After a slow start to California’s wet winter season, a series of storms that hammered the state at the tail end of 2019 dumped enough snow on the Sierra Nevada to kick off the new year with a solid snowpack.

Surveyors with the California Department of Water Resources trudged through a snow-covered field Thursday at the department’s Phillips station — fresh powder crunching beneath their snowshoes —and plunged a hollow pole into the snowpack for the first monthly measurement that serves as an important marker for the state’s water supply.