Two Sierra towns a thousand feet apart can differ by six feet of snow

Snowfall follows the storm track and the slope it climbs, not just how high you are. Which is why the west side is buried and the east side is not.

It is tempting to treat mountain snowfall as a function of elevation: go higher, get more. In the Sierra Nevada the relationship is real but it is not the dominant term, and reading it that way will mislead you badly about where the snow actually is.

The range is a ramp

The Sierra is a single tilted fault block — a long, gentle western slope and an abrupt eastern escarpment dropping toward the Owens Valley. Pacific storms arrive from the west and are lifted continuously as they climb the ramp, condensing out moisture the whole way up. By the time an air mass crosses the crest it has already given up most of what it was carrying.

So a station part-way up the western slope can out-snow a considerably higher station on the eastern side, because the western station sees the storm with its moisture intact and the eastern one sees what is left.

The rain shadow, in one pair of numbers

The clearest illustration on this site is Blue Canyon against Bishop. Blue Canyon sits at 5,300 feet on the western slope and takes about 62 inches of precipitation a year. Bishop sits at 4,150 feet on the far side and takes under five. Ninety miles apart, a thousand feet apart in elevation, and a factor of twelve apart in water.

What it means for the season

Snowfall in the Sierra also arrives in very few, very large events rather than steadily. A handful of atmospheric rivers make or break a season, and whether they arrive warm or cold decides how much of the total is banked as snow rather than running off immediately.