A Challenging Start To The Season

The recent weather around Tahoe is the kind that brings fear to mountain managers and their mountain ops teams. If you want to open your mountain on schedule, you need a series of cold storms to build your snowpack before opening day. Barring that, you need a big shot of cold and dry air, such as those north wind events that can keep temperatures below freezing around the clock for several days in a row. November of 2023 has been nothing of that sort. We’ve had this cutoff low hanging off the coast bringing just a small amount of rain and very high elevation snow to Tahoe. It’s too warm and wet to make snow when it’s like this. It’s not that they don’t want to, it just cannot be done.*

Consequently, several Tahoe ski areas threw in the towel and delayed their openings this week: Northstar, Heavenly and Sugar Bowl. Two ski areas have managed to open. If you have been reading this week, you know that Mount Rose has been able to take advantage of their elevation, offering basically one run off of their Lakeview chair. It may not seem like much, but I have racked up about 80k vertical feet there this week. On the other end of the spectrum is Boreal, which opened Friday with just the Castle Peak chair. It serves a small terrain park, about 400 feet in length and with 165 feet of vertical rise.

Palisades Tahoe finally made some sort of commitment to what terrain they are opening on Wednesday, November 22nd. The First Venture chair will be open for business Wednesday on the Palisades side. If you have been reading my reports over the last week, I have been saying that this was the likely outcome given our recent weather pattern. It’s not much. The run at First Venture is about 500 feet long, with about 100 feet of vertical rise. The idea of putting on your skis or board and standing in line for that sort of run…well, you’re doing it for the ‘Gram…or you really love skiing and riding. Honestly I have never ridden First Venture.** Maybe it’s something I should cross off of my bucket list.

Sure, we love those seasons where we have been able to ride Roundhouse or Summit on Day 1 of the season. But not all seasons start that way, especially if you are ready to start ski season as soon after Halloween as possible. This got me thinking about my “smallest starts” to ski seasons over the last twenty years. Here’s some of the memorable ones:

• Hot laps on the Nugget Chair at Boreal on October 11…my earliest lift served skiing
• A full day of laps on the magic carpet at Mount Rose…two days in a row.
• Laps on the aforementioned Castle Peak chair at Boreal, where walking up the hill might be faster than the lift line
• Days of laps on the old Ponderosa lift at Mount Rose…slower and flatter than the old Hot Wheels Chair!
• Several weekends of laps on the newer Wizard chair at Mount Rose…an excellent time to practice tele turns.
• A recent season at Alpine Meadows when I put in 120 laps on Kangaroo before any other lift opened.

Call me nutty. I know I am addicted to skiing and will take whatever I can get. It’s fortunate that I have the resources and time to make use of my “backup pass” at Mount Rose until Alpine Meadows opens. Everyone in my household is happier this way.

There is still some “weather and conditions permitting” language in the official operations blog announcing the limited operations for opening day. It’s possible that they could get more terrain open sometime during the week. It all depends on how this storm performs today and tonight, and just how many hours of cold we get for making snow the rest of the week.

My projection in my last report was that we could see as much as 12-16 inches of snow out of this system by Sunday morning. Hopefully you did click the link to the clip from Dumb and Dumber where that chance was specified as “one in a million”. Still we could get almost there. The snow levels have been running at 8000 feet all day and should drop to near base levels this evening. The point forecast calls for 3 to 7 inches at mid mountain. Up top…we shall see. Getting the TLC zone going at Alpine Meadows will likely depend more on the following cold temperatures and the ability to make snow once again. I have confidence that the mountain ops teams at both Alpine Meadows and Palisades will be doing everything they can to get more than just First Venture opened as soon as possible.

Today was my first “storm skiing day” of the season, with snow falling at Mount Rose…barely. That first storm day is a challenge, where you have to remember exactly which parts of your kit works best. I nailed it for everything except for the pants. They were soaking up every wet snowflake like a wet sponge. Also, note to self, those Converse Chuck Taylors do not cut it in a slushy ski area parking lot. Tomorrow should be the first real powder day of the year at Mount Rose. It will be short lived with really only one run open. Being a rule follower, I will not be dipping into any of those tempting zones I might enjoy when there is much more snow on the ground. More importantly, I’ve already done my time with injuries from skiing early season pow with no base. I want to ski the entire ski season. If I ski tomorrow, I will be playing it extra safe.

Keep those anti-jinxes going!

* A company makes a self contained snowmaking system called The Snow Factory that allows for snowmaking in temperatures up to 80°. Boreal had it for one summer for their Summer Shred sessions. That poor machine pumped out enough snow in one day to make a snowman or two.

** According to a comment at LiftBlog.com, the First Venture lift was formerly called the Little Papoose lift. If that is true, then I probably did ride that lift as a kid.