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LAKE TAHOE — Even here in these world class mountains, where outdoor sports are the heart and soul of the local economy, there’s such a thing as too much snow.
February was a month for the history books, with resorts getting the extraordinary powder that skiers and snowboarders dream of: up to 2 feet of snow in one 24-hour period, with a few two-day totals surpassing 4.5 feet. In many places, it wasn’t just the whitest February on record – it was the whitest month, period.
But the snow is so deep that there’s no easy way to drive here — and, once you’re here, fierce winds and avalanches are limiting access to the best terrain. Many visitors are disappointed by delayed or closed lifts. For locals, daily life is a chore.
“Thanks, Mother Nature. But please — let’s take a day off,” said Bill Oudegeest of the Donner Summit Historical Society, whose Soda Springs home is surrounded by 16-foot drifts and his community’s only exit is a dangerously narrow one-lane wide road.
“Life has really come to a stop,” he said. “It’s just digging and blowing. Digging and blowing.”
That’s both the blessing and the curse of this unforgettable winter: blissful conditions but also major headaches, with nearly buried homes, unsafe driving, high avalanche danger, collapsed roofs and elevated risk of carbon monoxide poisoning due to clogged vents. And near-constant shoveling.
“It’s pretty epic,” said skier Alex Sebastian, who on Thursday left his Santa Rosa home at midnight, dodging flooded roads, as soon as he heard Interstate 80 had re-opened. After a few hours of sleep in his sturdy gray Jeep in Sugar Bowl’s parking lot, he was good to go.
“This is a flashback to the past, with a real ‘old school’ winter,” he said.
This week’s warming means the snow is a bit wet and heavy, with a few inches of lighter powder on top. More snow is returning for the weekend. The National Weather Service predicts total accumulations of 12 to 17 inches, with localized amounts up to 22 inches.
“It’s creamy but if you’ve got wide skis and go fast enough and free enough to ride up on it, you’re floating,” said Sebastian, a retired civil engineer and photographer who can pack up his two pairs of skis, helmet, sleeping bag, pillow, tire chains and dog Max at a moment’s notice.
“You surrender yourself to it,” he said.
Earlier this month, a snowboarder and “powderchaser” named Steve rushed from Salt Lake City to reach Squaw Valley before dawn, catching the first KT-22 chair up the sheer West Face terrain after a two-day, 56-inch dump. He contributes his experiences to the website Powderchasers, which provides a daily forecast for the deepest snow in North America, but asked that his last name not be used because he wants to keep his day job.
“It was euphoric. Waist deep. On every turn, a face shot of snow,” he recalled. “You’re pretty much blinded by the wave of the powder. It was a full ‘White Room’ experience.”
The most snow has fallen on the northwest corner of the Lake Tahoe region, with much lighter accumulations in the south. For instance, Squaw Valley and Sugar Bowl have gotten 557 and 502 inches, respectively, while Sierra-at-Tahoe and Heavenly Mountain have gotten 436 and 386 inches.
But on Friday, wind and avalanche risk meant lifts were closed all over the Sierra.
“If it’s too windy, we can’t operate lifts for safety reasons,” said Jon Slaughter, a spokesman at Sugar Bowl, which spent 15 days of February doing avalanche mitigation. “Wind combined with snow forms ice on the lifts so there’s a lot of handwork, chipping ice, just to get things restarted,” he said.
At Squaw Valley on Friday, where lift tickets cost $179 and are non-refundable, only 10 of 42 lifts were running; 21 of 230 trails were open. Sugar Bowl opened five of 11 lifts and 11 of 75 runs.
At Heavenly, with $154 lift tickets, the popular gondola stopped around lunchtime Friday due to high winds. The resort urged guests to start heading back to where they started the day.
“It is the biggest frustration of chasing powder,” said Powderchaser Steve. “You reach your favorite resort and almost nothing is open. I can’t even describe it. Your stomach sinks down.”
Longtime local Mark Fisher said “There is a disconnect between the marketing people and the people in charge of operations and safety. Marketing says how much snow is falling and how great it is — even though it is heavy and wet and windy and not much is open.”
“They will honestly say we got five feet of snow in the last three days. But that is an irrelevant situation when the surface is ice, because it got warm and froze,” said Andy Wertheim, an Alpine Meadows realtor who produces the Unofficial Alpine Meadows Ski Report. “Conditions change even in one day. It might be a sunny beautiful day, cold and with incredible light power. Then the weather changes and you get super high winds and maybe it warms up.”
Whenever a big new load of snow falls on existing snowpack, ice crystals bond — but when the load is faster than the bonding, avalanches happen, said Brandon Schwartz of the Sierra Avalanche Center, which partners the U.S. Forest Service in forecasting danger.
“This isn’t the wettest winter, and it’s not the greatest amount in a winter. But in one month, it was just one storm after another, adding more days of issues that you’re trying to manage,” he said.
On Wednesday, a Union Pacific “plow train” derailed and became stuck at Soda Springs while attempting to clear the tracks of snow. Service on Amtrak’s California Zephyr was suspended Tuesday, requiring passengers to transfer to charter buses, after an avalanche in the mountains west of Truckee.
Resorts still remember Squaw Valley’s aerial cable car tragedy of 1978, when southwest winds sent a cable slicing through a cable car, killing four people, injuring 31 and stunning the ski industry. In 1982, an avalanche at Alpine Meadows slid more than 700 vertical feet, killing seven people.
Even snow sliding off roofs can be dangerous. Last April, snow that had piled up on a Kirkwood condominium roof broke loose and buried a mother and son in an instant.
Snow is damaging homes all over the Sierra, say roofers.
“The load is so tremendous. Windows are shattering from stress. Snow melts and seeps into cracks, then freezes, ripping roofs apart,” said Tim Smith of Mountain Valley Roofing in Lake Tahoe. “There’s nothing we can do right now except tarp it. We call it ‘bagging for the summer’.”
“This is the worst conditions that I’ve seen in 30 to 40 years,” he said, with a surge of “ice dams,” caused when a ridge of ice forms at the edge of a roof and prevents melting snow from draining. “We’re running 24-7, getting 50 to 75 calls a day for snow removal. Roofs are collapsing, doors and windows don’t open.”
With major roads closed, traffic has been nightmarish, locals say.
“It can take three to four hours to get from Tahoe City to Truckee,” a 15-mile trip, said realtor Wertheim. “When ski areas’ parking lots fill up, people get turned away, so traffic backs up all over.”
Interstate 80 — one of two main routes to Tahoe — has been closed at least four times in the past month, according to Caltrans spokesperson Raquel Borrayo.
“When the wind whips up the snow, it’s nearly impossible to see. That’s really hazardous,” she said. “And do not listen to Waze for alternate routes. If you are taking county roads, you will get stuck.”
There’s another problem: Caltrans is running out of places to put the snow. On the uphill side of I-80, the shoulders are so high that blowers can’t shoot over it. Snow just falls back down, like an avalanche. So it’s blown across the freeway, instead – an approach that is dangerous for cars, necessitating closure of the Interstate route.
Tow truck drivers say that just one incident backs up traffic for miles, because roads are narrowed by snow. About half of their calls are from drivers who slid off the road, hit a tree or went down a hill and rolled over. The other half are from drivers with the wrong tires or whose chain gets wrapped around an axle, said Joe Kirsch, manager of Truckee’s Milne Tow Service.
When major routes close, drivers get stuck in their cars for hours, because side roads aren’t plowed.
“If you’re coming up, be prepared,” said Kirsch. “Fill your tank up. Have water, have food and know how to use your chains.”
HOW MUCH SNOW?
Season Totals Summary:
• Squaw Valley: 557”
• Sugar Bowl: 502”
• Northstar: 494”
• Kirkwood Mtn: 471”
• Alpine Meadows: 463”
• Sierra-at-Tahoe: 436”
• Bear Valley: 405”
• Heavenly Mtn: 386”
Source: Coop Cooper, Outside TV | Lake Tahoe Television
