Every year I go on a week long trip to a skiing destination with a group of around eight friends. We cycle through different locations, and this year we chose Palisades Tahoe, mainly because of the hope that the El Niño cycle wouldn’t kill the snowpack, and because someone in our group had already purchased an Ikon Pass.
Now you may have already noticed that I just said “week” and the title references four days. Yep, this trip is a weird one. For the first time we ended up cutting the trip short in order to avoid snow, which sounds very unnatural to say as a skier. But, as I describe below, when you begin seeing messaging like “Expect dangerous to impossible mountain travel conditions“, you start to consider leaving the area.
Transportation & Lodging
Getting to Palisades Tahoe was fairly simple. We flew into Reno from Seattle, and rented a 15 person van to cart ourselves and our gear up to the mountain. It’s only about a 45 minute drive from Reno to Olympic Valley. We didn’t stay on mountain, but instead stayed at a pretty luxe VRBO house within the Everline Resort area.
This gave us access to the base of the Resort Chair, which would lead to the rest of the Palisades base area. It was somewhere between a 10-15 minute walk from the rented house to that chair, which is doable, but most days I took the Mountaineer transit service to get to and from the lifts.
The Mountaineer is an awesome Uber-like service that runs 10 person vans within the Olympic Valley and Alpine Meadows areas. You just put in your destination on the app, and a van with ski racks will pick you up. The insane part? It’s completely FREE. Yes, that’s right, free point-to-point transportation. It’s truly a public transportation dream, you don’t have to worry about parking or driving in garbage conditions, or making sure you order an Uber that’s big enough to probably fit your skis. Highly highly recommend downloading the app if you’re in the area.
Skiing at Palisades Tahoe
As a reminder, in case you missed last year’s Salt Lake City review, I consider myself to be an advanced skier – someone who feels very comfortable on blues, can tackle blacks in most snow conditions, and will probably survive double blacks in good conditions. I would say most of my companions on this trip are closer to the expert range than me, so as a group we focused on blacks more than anything else. Except I hate icy moguls and will choose most other terrain over that – so just keep that in mind as I discuss the mountain.
Day 1
Day 1 was a massive exploration day of the Palisades base. Most of the group had never been to this resort before, so we ended up tackling eight different chairs to get a good feel for the mountain. It was above freezing for most of the day, so anything in the sun began to get slushy and easy to ski as the day went on. We didn’t stray too far off piste on this day, as most runs were crusty if ungroomed.
What’s nice about Palisades is that the mountain is pretty tall, so you can get a very long run in if you want – probably my favorite of the whole day was making my way up the Siberia lift and then skiing all the way down to the base.
Day 2
Oof. That’s how I would describe Day 2. We went to the Palisades base to find not much open due to wind gusts of 55+ mph. We then took the 20 minute base-to-base shuttle to Alpine Meadows where we managed to take a few windy runs before literally every chair was on wind hold. We then took the shuttle back to Palisades where I did one run off of the Red Dog chair where it was so windy I had to stop and hold my hand in front of my face to prevent the icy gusts from attacking me. I then gave up and went home.
Day 3
Day 3 consisted primarily of the Headwalls lift and Wa She Shu on the Palisades side, then we took the Base-To-Base gondola to Alpine Meadows, which was mostly open, unlike the previous day. It was warm and sunny again, which made the backside of the mountain pretty nice and slushy.
Best chair of the day was Lakeview, where we did a photo shoot at the top where, believe it or not, there’s a view of Lake Tahoe.
I really liked Alpine. I understand that the Palisades base gets most of the hype, but the backside and upper part of Alpine is really fun. I would have preferred fresh snow, but the blue sky led to insanely beautiful views throughout the entire day.
Day 4
Day Four is a bit of a misnomer for me, as my legs desperately needed a break. I stayed home and did arts and crafts. I regret it a little bit, as we ended up leaving very early the next day, but sometimes you have to just listen to your body.
Evacuation
As I said above, we unfortunately had to cut our vacation short. When we first arrived, we looked at the forecast and thought that getting a late week powder storm sounded great. But as the week progressed, it became clear that this wasn’t a normal snow storm. This would be a true blizzard, complete with insane winds (100+ mph) and ridiculous snow accumulation (5-10 FEET). We debated as a group trying to stick it out, but considering how lighter winds had closed the upper mountain earlier in the week, we decided it wasn’t worth the risk of getting stuck, possibly without power.
And, now that I’m sitting in Seattle two days after our trip was supposed to end, we 100% made the correct decision. I-80 in California was closed for two days, right when we would have had to leave to catch our original flight. The resort was closed Fri – Sun, so we wouldn’t have had access to any of the powder anyway. And the wind and snow reports ended up being pretty much on point. So we dodged a bullet by leaving when we did.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, we used the following resources to help us monitor the storm and make a decision.
CalTrans QuickMap – Map highlighting things like road closures, chain controls, webcams showing conditions
Palisades Tahoe Operations Blog – Posts with current and expected conditions
Palisades Tahoe Instagram – Various posts, including this one that essentially said “don’t come here plz”
OpenSnow Palisades Tahoe – Daily snow reports
NWSReno / NWSSacramento – National Weather Service Twitter accounts from both sides of the Sierra
Palisades Tahoe – Overall
I like Palisades Tahoe, but it hasn’t been very kind to me weather-wise. The first trip I took here several years ago had lifts closed because of too much snow, then it rained for several days. This trip there was luckily no rain, but there was too much wind and we had to leave early because of too much snow.
That said, there’s a large variety of terrain to choose from here. Big bowls, steeps, nice groomed blues, so there’s something for any mood – as long as the whole mountain is open! I would definitely consider coming back, but I’ve been burned twice by interesting weather conditions, so I might not plan the trip too far out. I also haven’t been to any other Tahoe resorts, so I might prefer to see what else the area has to offer.
That said, I hope this trip report was useful to you! Let me know in the comments if there’s anything I missed, or anything you’d like to see in the next trip report!
