It was partly cloudy when we arrived at the Alpine side of Palisades Tahoe this morning.
A bit of a southwest wind starting to pick up mid-day. The National Weather Service forecast discussion was mentioning winds of about 30 mph with gusts over 45 mph today. We checked the lift & grooming status on the Palisades Tahoe app – it was showing that Summit, Scott, and Alpine Bowl Chair are scheduled with anticipated weather impact. Fortunately, the wind didn’t affect Summit nor ABC, but Lakeview and Scott were put on wind hold today.
We hopped on Summit and the top greeted us with an amazing view of the lake! This view never gets old! Lenticular clouds were starting to gather, which is a sign that a storm is coming. Lenticular clouds are also simply gorgeous. The forecast is anticipating ~2 inches of fresh snow in the next 24 hours and up to 13 inches for the next two days. Winter is back!
After enjoying the views and taking a few pictures we ventured into Wolverine bowl. We were expecting flat light in the bowl, but surprisingly the sun broke through the clouds and lit the bowl up! This run never disappoints! The run held fresh corduroy – very smooth with good grip. After a couple of runs, the corduroy transformed into perfect corn. The Face looked icy so we skipped it this time.
After three laps off The Summit, we saw that the lift line was backing up so we decided to check on the backside instead. We jumped on Treeline Cirque and skied down to Sherwood Express. The bumps on the Sherwood face and the Sherwood run were still quite hard, so we went back to the front side.
We did a few runs off Roundhouse and skied back to Summit again. There were more people today than in previous days and the popular runs were getting busy. While skiing we noticed a couple of close calls, so wanted to remind everyone – always keep a distance from other people, at least 15 feet. One more tip – if you’re coming down to Summit, you may want to take Kangaroo ridge run, as it’s well-groomed and quite empty. This run goes skier’s left of the East Runout which often gets busy.
Tomorrow will likely be snowy and windy. The high is expected to be just 25 F, so dress warm. The wind speed at Alpine Summit was 60mph as of 3 pm today with gusts over 70 mph. It may affect the lift operations. Always check @PalisadesOps Twitter in the morning before heading to the mountain for the recent updates.
