Snow, hail shower North Coast

Bitter cold temperatures and scattered precipitation made for a hodgepodge of weird weather around the North Coast early Monday, including snow at upper elevations of Cobb Mountain and Mount St. Helena, as well as hail on Bodega Head and elsewhere.

Little of the snow stuck for long, though parts of Mendocino County still had several inches on the ground by Monday afternoon, residents said. There was enough snow in the Brooktrails Township a few miles north of Willits to draw people in from town to frolic, one firefighter said.

“It’s still snowing right now, and it’s probably going to snow for another day or so,” said Dana Karkar, 25, who spoke by phone from her family’s Sherwood Market & Deli, where Karkar’s unofficial estimate of snowfall was about a foot.

Much of inland Mendocino and Lake counties were under a Winter Weather Advisory, thanks to temperatures that hovered around freezing amid showery weather expected to last into early this morning.

Upper elevations of Mendocino County such as Iron Peak near Laytonville, reportedly received nearly a foot of snow, though even Anderson Valley towns like Yorkville reported a dusting, said Tony Ashford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. It’s possible some of what was viewed as snow in some areas was actually hail, he said.

But “I would say anything above 2,000 feet probably got some snow, mostly north of Ukiah,” Ashford said.

About an inch of snow that fell overnight at Cal Fire’s Howard Forest Station outside Willits left a thin blanket that remained through the day.

But while flurries and pretty dustings of snow were reported around Lakeport and the Clear Lake Riviera in Lake County, it was mostly transient, residents said.

Up in the mountain village of Cobb, the roads were covered at one point Monday morning - the snow bringing “some cheer around here,” according to Teresa Messer at Hardester’s Market there.

“Some of the kids were playing in the parking lot, but they left now,” Messer said.

Forecasters said the changeable weather was expected to continue through the week and into the weekend, though early predictions of subfreezing night-time lows during the week had been tempered somewhat, favoring less alarmingly low temperatures and more rain beginning early Tuesday into Wednesday, including periods of heavy precipitation.

More than an inch of rain was expected by Thursday morning in Santa Rosa and other inland areas of Sonoma County, with rainfall closer to 2 to 3 inches in the coastal mountains, the National Weather Service said.

Additional rain is expected beginning Saturday, meteorologist Bob Benjamin said.

“Temperatures are not as big a concern as we were looking at earlier because the rain replaced the cold,” Benjamin said.

The Sierra also should see some significant snowfall and potentially hazardous road conditions through late Wednesday or Thursday morning, forecasters said.

“Around the crest, we could see 4 feet of snow,” meteorologist Marvin Boyd said from the weather service’s Reno office.

In Sonoma County, temperatures should warm slightly Tuesday and Wednesday, then start falling again to near freezing by Friday morning, “not as cold as we initially were expecting this week,” Benjamin said.

“Instead of a very cold pattern, we’re now predicting a very wet pattern,” he said. “But it’s going to feel cold.”