The Weekend Is Here

If you live in the Tahoe area, you’re already familiar with the phrase “Friday is the new Saturday” After a delightfully quiet mid-week at Alpine Meadows over the last four days, it got busy again today. The question of the day was will this weekend be anything like last weekend?

The upper parking lot did not quite fill. I didn’t spend my day counting cars, but if I had to take a guess, the lots were around 80% there today. Lift lines were minimal with everything but ABC running. But the slopes felt crowded. Very few people were skiing off piste, and that meant that the groomed terrain was quite hectic, as in “keep your head on a swivel”, in the usual places: Alpine Bowl, Wolverine, Rock Garden, Weasel, Werners, Dance Floor, Sherwood, Ridge and Bobby’s all felt just a bit claustrophobic.

I felt a lot better finding some of the secondary routes down the mountain. In particular, the off piste terrain off of Yellow and Roundhouse were much less busy.

There was a new groomed slope today in Alpine Bowl, just to skier’s left of the main Alpine Bowl groomer. I had not noticed the new pick pole up top that allows them to hook up the winch cat in that area. I’ve heard this line called a number of things before: Tower 23, Bullwheel (as it’s even with the Summit bullwheel), Summit Direct and Summit Express. The last two make the most sense to me as you can make a quick left exiting Summit and be heading downhill very rapidly. More routes down from the top of the mountain makes sense to me.

Things were slow to soften today with a fairly thick cloud deck moving in for the morning hours. We tried heading over to Sherwood about 10:30 and found that was way too early today. I eventually went back around 1:00pm and found the groomed runs were nice and corny on the upper pitches. The flatter runouts remained firm, as did much of the off piste terrain. By the time the sun emerged from the clouds this afternoon, the angles were all wrong for radiant heating of the snow.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a few degrees cooler, but potentially sunnier, which could allow for a faster thaw. Hopefully so as it would encourage people to ski off piste. The forecast still looks cold and snowy for Sunday, with 4 to 8 inches of snow expected, mostly during the ski day. It’s a pretty good bet that we will see upper mountain lift closures Sunday and possibly Monday due to some high winds.

Today was pretty busy for a Friday, and once again, I noted a lot of incoming traffic on Highway 89 this afternoon. How will the traffic and parking shape up tomorrow after the fiasco of last weekend? Here’s the two predominant theories I heard today:

A: Things will be bad, and there could be an escalation of arrival times. Every family that missed team, or missed a lesson, or did not even get to ski last weekend will be setting their alarm clocks an hour earlier and hitting the road ASAP to get a parking space. We saw that happen last Sunday.

B: Families that sat in traffic way too long last weekend, and maybe did not get to ski at all, could bail out for this weekend and not even try. My wife and several of my friends are in this camp already. Locals that don’t have commitments to teams, lessons, etc might find that cleaning the bathroom is more fun than sitting in traffic.

Honestly, I think “A” may be the case. People that already have committed to the weekend may be unwilling or unable to change the plan as they have team commitments, lessons reserved, a nonrefundable AirBnB reservation, etc. Since they already have all of that it place the answer will be that people will just plan to get to the mountain earlier…and earlier… and earlier. Most locals, especially without kids, are smart enough to stay away on weekends. Then there’s people like me, that just can’t stay away.

We shall see.