Recapping The ’23-’24 Season At Alpine Meadows

When we look back at the ’23-’24 season, I don’t think we will find very many people that will claim this was an amazing season for skiing and riding at Alpine Meadows. That’s not to say that I did not have a good time just about every day on the mountain or that I don’t appreciate the efforts of those that make it happen. Compared to ’22-’23, which was an amazing season from start to finish, finally finishing on July 4th, this season was not quite the same. This year, instead of closing 5 weeks into summer, Alpine Meadows closed on April 28th, a month earlier than what most of us would consider “normal.” I have heard more than one person label the season as “memorable”, and I think that is entirely accurate.

Our Snowfall Was Below Average

The official stats have not been released yet, but doing some pencil and paper calculations, we ended the snow year at Alpine Meadows significantly below average. I know, this is not what you may have heard from other sources. The Donner Summit Snow Lab did report slightly above average snowfall for the season, and that has been widely reported in the media. We have cautioned you repeatedly that the stats at Alpine Meadows are not quite as rosy. The reason for this is that snowfall stats at Alpine Meadows are measured near the bottom of Roundhouse. The east slope of the Sierra does get slightly less snowfall than the west slope.

Since the records at Alpine Meadows have always been based on the lower snow plot at Roundhouse, the only way to get a meaningful comparison, season to season, is to look at the same place. Here’s the penciled out stats, which may be an inch or two off:

• Season Total (ends April 30): 292 inches of snowfall, compared to a 362 inch average. That’s a 53 year average. Update: I saw the official stats and they say 298 inches for the season for 82% of average. The month of May is never included, so our biggest one day storm of the season in May doesn’t count.
• That means that we ended the season with 81% of average snowfall at Alpine Meadows
• In ranking this season with the previous 53 years, this season comes in 36th place. Ouch.
• Only February & March showed above average snowfall. All other months were pretty slow to very slow

Obviously there is still a good amount of snow at the top of the mountain. The base area is thinning out, showing a 68 inch snowpack as of today. Many people have pointed out that there is very likely enough snow to keep Alpine Meadows open for another month. That is a moot point at this time. But it is interesting to note that even in a “less than average” year, Alpine Meadows can probably be kept open through May.

The Snow Was Very Late To The Party

We started off the season skiing on almost 100% manmade snow. Here’s the progression of opening:

• November 25th: Treeline Cirque to the mid-station only
• December 2nd: Meadow, Subway and Big Carpet added to the schedule
• December 15th: Roundhouse opens with just Rock Garden and Upper Weasel One runs open
• December 28th: Summit opens with access only to Alpine Bowl
• January 3rd: Yellow Chair opens, as well as all terrain off of Roundhouse
• It started snowing in mid-January, allowing Scott, Sherwood and Lakeview to be added to the schedule by the end of January.

Yes, this was the season I made over 300, nearly 400 laps on Weasel before anything else opened. February and March ended up being two months that offered some every good skiing. We had a really good run of powder days in hidden places that just we just can’t talk about. Then the snow machine turned off, making us look forward to corn season. Corn season was just too short this year.

Again, you have to hand it to the mountain ops team for making it through the first 50 days of the season. Without intensive efforts by snow makers and groomers, we would have been in very dire straights. Thank you again.

It Was A Season That Made You Ask “What’s Next?”

Not only was the lack of snow a challenge for mountain staff, both Palisades and Alpine Meadows faced a slew of different challenges, some of which are just not what you might expect during a “normal” season.

• Before the mountain even opened for the season, a member of the Alpine Meadows team was killed in a tragic snowmobile accident during overnight snowmaking operations. RIP Brian “Boogs” Gimbert
• In January, an inbounds avalanche killed one and injured another near the KT-22 lift at Palisades. RIP Kenneth Kidd
• One day later, a second inbounds avalanche occurred in Wolverine Bowl at Alpine Meadows, fortunately nobody was hurt.
• At the end of January, another former Alpine Meadows employee was involved in an incident that started with a carjacking, turned into an attempted stabbing, resulting in that person being fatally shot by a California State Park ranger near the OVI building at Palisades. RIP Vinton Miller
• In early March, Alpine Meadows experienced a rare ski area wide power outage, as a part of a wider scale outage at Liberty Utilities. Power was restored within a couple of hours, but there was an unscheduled emergency test of all lift backup systems. Some guests were stranded on lifts for more than an hour. Fortunately no rope evacuations were required. So many “half off vouchers” were distributed that day, it became difficult to even give them away!
• In March, a patroller at Palisades threw a hand charge near the Nose off of KT-22, landing on the roof of an unoccupied gondola car. Reportedly, the charge exploded, damaging the cabin severely. Fortunately that sort of control work happens outside of operating hours so no guests were involved.

You might expect one or two of these sort of events within a season, but six is definitely “memorable.” The Alpine Meadows season is done, but the Palisades season still has 28 days to go. What’s next? Volcanic eruption? Killer bees? Nothing would surprise me at this point.

We Learned To Live With Parking Reservations

When parking reservations for the ’23-’24 season were announced last spring, there was a lot of grumbling. Yes, we were a part of that grumbling. A test run of a parking reservations during the July 4th summer session at Alpine Meadows did not really make anyone more confident in the plan. As the summer wore on, the handwringing and angry rants continued.

Ultimately, Palisades Tahoe released an entirely different reservation process in the fall. That lead to a struggle fest for a short period of time while we all tried to figure out how to best bypass the system or scam the system. Ultimately the real challenge became to figure out how to live with the system. Once I cracked the code of ignoring the “Honk!” app itself, and creating my own applet link on my phone, things started to settle down and I published a post called “This Is The Way”. It was widely shared across the various ski communities of Alpine Meadows and Palisades, making it just a little bit easier for everyone.

Still there were challenges to overcome with servers at Honk! becoming bogged down with thousands of requests each Tuesday at noon and 7pm. There were shouts of anger over server errors and “Try Again” messages, but there were also shouts of joy when one was successful. By January there were small clans of people congregating in areas around the mountain where cell service or WiFi was reliable each Tuesday just before noon. We coached and coddled each other to keep up the faith. The few times I failed at the noon hour, I had redemption at 7pm. Others reported fair results with just repeated attempts on Friday evenings.

We survived the process, and as I have mentioned before, the reservations did help to some extent, maybe.Although we saw fewer days with bad traffic or gridlock, this season offered very few powder bonanzas that ultimately cause most traffic jams in the winter. Palisades also reported that reservations did encourage far more people to use public transportation options this winter, but that was likely more to Palisades. Everybody knows that public transportation to Alpine Meadows is essentially a myth, with the exception of the Mountaineer for valley residents.

As long as the balance of parking reservations stays weighted toward mostly free, it is something that I am willing to live with. If you found it difficult to deal with last season, learn how to set a recurring reminder on your phone for each Tuesday. Then check out the “This Is The Way” article to make it as easy as possible. I will update that article as needed for next season.

It Is Still Alpine Meadows

There was a day when Alpine Meadows was just a quiet little place compared to all of the glitz, glamour and fame one valley over. Many of us were drawn to Alpine Meadows because it offered something different, especially after Intrawest built the first rendition of a faux alpine village in the early 2000’s at the base of NAW Valley. Alpine Meadows was the home to locals and the “day trip” market of Northern California. As you’re probably aware, that’s all changed.

There’s a huge variety of things that have conspired to change the nature of our favorite mountain. Here’s just a partial list: Ikon Pass sales, the Ikon tourist, a very effective marketing campaign in foreign markets, the shiny boxes, remote workers, boomer retirees that ski every day, more AWD cars, fat skis and short term rentals. The more I pay attention, it’s the STR’s that have the biggest impact, not just at Palisades and Alpine Meadows, but throughout the Tahoe region. It’s a problem everywhere. Our world is broken. Houses have become hotels and hotels and motels are now the respite for the unhoused. Overtourism is a problem worldwide.

The other day, I heard a tourist correct someone that called the mountain “Alpine Meadows”, telling them “No, it’s all Palisades Tahoe now.” There’s a bunch of us that will never accept that. I was proud on closing day to see that people wearing various Alpine Meadows logo gear outnumbered those wearing the Palisades logo by a factor of about 20 to 1 (not including employees that are forced to wear the Palisades logo and have been banished from using the word “Meadows”). Alpine Meadows logo merchandise has not been sold for three years, but we still hang on to it. Go team!

Traffic At Unofficial Alpine Has Gone Through The Roof

We cannot pin it down to any one thing, but the growth of Unofficial Alpine over the last 5 seasons has been pretty phenomenal. We took a break for a couple of years, restarting posts in late 2019. We have had all sorts of factors that have influenced our growth. Andy and I just try to tell it how it is, and people seem to trust what we say. Most of the time that’s a good decision. We are more consistent than any other source for conditions and weather reports in Tahoe. Just this season, we produced 153 reports over a 156 day season. We do this without requiring a subscription, and without pushing much in the way of advertising in front of your face.

Here’s the numbers over the last six years. Yeah, I knew we were getting bigger numbers, but not that big. And yes, those numbers are really no big deal, but in the context of a site that is focused on one ski area, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Our traffic varies with the season, peaking around holiday periods and during stormy periods. People love to know if it’s going to snow and they love to see pictures of powder. There’s a few posts that have seen way more traffic than others. I wouldn’t say they went viral, but they have been very widely shared. Here’s the top three:

• The Legacy Of Alpine Meadows: The 1982 Avalanche A lot of people read this post initially, then that doubled when the Buried movie was released in theaters. When Buried was released on Netflix, traffic on this post went crazy as people went looking for more information about the avalanche.
• Sixty Years Of Progession At Alpine Meadows This piece has been widely shared among the ski industry and various ski forums
• A Tough Day For The Palisades Tahoe Community I wrote this piece after the inbounds avalanche at Palisades this January. The professionals were taking a lot of hits from the armchair quarterbacks that insisted the mountain needs to be 100% safe all of the time, which is an impossibility. Again this piece was widely shared in the industry.

I would love to give you some specifics on the number of times those articles have been read, but the supplier of that data now insists on a monthly subscription to access those details. I don’t care enough to pay for yet another subscription.

It’s this phenomenal growth that had led us to being much more careful about what we post when we are talking about “off the map” places at Alpine Meadows. We know that when we talk about something too much, it just brings too many people to that spot. For that same reason, we can never publish a map or guide to some of those places. We do plan to continue to give you some good general ideas about what to expect for different areas of the mountain and what kind of weather might happen.

Lastly, the unthinkable happened. There actually was a reference and a link to Unofficial Alpine from the Palisades Tahoe site this season. They said it would never happen, but it did. Essentially, it brought a bunch of kooks here that like to post comments about how NAW Valley is so much better than Alpine Meadows. Of course it is, it’s always better over there. Still I delete most of those comments.

It’s Time For A Summer Pause

I don’t expect to post here much through the summer season. We used to write about interesting hikes and bike rides during the summer, but I have stopped doing that. The Tahoe area is facing enough overtourism as it is, and there is no place in Tahoe that needs more publicity during the summer time. There will be no listicles of “The 10 Best Hidden Beaches Of Lake Tahoe” here.

We will consider posting if there’s interesting news on mountain developments, changes to the parking program, and long range outlooks on the weather as people start prognosticating. The hype has already begun for another La Niña year. Thanks for being a part of Unofficial Alpine this season!