Kirkwood

On Tuesday, we decided to lay low and take a day off. Some rain had invaded the Tahoe region and we were seriously questioning ourselves. Had we brought the rain 900 miles south? Are we cursed? After drinking some coffee and Baileys, we perked up enough to do some research and found out that Kirkwood was actually getting some snow.

Upon waking up on Wednesday morning, we decided to make the drive down to Kirkwood, since they had the best forecast for the day and had received some snow overnight. Upon reaching Kirkwood, we saw about 3” of new snow in the parking lot, with more falling. And this didn't include the 2”+ that had fallen the day before. We got our tickets and made our way over to Chair 6. Patrol was doing some serious bombing and we waited for 45 minutes at the base of the chair without any word on when it was going to open.

Finally, we went over to Chair 5 and got a couple quick runs in. There was a decent amount of snow by now, and the skiing was good. We guesstimated that since we were last here on Monday, over 6” had fallen. Finally, Chair 6 opened and we hoped on, eager with anticipation. The first real run of the day was great. Patrol hadn't opened Sentinel Bowl yet, so we skied our way down the ridge and back in to Olympic. After a couple more runs, it was fairly tracked out, so we went over to Chair 10 and harvested some more pow. There were barely any people at the resort and we were getting numerous untracked runs.

After a quick lunch break, we took a couple of runs down Eagle bowl off of Chair 10 and towards the end of the day, we went back to Chair 6 and did the traverse out to Palisades Bowl. They were barely any tracks in Palisades and the the snow was coming down hard. There was enough new snow where were not hitting the hard pack from Monday and we finished up the day with 2 runs in Palisades. Shortly after 4pm, we called it a day and went back to the car after buying some hot cocoa to keep us awake for the ride home.

This was the day we had been waiting for. Fresh powder and no crowds. On the ride back, we discussed our game plan – if it snowed in Lake Tahoe that night we would stay close to “home” and ski either Alpine or Squaw. If the snow didn't come, we were heading back to Kirkwood to once again harvest the pow...