While snow weighted down trees and power lines, there were no reports of any outages in the area.
?A majorly white Christmas,? was the comment of one resident as the northern part of Lincoln County had a heavy snowfall for the Christmas holiday.
An average of 15 inches fell around Pioche and reports of up to 20 inches in the Mt. Wilson area.
The Lincoln County Sheriff?s Department reported the snow began Friday night and continued through Christmas Eve with temperatures in the low 30s to minus degrees in some places.
?The roads are not bad,? an officer reported, ?just everything covered in ice.? The main highways were well maintained with no reports of closures, however some of the surface streets in town and Highway 322 out to Eagle Valley took more care to navigate. ?Pioche even made the Weather Channel yesterday (Dec. 25),? the officer said. ?It showed us with 18 inches of snow.?
County Commissioner Paul Donohue, a Pioche resident, said there were no reports of major utility outages. ?Snowed hard Christmas Eve with about eight inches of wet, heavy snow. The rest was lighter,? he said.
?Roads in town are good,? Donohue said, ?but there will be big piles of snow on the side for a time. And it will take time to clear out the outlying areas also.?
Donohue said he does not remember having this much snow on Christmas for a good number of years, ?but this is nothing compared to what we used to have when I was a kid.?
The late Judge Roscoe Wilkes in his book High Desert Tales tells some good stories of fun in the snow during his own childhood days in Pioche in the early 1930s.
At Eagle Valley, Margie Smith, manager at the Eagle Valley Resort, said there was about 8-9 inches there. ?It?s absolutely beautiful.? Highway 322 was cleared quickly by the road department.
In the south part of the county on Friday and Saturday there was rain, .34 inches in Alamo for example, on Dec. 22 and .40 inches on Dec. 23, which then tapered off to .24 inches during the day on Christmas Eve. However, there is heavy snow in the higher elevations of the mountains around Pahranagat Valley.