Snow day: Lake Tahoe offers fun for ski addicts, families and outdoor enthusiasts
Lake Tahoe is on quite a roller-coaster ride.
The Sierra Nevada range is in the midst of one of its snowiest ski seasons just six months after devastating wildfires roared through, causing billions of dollars in damage and lost tourism revenue.
In December, 16 feet of snow fell in the Sierras, smashing a 50-year-old record.
For a ski addict such as myself, all that snow was too enticing to pass up. At the time, I was hanging out with my wife Leslie on the sunny beaches of Southern California in our RV, but my mind was in the mountains jonesing for powder.
“What if I go skiing for a week in Lake Tahoe while you take the RV to Palm Springs?” I asked Leslie one night. We’ve been on the road in our RV since early September (we write the Going Mobile column, which appears Fridays in the Auto Connection section of The Spokesman-Review), and Leslie was ready for a break of her own.
I got the green light to go play in the white stuff, skiing five days at three of Tahoe’s best resorts, keeping an eye on our travel budget. In other words, I went on the cheap.
Heavenly: Top o’ the world
The view from the slopes of Heavenly Mountain Resort rivals any ski area in North America.
The resort sits right on the California-Nevada border. On the California side, you have expansive views of Lake Tahoe; the Nevada side features equally expansive views of the Carson Valley as far as the eye can see.
Heavenly is massive, with 3,500 vertical feet stretching across 4,800 acres. It definitely has that big-resort feel, with three major on-mountain lodges and huge, busting village scenes in California and Nevada.
At times, crowds can make Heavenly feel devilish. I had heard that the Nevada side was less crowded, so I parked at the Stagecoach base area for my two days at the resort. The plan mostly worked: I never stood in line for more than 10 minutes.
The high-altitude slopes at Heavenly (the resort tops out at 10,067 feet) are particularly appealing, with a lot of long cruise runs to explore. Glades and tree skiing are excellent, and I found myself turning among the very same tree trunks where entertainer-politician Sonny Bono died 24 years ago.
That was a shocking day. But let’s give this to Sonny – his death at Heavenly helped make the ski and snowboard industry a lot safer, introducing the helmet as a now-ubiquitous piece of safety equipment.
You’ll hear every kind of accent at Heavenly. I rode the chairlift with Argentinians, Germans, New Yorkers, Iowans and even a couple of intrepid Scots who had flown to Los Angeles, toured the Southwest and then red-lined it from the Grand Canyon after December’s big dumps.
I wasn’t the only ski addict drawn to Lake Tahoe this season.
If you go: Heavenly Mountain Resort, 3860 Saddle Road, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96150, (775) 586-7000, skiheavenly.com
Family fun at Northstar
On the north side of Lake Tahoe, seven miles from the town of Truckee, Calif., is Northstar California Resort. This sprawling ski area is best known for its family-friendly, low-angle cruisers.
Like Heavenly, it’s big. Northstar stretches 3,170 acres around the slopes of 8,617-foot Mount Pluto, an extinct volcano that erupted 2 million years ago, plugging up a valley and eventually creating Lake Tahoe.
From the top of Northstar, you have exceptional views of the lake that Mount Pluto’s lava and mudflows created, but I found myself most attracted to the opposite side of the mountain.
Known as “The Backside,” these north-facing slopes feature rolling terrain and a few steeps that reminded me of a bigger, longer version of Chair 4 at Mt. Spokane Ski and Snowboard Resort.
I was happy to bang out lap after lap through the trees on “The Backside,” where I hung out for most of the day. And even though Northstar is one of the closest resorts to the Bay Area, it wasn’t crowded on the midweek day that I visited.
Northstar is definitely built to handle the Bay Area crowds: A shuttle service brings skiers from remote parking lots to a bustling village base area crammed with shops, bars and restaurants.
If you go: 5001 Northstar Drive, Truckee, CA 96161, (530) 562-2267, northstarcalifornia.com
Kirkwood: ‘A skier’s mountain’
Villages and fancy ski shops aren’t really my thing. I knew I was among my people when I showed up for two days at Kirkwood Mountain Resort, about an hour south of Lake Tahoe on the crest of the Sierras.
“Most of Lake Tahoe is pretty flashy, but Kirkwood is a skier’s mountain,” said one of my chairlift companions, an aging hippie from Santa Cruz, Calif. Like me, he had spent a week skiing the slopes around Lake Tahoe on the Epic Pass, Vail Resorts’ season pass that is good at Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood.
What my instant friend meant was this: Kirkwood is not about the big-resort amenities – it’s about the turns.
The ski area tops out at 9,800 feet and features a long ridgeline punctuated by massive cliffs and chutes offering access into several broad bowls. Advanced skiers will love some of the steep drops on Kirkwood’s 2,300 acres, and tree skiers will be attracted to all the powder in a good year like this.
Kirkwood’s ridgeline reminded me of two Pacific Northwest ski areas: Schweitzer and Mission Ridge. And as I cranked out turn-after-turn on my final day, it felt a little like being home after all this time on the road.
If you go: 1501 Kirkwood Meadows Drive, Kirkwood, CA 95646, (209) 258-6000, kirkwood.com