The Tahoe Experience

Despite spending quite a bit of time in the past in the Tahoe area (even hiking the entire Tahoe Rim Trail almost a decade ago), I had never been to Tahoe for skiing. After our wedding last summer, my cousins Kim and Isaac invited us to stay with them in South Lake Tahoe. So we planned a trip, partially for the skiing, but largely to spend time with their adorable two little girls, Dara and Seyla.

Before the Storm

Seeking cheap plane tickets, Kelly and I arrived at the Reno Airport around midnight. We ended up spending longer than the flight waiting in line for our Hertz rental car pickup. They were understaffed and out of the four wheel drive vehicles everyone reserved. It was after 2 AM when we finally got our car after being told we would have to come back the next day for our actual promised vehicle. It was nowhere near as bad as our debacle returning from Europe, but it was still a bad start to the trip!

When we arrived, Tahoe had not seen any significant snow in over a month, but a massive storm was supposed to arrive shortly. We started out by going to Nevada Nordic, an excellent little donation based nordic ski area on the Mt. Rose Highway. It was challenging to skate unacclimatized at 8500 ft! The actual footprint of the trails is very small, but they pack a crazy amount of trails into a tiny space. There were tons of people out, skiing, snowshoeing, and hiking. It was great to see so many people outside!

On our first evening, we gave Kim and Isaac a free Valentine’s day evening as we babysat the girls. Dara, who was the flower girl for our wedding, remembered us from the wedding (she even remembered my, er, unfortunate food poisoning situation), but we were pleasantly surprised that Seyla warmed up to us quickly.

The next morning, I went for a short tour while avalanche conditions were still low and the weather was nice. I went up Maggie’s Peak near Emerald Bay. There was only other car at the parking, which was probably a sign of the poor snow conditions. Solar aspects were completely melted out. At the summit, I met three guys, one of whom asked me “are you Kyle?”. It was Frank, who I skied in the High Sierra with a few years ago! It was truly a fortuitous encounter. It was a “one and done” kind of morning, so I got pizza for lunch with them, and made tentative plans to ski with them the next weekend.

The Storm Arrives

Honestly, I was quite intrigued to experience a classic Sierra snowstorm. The Sierra is a “feast or famine” range. They frequently go weeks between storms, but the storms often dump many feet of snow, with high winds.

Since we had Monday off for President’s Day, Kim, Isaac, Kelly, and I went to Kirkwood for some storm skiing. The winds were crazy up high, but the snow was actually pretty good, as far as resorts go. Most importantly, we made it back over Carson Pass in the afternoon before any closure!

The snowfall really ramped up the next day. It never felt like it was really snowing that hard at any moment, but the 1 inch/hr rate of precipitation was constant, and winds strong, even in the trees. I spent most of the day working, but eventually I got antsy, and went for a tour in the afternoon. I left straight from their house, breaking trail through rolling terrain before reaching some 25 degree treed slopes. After setting an exhausting skin track, I ripped my skins, pointed my skis down, and didn’t even move. Even with 112 underfoot powder skis, my tips just sank deeper and deeper. I had never had this problem before. The powder was unequivocally “too deep”. Somewhere along the way, I lost a tail clip and had a total skin failure, limping back to the house with Voile straps, soaked to the bone, defeated.

On Wednesday, I took part of the day off work to try to get some powder with Mike, one of the guys I met on Maggie’s Peak. Terrain choice and access was a challenge. 9 people had died the day before in an avalanche near Truckee, highlighting the risks of intense snowfall and buried weak layers. There’s plenty of low angle tree skiing around Tahoe, but we needed to find slopes steep enough to ski, but not steep enough to slide.

We initially tried to drive out to Waterhouse, a classic storm skiing spot. The roads were slow, and then we ran into a full road closure past Myers. We turned around and tried for a spot more in town, but stuck cars and unplowed roads blocked us. After 2 hours of driving, I returned home, once again defeated. While we see plentiful social media videos of over-the-head powder to Tahoe storms, the reality is much different – access is rough, and threading the needle between steep enough to ski and safe to ski can be dicey. I resigned myself to wait for roads to clear and the snow to settle.

After the Storm

Friday broke sunny and cold. I took the day off work (my first day off since last summer!), ready to finally get some Tahoe powder. I was struggling to figure out which parking locations would be plowed, so I decided to stick to something close by. I noticed that there is extensive north facing trees and a burn on the NW aspect of the Heavenly side country. Looking at Strava heat maps, it seemed like resort skiers headed out this way and got picked up, but people didn’t typically tour from the bottom in this area. The reason? Parking. There was no public parking in the residential roads at the base. Luckily, I could rely on Kim to simply drop me off and pick me up at the end of the day!

Over the last 3 days, it had snowed about 40 inches. Starting from the bottom, I had over two thousand vertical feet of trail breaking to do by myself. I intentionally set the track to be very easy to recycle.

The skiing on the northwest aspect had a tiny bit of wind effect, but it was mostly excellent skiing through dreamy trees and open burns. The laps were long – nearly 1800 ft – providing an efficient vert farm. It had been a long time since I just hamster wheeled powder laps.

Starting midday, there was a steady stream of resort skiers skiing through the sidecountry. For reasons I don’t fully understand, they seemed to prefer to ski right on my skin track, traversing across my slope, rather than skiing the untracked powder nearby. My theory is that the first snowboarder sees my skin track, and follows it to hold speed on a traverse, and then the others follow suit. Unfortunately for me, this meant that my immaculate skin track was getting erased over and over.

It was a truly gorgeous day – calm, cold, and crystal clear. I could see individual ripples on the lake. This was the quintessential Tahoe experience. I felt grateful for fortuitous timing on this trip, and excellent conditions.

On Saturday, Kim, Isaac, and I went out for a tour. For everyone else, it was their first tour of the season. We went up Angora Peak. It is lovely how simple and short the tours are in Tahoe – you can start at 10 AM, do 2k ft gain, have a nice summit view, and ski perfectly spaced trees with no BS getting out. Kelly agrees that if we lived in Tahoe, she would ski tour a lot more. Compared to Washington, Tahoe is most certainly “easy mode” (but that is true of almost anywhere compared to WA!).

People come to Tahoe for the lake views, but I was most intrigued by the legendary tree skiing. Indeed, it was truly remarkable. Tahoe is full of dry forests, with towering Ponderosas and pines, widely spaced. We have similar forests in WA, but only on south aspects below 5k on the east side. These locations less commonly get deep snow. Tahoe is the only place I’ve found so far that has this dry forest biome, yet abundant snowfall. Angora had some incredible trees.

On my final day of the trip, I linked up with Mike with yet more great tree skiing above the lake. Despite temps in the mid 40s in town, the high north aspects were still fast, settled powder. It was tempting to step into steeper terrain, as others were doing, but we were concerned about the lingering weak layers. It was some of the best tree skiing of my life, so it felt like an easy decision to keep it conservative!

The Tahoe Experience

For just a weeklong trip, I felt like we got a complete Tahoe experience – crusty snow at the end of a monthlong dry spell, a violent storm, and bluebird powder on the backend. We nordic skied, resort skied, and backcountry skied.

But the best part of the trip was definitely getting to spend time with my cousins and their adorable daughters. Dara and Seyla were sad when we had to leave, and we were a little sad knowing how different they will be next time we see them!

Thank you to Kim and Isaac for hosting us!