Marc's Blog: snow - 5ft powder storm in Tahoe: Sierra @ Tahoe and Heavenly

After a horrible dry spell this year, Tahoe finally started getting a bit of snow. While 5ft in a storm sounds great, I got to find out that it was 5ft on top of almost nothing, so the tree runs were very treacherous. The amount of rocks and tree stumps, which ultimately isn't super safe. Also, the resorts were super packed, which is not surprising given that everyone had been waiting for real snow for so long.

Johannes was a trooper and offered to drive me to Tahoe, which was super great given that I had a concert on friday night and got to bed around 01:00. Sadly, my plan failed miserably and I slept past both my alarms for 05:00. Johannes was super nice and just waited for me to wake up (it's more complicated than this, but skipping details), and we ended up being on the road around 07:15. By then Carson Spur was still closed sadly (it only opened at 13:00, very late), so we ended up driving past Sierra @ Tahoe on hwy50 around 11:30 and figured it was already late enough that we might as well just go there. Sadly we didn't know the resort well and went to the famed West Bowl was actually kind of stupid because while it had plenty of snow, it was lacking slope. We later (too late) went to the main lift on the front side, and that gave much better terrain and pitch:

good enough for the day given that it was already 11:30

the tree runs I did were great, but honestly very technical, even for me

convertible RWD porsche without chains just after a snow storm, ballsy but well done

Since we were sleeping in South Lake, heavenly for day #2 was the easiest, but also I figured they'd have more untracked terrain than kirkwood, so we gave that a shot. Mott opened at 10:00 and I made the mistake of not being at the rope waiting for it to open, so I missed the first group down and it was half tracked for my first run. First line was about 30mn, second line was 40mn+. Yikes!