aren't thrown into a tree head first by a steep ice patch. However, by then you have fallen and you have to get your hand free of the loop so you can grab the base of the pole to jam the point in to stop as soon as possible sort of like you would an ice axe to stop quickly.
I once was climbing Star King and both feet went out from under me on ice covered dome in Yosemite and when I drove the ice axe in it stopped me but nearly pulled my arm out of the socket doing it. However, my friend got a picture of me just as I fell which was pretty good that he got a picture of it and I still survived it.
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