This Is The Way

I apologize. My first post about the newly released system for making parking reservations at Alpine Meadows and Palisades for the ’23/’24 season was full of vitriol, frustrations and questions. It was a natural response. Here I have this season pass that someday will give me access to 257 ski areas in 48 countries, yet it does not guarantee that I can ski at my home mountain. The thing is, that’s all I really want to do. I continued to investigate the ups and downs of the process for much of the day yesterday and cracked the code for how to make it easier. Our friends at PTAM should have published something like this yesterday upon activation of the new system.

This Is The Way

The key to all of this is to think like a millennial. The younger generations may not have touched a desktop or laptop computer since high school, where some boomer insisted that Intro To Keyboarding was the most important class they would ever take. Since that time, the younger generations have done everything on their phones, or at most, a tablet. So the tutorial below will teach you how to set up your phone to easily deal with the new parking reservation system at Alpine Meadows and Palisades.

Step 1:  Use Safari (or the browser app of your choice) to navigate to ParkPalisadesTahoe.com on your phone. You will end up here:

Step 2:  Click the big orange button that says “Reserve Now”. Scroll down, because we know you want to go to Alpine Meadows, and you will be at this screen:

Step 3:  Click the big orange button that says “Reserve Alpine”. That will bring you to this screen, which looks far better on a phone than on a large computer screen:

Step 4:  In the upper right corner, you will see the option to “Log In”. Yes you should click there. Scroll downward find the option to create an account. Enter an email address and a password. There are no ridiculous password regulations like “must include upper case, lower case, one animal emoji and one greek character.” Also, the bonus of using this route is that you are not forced to put in a credit card at this time. After logging in, your screen will look like this:

Step 5:  Yes, I know you have not put in a vehicle license number yet. You will be asked to do that when you make your first reservation. You will know that you are “logged in” by seeing the person icon in the upper right. You can click that to add additional information if you like…but don’t do that just yet. Instead click the “Share” icon at the bottom of the screen.

If you are on an Android phone, your “Share” icon will not look like that. Yours should be the three vertical dots at the upper right corner of the screen. I can’t provide a screen shot as I have not owned an Android phone since 2008. Just for the record, if you have an Android phone, you’re already sharing everything you do on your phone with scammers and hackers around the world.

Step 6:  Scroll down screen and look for the option to “Add to Home Screen”. It looks like this:

Step 7:  You should find a new “app” on your home screen that has the Palisades logo and a title of “Welcome|Honk”. That will take you directly to the page where you can add a reservation, use a parking code or manage existing reservations. From my limited testing, the logged in state seems to be pretty persistent too. I am noting that there is a transparency issue with the logo that makes it appear black and orange, appropriate for Halloween today.

So there you go. We turned all of that frustration and anger into a positive tutorial in how to make this work. I’m betting that there are a whole bunch of you that did not know you could turn a web page into an “app” by adding an icon to your home screen. My advice is that you can use the same tactic to navigate to UnofficialAlpine.com and add that icon to your home screen too. That will make it easier for you to visit us, rather than waiting for an email to pop up in your inbox…without photos. Hope to see you on the slopes soon.