Here’s the day in a nutshell. The sun was shining early, providing good visibility and the “sense” of a bluebird day. But only trace amounts of snow fell Saturday night. Wind shifted a little bit of snow around but essentially, conditions this morning were not very different from conditions Saturday afternoon. Patches of good snow on piste, A few areas where fresh snow had been blown or scraped off revealing firm conditions underneath. Several tempting off piste wind drift stashes on the upper mountain where you might get a couple of soft turns, but with the risk of running aground in these low snow conditions.
By mid-morning the new system started rolling in. Gold Coast, East Broadway, and the Funitel were all providing upper mountain access yesterday and today but winds have prevented the resort from opening Shirley Lake Express.
After 12:00 or so the storm arrived and everything was socked in and snowing, which is awesome! I have to say I was oddly displeased with the blue skies earlier this morning.
The reason the wind played havoc on Shirley today is because it was blowing over the ridge into Shirley Bowl directly in line with the offloading chairs, which can mess with the chair spacing on a detachable lift. This however is great news for the Shirley Bowls. While much of the upper mountain resembles a frozen wind stripped tundra, plenty of snow has been blowing over the ridge and loading the Shirley Bowls. As long as the wind is down tomorrow, bowls 1 and 5 should open up with some great low angle pow. No ski acting required.
There has been a fair amount of “photo optimization” going on over the last couple of days to show off the return of winter to Tahoe. I don’t blame em. The snow diet is meager and even just a couple of pow turns is as exciting as October laps in the Mt. Rose sidecountry. But the truth is we need quite a lot more snow to really get back in the swing of winter. Much of the mountain still resembles the Eurasian Steppes. Speaking of which, patrol is also working to open Siberia as soon as possible. Sibo will probably be the next lift spinning after Shirley Lake.
We’re looking at the possibility of a couple feet of snow above 7000 in the next 36 hrs. That should at least get us out of the weeds in a few more areas on the mountain.
It was nuking for a minute this afternoon… Keep it coming!
