It’s August. Californians Are Still Skiing. Don’t Ask.

This weekend, while I squeeze into a thick winter wet suit for a cold-water surf in foggy San Francisco — and while my cousin in Phoenix goes rock climbing indoors to escape 115-degree heat — hordes of Californians are smearing pink and yellow zinc oxide on noses, shoving feet into hard plastic ski boots and gliding over to the lifts at Mammoth Mountain for yet another day on the slopes. A reminder: It’s August.

After so many years of drought, this winter’s snowfall in California was insane, a biblical onslaught of atmospheric rivers sucking up the Pacific Ocean, funneling enormous volumes of water thousands of miles through freezing sky and piling up the Sierra Nevada snowpack to more than 300 percent of average levels in some areas. It crushed houses, buried roads and cut off small towns. Some ski resorts had to close because they had too much snow.

That snowy abundance has lasted longer than anyone could have hoped. Two of the biggest ski resorts on Lake Tahoe were still hopping on the Fourth of July, a time of year when the mountains are usually full of wildflowers. Mammoth Mountain, 140 miles south of the lake, got a positively Alaskan 75 or so feet of snow at its summit and is only now celebrating the final day of the season.

Climate scientists have been warning us about not just global warming but also global weirding, or climatic dysregulation so severe that our most familiar landscapes are suddenly unrecognizable. And don’t bother trying to get used to them in their new form, because they’re going to keep changing, at an ever-faster pace. Unpredictable change is the new status quo. On an emotional level, there’s something undeniably frightening about that — where’s it all going? — but it can also, in a rare instance like the chance to ski in the dog days of summer, bring a disorienting joy.

A friend of mine, Kelly Cashman, who worked Mammoth ski patrol for years, nearly lost her home and her business under the weight of this past winter’s snow and ice. She now runs ski patrol for the June Mountain Ski Area, near Mammoth. She spent some nights alone, with no hot water, in a motel she owns and days on the mountain, skiing high ridgelines and chucking explosives to trigger avalanches before recreational skiers could.

In San Francisco, so much rain fell that my wooden back door swelled too much to shut; my favorite Japanese restaurant, Izakaya Rintaro, flooded waist deep; and storm drains got so overloaded that sewer grates spouted geysers.