Ski Tahoe.. sort of

After the conference ended my dad flew in and we drove to Kings Beach for 4 days of skiing at Lake Tahoe. Or least that was plan, the weather didn't really cooperate. For our first day at Squaw Valley there were effectively 2 lifts open with a couple trails each on about a 12 inch base. Fortunately the stuff that was open was pretty interesting, with lots of slaloming through small tree and rocks sticking up through the snow. I practiced jumping 3 to 5 ft. cliffs and learned that's its not smart to follow the Squaw Freestyle Team when they ski off into the trees. I ended up getting cliffed out and had to hike back uphill for a bit.

The second day was at Alpine Meadows, which is right next to Squaw, and we luckily had about 8 inches of new snow. That gave us one pretty nice powder run before it all got skiied out. The rest of that run didn't go all that great for me. I got one of my poles stuck in a tree and snapped it in half, and then also ended up stuck in a creek for about 5 minutes. The rest of day went better. Or, since that's not saying much, the rest of the day went well.

The third day was at Heavenly, and it reminded me of eastern skiing. Heavenly was much more restrictive in opening their terrain, so while there was enough cover on some trails for them to be open at Squaw, the ski patrol at Heavenly had pulled 130 tickets in one day off of people poaching closed trails. So the only trails open where groomers on man-made snow. Quite a few lifts were open, but each lift only had one trail open, and it was really crowded. And windy. And icy. The views were nice though, and there was one steep trail open, which was fun to ski. For me at least, it was decidedly not fun for the person I saw fall about 2000 feet down the slope because it was so icy he couldn't stop.

Fed up with the lack of open terrain and wanting to give our poor ripped-up skis a break, we went snowshoeing on the 4th day. I knew a place near Emerald Bay where I had been on the stretch, and it was very scenic and snowy, definitely a nice change of pace.

On the trip home we stopped in San Fran for a while to eat and Christmas shop in the Ghiradeli square/Fisherman's warf area, so I finally got to see the golden gate bridge.

Highlight of the trip home: Winning $20 in a slot machine at the Las Vegas airport.
Lowlight of the trip home: Not getting home until 3:30am! That sucked.