It’s Snow Joke in the High Desert : Commuting: Antelope Valley Freeway drivers discover the hard way that the weather can come between them and a speedy trip home.

It’s a jungle out there-- there being the Antelope Valley Freeway, especially during weekday evening rush hour as the 40,000-odd Antelope Valley residents who work in Los Angeles come rushing home at 60, 65 and 70 m.p.h., bumper to bumper, low on blood sugar, following too close, late for dinner, late to pick up the kids, late for a cold drink in a soft chair in front of the big-screen TV and then-- What the hell is this!!!! --their cars are spinning around on black ice, on wet snow, sliding uncontrollably into the next lane, the car ahead, into the deep ditch off the right shoulder.

And as they climb out of their cars, standing there in the blowing snow, in their flimsy shirts, in their tennis shoes, in their open-toed high heels, they suddenly have a freeway revelation --Oh my God! It snows in the desert!

Not that there was any reason for them to have known, especially. Many of the Los Angeles residents who moved to the high desert over the last decade--and helped raise the population of the Antelope Valley from 130,000 to 255,000 in barely 10 years--grew up in places like Venice or West Los Angeles. There, they wore the same wardrobe all year around. The only time they saw snow was if they went skiing at Mammoth.

Then they began moving up to places like Palmdale and Lancaster to take advantage of the clean air, low crime rate, the good jobs in aerospace and, most of all, the brand-new three-bedroom, two-bath houses that sold for $118,000, half of what a comparable house in a nice neighborhood would have cost in Los Angeles.

What they didn’t always understand was that the high desert was not just Palm Springs with sonic booms. It got cold in the high desert, down to 10 degrees or less at times. And although it didn’t happen often--once every four or five years, perhaps--they had real snows, deep ones too.

“We had 18 inches on the ground in 1984,” said Bill Gillis, a Lancaster retiree and columnist for the Antelope Valley Press. “It almost covered my dog.”

The problem is, for most of the new arrivals, and for many of the old residents as well, the big snows came so rarely that it didn’t trip their alarm buttons. Weather was not a concern. They’d take that 60- or 70-mile commuter drive to downtown Los Angeles each day in summer clothes and business suits.

And then one of those El Nino-generated northwesters would blow in from the Gulf of Alaska as it did late Tuesday afternoon, dumping four inches of wet snow, and they’d be spinning and skidding like hockey pucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

“I don’t know how many people I talked to who had collisions or who spun out who were saying, ‘I didn’t know it snowed up here. I didn’t know we had ice,’ ” said Officer Moe Nemback of the California Highway Patrol’s Lancaster office.

It wasn’t the old Antelope Valley hands who were having the problems--either they slowed down, put on their tire chains or stayed home. “Anytime you find an old-timer who crashed in the snow, it’s because someone hit them,” Nemback said.

Although the notion that mere nature could interfere with their right to travel the freeways might annoy some residents of Los Angeles, Antelope Valley residents have learned to welcome such acts of God.

“It’s an excuse not to go to school or to work and not to do your duties,” said Palmdale attorney Ross Amspoker, who has lived in the high desert for more than 40 years. “And the valley looks beautiful.”

When you live in the high desert, says Don Kunz, general manager of a Lancaster real estate office, you simply tend to be better prepared. “Whenever I used to go somewhere, I carried a survival kit--tools, blankets and water.” And if you have a company and the weather is getting bad, as it did Tuesday, you send your employees home early.

“We realized if we closed down, it isn’t going to ruin our lives,” Kunz said. “But the people down below, they say, ‘Just keep working till it’s time to go home.’ ”

“The L. A. people have no idea that it snows up here,” Lancaster CHP Officer Mike Wible said. “They are not prepared for the weather. They leave for work at the normal time. They follow too close.”

People are gone away from home for a long time, said Sgt. Bobby Denham of the Antelope Valley sheriff’s station. “So they push it.” When the traffic is free-flowing, it’s not uncommon for people to drive faster than 70 m.p.h.

“You drive 65 m.p.h.,” Amspoker said, “and feel like a little old lady from Pasadena.”

Their anxiety causes problems even in good weather. If there’s a traffic jam, some people drive on the shoulder and race ahead. “They are willing to risk their lives to get home five minutes earlier,” said David Walker, a graphic artist who commutes to the San Fernando Valley from Lancaster.

And if the snow drops below 3,000 feet and starts to cover the freeway, it doesn’t make any difference, Wible said. People drive 65 m.p.h. through snow and ice when they should be going 25.

“They just drive too fast,” Nemback said. “They don’t leave themselves enough time to go to work. They know that we have inclement weather and they leave at the same time anyway. They think they can maintain the same speeds.”

One result of Tuesday’s storm was that a lot more people bought tire chains. “We had people coming in all afternoon,” said Ken Roberts, manager of the Palmdale Pep Boys auto store. “They didn’t buy anything else. We sold over a hundred sets of tire chains between 3:30 and 8 p.m. Tuesday.”

Weather Extremes

Average summer high Average winter low Antelope Valley 95 35 Los Angeles 82 45 Record high Record low Palmdale 111 4 Edwards Air Force Base 113 4 Yearly averages (in inches) Rain Snow Palmdale 5.5 4.4 Edwards Air Force Base 1.6 4.9