It Was Only Three Miles

Santa Cruz Mountain Snow Surprise

Jun 06, 2026

I was living in Boulder Creek, up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in the early 1970s. One of the first places I lived was off Bear Creek Road, down a dead end called Old Bear Creek Road. This event happened the first week of January 1974.

Back then I was working for a furniture restorer. He’d travel the Midwest hunting down abandoned or dirt cheap old wood furniture and haul back trailer loads of it. A couple of other guys and I worked out of his home shop, taking the pieces apart, refinishing them, swapping in new wood where the old was too far gone, and adding hardware where it was needed. The owner usually took three weeks off over the holidays, so we were riding out the tail end of a long, easy, although unpaid, vacation.

A group of us had planned a delayed New Year’s party the upcoming weekend. Two friends had been out of town for the actual new year and we wanted everyone together, so we pushed it back. It was a Thursday, and I drove into Santa Cruz to pick up supplies, and some LSD from my contact out near Pleasure Point. It was unreasonably cold, but it was January, even in California, so I didn’t think much of it.

Heading home in the mid afternoon, I stopped at a discount liquor store for a few bottles of Jack, then pointed my old VW van back up Highway 9 toward Boulder Creek. Somewhere along the way the rain started turning to snow. I’d seen plenty of snow in my twenty-five years. In Tahoe, and stretch living in Colorado. So when a few fat wet flakes slapped the flat windshield, of my van, it didn’t register as anything special.

Boulder Creek sits higher up, and the farther I climbed, the harder the snow came down. It started sticking. Then it started piling. The van was managing, but the snow on the road kept getting deeper, and I began passing cars and trucks just sitting there, stranded, going nowhere. Rooftops were white now, and so were my knuckles as I tighten down on the steering wheel. I kept going anyway. It was getting slick, and before long there were no tracks to follow at all. The snow was coming down so fast and so wet that the road filled back in behind every car that had passed.

If you’ve never been in a late ‘50s or early ‘60s VW bus, picture a thin metal box that heats itself off the warm air coming off the engine. The heater in mine was barely a rumor. Condensation and ice was forming on the inside of the windows, and I drove with an old rag in one hand, wiping a clear patch so I could see.

Simulated picture of my VW Bus in the snow

That old van did better than it had any right to, but just outside of Ben Lomond the road was blocked solid by fallen trees. The snow was wet and unbelievably heavy, and there was no one around. Nothing I could do about it. I’d lucked into wearing a wool jacket, given the cold, so I made a decision. I’d walk. I grabbed the old leather bag that went everywhere with me, put my recent purchases inside, and before I set out I cracked one of the bottles of Jack and took a good long pull. That’ll warm me up, I figured, obviously not knowing at the time, that the alcohol blanket warmth is a myth

It was only about three miles. How bad could it be.

I had never walked three miles through rising, deep, wet snow. I’d also forgotten, and then stopped caring, that I was wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers. My feet were soaked almost right away. But I kept taking sips and kept feeling alright, picturing the warm shower waiting for me at the other end.

I came up on a school bus abandoned in the road, a small one, the kind a little community runs, and it was an eerie thing to walk past, slowly disappearing under the snow. I kept moving. Kept warming myself with Jack. Honestly, I was half enjoying it, even as every step got harder.

Ben Lomond was small then, same as now. Cars sat stranded all through it, but people were out in the streets, and the mood was a strange mix of light and frightened all at once. Plenty of folks walking, plenty more clearly stuck. I still had a few miles to go, so I kept on, kept drinking.

Outside of town the trees were down across the road again, more abandoned vehicles, and I was alone once more. It was starting to get dark. I was tired, and getting a little scared, and then a tree came crashing across the road behind me. So I sat down. Wet feet, worn out, and I took a few more sips and rested.

I’m told I fell asleep. Who told me? A man from the Department of Forestry, in an old Chevy short bed 4x4 truck, just trying to get himself home to Boulder Creek. A horn blast woke me up. He said he’d nearly missed me. I was asleep on the side of the road and going white under the snow. He got me home, for ever grateful, to this nameless forestry dude. I built a fire, took my shower, changed into dry clothes, and by then it was full dark.

The place I was renting was an old barn/shed behind a couple’s house, surrounded by second growth redwoods with a few first growth giants mixed in. The deal was simple. I’d remodel the inside in exchange for free rent. I’d already framed some walls into rooms and built out a basic kitchen with a sink, a gas stove, and cabinets. The bathroom worked, but you had to step outside to reach it. Out the back, turn left, door right there. Shower, sink, toilet, all functioning, no heat. My side had a wood stove and nothing else for warmth. Electricity ran off the main house somehow, no separate service. No TV, just a stereo and a radio that crackled more than it played.

It was quiet. Quiet even for the woods. I was listening to the raspy radio and dozing off when it started.

The first one was a boom. A deep, heavy crash that shook the barn and came up through the ground into my chest. Then a second sound followed it, and that was the one that taught me to be afraid. High up, somewhere in the dark, a crack. Then a whistle. A long falling whistle, the kind you’d swear was a bomb or a missile coming in. Then the smash.

I didn’t understand it yet. I went outside. People were yelling somewhere in the dark, and then it came again, closer this time. The crack overhead. The whistle. And I stood there in the snow with no idea which way to move, because there was no way to know where it would land. Then BAM. The top of a redwood drove straight down through the neighbor’s house like a spear.

We pieced it together later. The snow was so wet and so heavy that it loaded down the branches of the tall trees until the weight snapped the tops clean off. These were not branches. These were solid lengths of redwood, ten, fifteen, twenty feet long, falling from a hundred feet up in pitch dark. Like telephone poles dropped point first out of the sky, and you could not see a single one of them coming. You could only hear it. The crack, the whistle, the hit. And then you waited, standing out in the open with everyone else, to find out whether the next one had your name on it.

One came down and split my water line clean in two. The pipes ran above ground, since nobody up there worried about anything freezing. Up and down the little neighborhood, people stood outside in the falling snow, looking up at trees they couldn’t see, flinching at every crack. One neighbor had a half basement, and a bunch of us crowded down into it and waited the night out. I ended up sleeping there on the floor.

The next morning it truly was the cliched winter wonderland. No electricity, no running water anywhere in the neighborhood. We had firewood for days, not just the cured stuff we’d stacked for winter but every dead branch and downed tree the storm had thrown at us. The silence under all that snow got cut to pieces by chainsaws starting up from every direction. The trees had mostly stopped topping themselves by then.

If I’m honest, my one real concern through all of it was running out of cigarettes. I was a smoker back then, and the thought of being snowed in for who knows how long without a pack worried me more than the trees did. Not to worry. I turned up some loose tobacco, and as luck would have it, I was never short on rolling papers in those days.

We never did have that New Year’s party. But the acid and the Jack did not go to waste.

It turned into a psychedelic winter wonderland.

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Have you ever been caught out in weather that was bigger than you bargained for? I’d love to hear where it found you.

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