A recent list released by Fordor’s.com, a popular traveling website, has highlighted the San Gabriel National Monument as one of 9 natural spaces on Earth not to visit in 2024. The National Monument just north of Los Angeles was added to the list because it is covered in graffiti, littered with trash, and so heavily impacted by visitors that entire endemic species are being threatened with extinction. The situation has gotten so bad that piles of litter 3 feet high can sometimes be spotted in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.

Although Eaton Canyon is not currently located within the official boundaries of the national monument, that could change in the near future. More on the efforts by Congresswoman Judy Chu and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla to expand the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument can be read here. One has to wonder whether such a designation would make any kind of difference at Los Angeles’s most popular waterfall hiking trail.

Here is a link to the 2024 “do not visit” list.

Over the past 116 years of weather record keeping, there have only been six cases of back-to-back winters in Eaton Canyon in which more than 25.00″ fell. These back-to-back wet winters are exceptionally important for the biodiversity of Eaton Canyon as some plants and animals depend on occasional prolonged wet periods to thrive, not just survive. Contrary to popular belief, the Western U.S. Megadrought is not over in California whatsoever. Megadroughts are defined as 20+ year long periods with below average precipitation, high temperatures, low humidity levels, decreased soil moisture levels, increased wildfire threat, significant forest mortality, groundwater depletion, irreversible land subsidence, weakened food chains, and threatened biodiversity. One single ultra-wet winter in California is not enough to repair the damages caused by this megadrought. Until the ecological damages can be somewhat repaired, this megadrought is not over. In order for California to escape from this megadrought, 3-5 years of back-to-back wet winters must occur in the state. These back-to-back wet winters we are looking for in California occurred in Eaton Canyon in:

• 1937, 1938 and 1939 (3 wet winters in a row)
• 1943 and 1944
• 1966 and 1967
• 1992 and 1993
• 2010 and 2011 
• 2023 and….. 2024?

The El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic and regular shift in oceanic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the equatorial east Pacific ocean from the area south of Hawai’i eastwards to the west coast of Peru. ENSO does not occur anywhere else in the world, only in this one region. When ENSO is in its negative phase and sea surface temperatures are cooler than average, we call this La Niña. When ENSO is in its positive phase and sea surface temperatures are above average, we call this El Niño. Given the expansive aerial extent of this periodic phenomena, climatologists have noticed a pattern emerge with each ENSO cycle within weather conditions worldwide. In California, El Niño typically means heavy winter rains while La Niña typically means less winter rains.

According to TropicalTidbits.com, we are currently in moderate El Niño conditions with SSTs +1.3°C across the equatorial east Pacific. NOAA has issued an ‘El Niño Advisory’ with a 85% chance of this event turning into a strong El Niño (SSTs >1.5°C) and a 30% chance of turning into a historically strong El Niño (SSTs >2.0°C).

The connection between wet winters in California and El Niño exists because El Niño steepens the temperature gradient between the North Pacific and the Equatorial Pacific. This steeper gradient strengthens the subtropical jet stream, a weaker counterpart to the polar jet stream. When the subtropical jet stream is stronger, it is able to undercut more wintertime ridges of high pressure that would normally sit off the coast of California and block any rain storms coming in. Instead of pushing these ridges aside like when the polar jet stream is amplified, an amplified subtropical jet stream simply pushes the ridges northwards, allowing warm Pacific storms with a strong tropical moisture tap to sneak into California. As a result, El Niño winters are typically not great winters for low elevation snowfall in California. It is those winters with a strong polar jet stream, like 2023, that can bring tons of low-elevation snow throughout the state.

Not all El Niño episodes are created equal, and there is no shortage of examples in which El Niño conditions failed to bring decent winter rains to California. There are other meteorological factors at play all across the globe, one of them being pure luck. For many California weather enthusiasts, the colossal failure of winter 2016’s rainy prediction pains us to this day. Hopefully this time we are not hyping ourselves up again only for it to be 90°F throughout much of February.

Winter 2024 is expected to be wetter than average in Eaton Canyon. Just how wet remains to be seen, though it is unlikely we will get another 43″ of rainfall like we did last winter. There is also no knowing if any storm will produce high enough rain rates to ecologically destroy Eaton Creek, which was destroyed and reordered in 1938, 1943, 1969, 1980, and 2005. Without a recent canyon-wide wildfire in Eaton Canyon, such a storm is unlikely in any given winter, though they are most likely in El Niño winters