Today was Day 1 of the Stifel (stee-fl) Palisades Tahoe Cup on the other side of the gondola. Meanwhile, at Alpine Meadows, we just went skiing. Did it cause some big traffic jams? Yup, especially for those that were headed to Palisades Tahoe. Looking at Google Maps this morning after arriving at Alpine Meadows, it showed that traffic was backed up about all of the way to Highway 80 and onto the freeway from the Truckee side. From the Tahoe City side, it was backed up all of the way to Dollar Hill. Yikes!
But as long as you got ahead of that traffic and were headed to Alpine Meadows this morning, it wasn’t awful. Still, a trip that normally takes 22 minutes from my house took 58 minutes. Typically, you have to leave even earlier on a Sunday, as people figure out “We need to leave the house sooner” tomorrow. That said, tomorrow will not be a quasi-powder morning, it’s the end of a nine day holiday for many schools, and the weather is expected to deteriorate tomorrow. My money is on a number of people skipping skiing and heading home instead. We shall see…
Sadly, today did not hold a candle to yesterday. Yesterday was all day powder fun, and you could ski just about anywhere and it was good, even at 2pm. Today there was less new snow, the temperatures were much warmer, and a lot of the mountain was wind affected by a strong east wind overnight. Still we found some very fun skiing this morning. The best we found was at Scott and Lakeview, as those spots are protected from the east wind. We got ahead of the crowd and went to Lakeview almost immediately. We picked up about 5 runs there before the line got longer than I can tolerate.
There was just enough sun to cook things pretty quickly in the sunnier areas, turning it from heavy powder into Sierra cement. Out on the groomers, things were much better with the exception of the heavily traveled runouts to the lifts, which took on that lumpy cobblestone consistency.
We noted that the east winds were tapering and stayed out until Summit opened, around 1:15 pm. We thought we were pretty clever, timing things to where we ended up on second chair. We instead would have been better off waiting until maybe 1:45. We encountered heavy fog, with very limited visibility. We felt our way out to Alpine Bowl, having seen a lot of sastrugi in North Peril, Sunspot and Tower 19. There was a two foot wind lip to climb over to get into Alpine Bowl, and a whole lot of nearly invisible sastrugi. Lower down, out of the wind and fog, it looked better…just kidding, it was breakable crust. So again this was likely better after 500 or so skiers skied it in.
So, here’s to hoping that Jeremy and crew get a chance to groom the heck out of the mountain overnight so we don’t face a morning of coral reef skiing until the next storm moves in.
That Next Storm Could Pack A Wallop
The Sacramento office of NOAA just updated their Winter Storm Warning to include a Blizzard Warning beginning Monday morning…4 to 7 feet of snow by Wednesday is the short story, plus very big winds. Here’s the copy and paste:
So if you need to get out of Tahoe, your window is probably tomorrow, earlier in the day. While there won’t be huge amounts of snow tomorrow afternoon, there will be enough for chain requirements on Donner Summit. Combine that with massive amounts of traffic and poor drivers and it’s reasonable to assume that there could be road closures later tomorrow.
For those that want to go skiing, I would expect that we will find some firm conditions in the morning after today’s warm temperatures. Snow is expected by midday and that should soften the experience. Winds will likely be an issue for some lifts.
Right now…Monday is looking very challenging for mountain ops crews and for just driving to the mountain. I would advise you to have low expectations. Tuesday…I think that will depend on just how much snow falls. If this storm pans out the way the models and forecasters see it, it will take a lot of work to make the mountain ready for safe operations again. Practice patience.