Squaw Valley

Until now I did all my skiing in the US at Kirkwood, CA, which is a beautiful resort, but it was time for a little variety. Lid and I had planned a skiing weekend for quite a while now, and our goal was to check out some places in around the North shore of Lake Tahoe. Saturday we planned on skiing at Squaw Valley USA, location of the 1960 Winter Olympics, Sunday we intended to go to Alpine Meadows.

After driving up to Tahoe City on Friday night, where we arrived around 11PM, we had a hard time getting out of bed Saturday morning. Never the less we made it to Squaw by 9:30 and took the gondola up the mountain. From here we took the Gold Coast Express to a blue warm-up run, which was a first test for Linda's knee. It passed! To be sure we stayed on blues for a few more runs, mostly off of the Emigrant and Shirley Lake chairs. Soon after we moved to the blacks of Granite Chief though. We stayed mostly on the groomers, since the snow off the prepared areas was pretty chunky. It had been the warmest week of the winter, but during the night the snow had iced over. After a run down the moguls to Shirley Lake we made our way to the Headwall Express in order to ski the North Face. The conditions here were awesome, since the wind had dumped a lot of powder on the slope. Before our lunch break we managed also two runs of Sibiria Bowl... nice fast fun! For lunch we went all the way back to the bottom of the mountain to get some runs on KT-22 in afterwards. I usually try not to stop for luch, because I have a hard time finding my rythm afterwards, but keeping in mind that we wanted to ski the next day as well it seemed a good idea to take a break. The first run off of KT-22 however did not feel that great...as anticipated. On the second one I was back in my groove again and enjoyed a nice cruise down the mountain. We finished an amazing day of spring skiing with two runs on Red Dog.

Our Sunday plans were altered by the weather... Always a possibility in the mountains!
When we arrived at Alpine Meadows the visibility was really poor and the most interesting runs were closed due to storm conditions. Given that we already had a great day on the slopes we decided to save our tickets and come back in better conditions. Let's hope for one more storm this year! (Well perhaps two, since I also have a couple of tickets for Bear Valley :-))