Basecamp for Lake Tahoe
Palisades Tahoe is the beating heart of Lake Tahoe adventure. Plan your trip with us today.
As temperatures warm and snowmelt intensifies, our grooming teams are hard at work maintaining our existing snowpack with the goal of getting it to last as long as possible. This time of year, we tend to get a lot of questions about *how* grooming works. Here, we’ve compiled the most frequently asked questions to give you more insight into this exciting, challenging operational time in the season:
Snow Reporting is a fun job. It’s cool to be “in the know” of mountain operations and what to expect, but what’s most important to us is getting the snow/weather data correct and delivered promptly to you and the rest of our guests. We are constantly tracking weather models and reading predictions from NOAA, OpenSnow, and local forecasters to have an idea of what the day will look like before arriving at 5:30am.
In the final days of February 2023, 146 inches of snow fell on the slopes of Palisades Tahoe. It was our biggest storm of the season to date. It was also timed exactly with our biggest event of the season, the Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup, a stop on the 2023 Audi FIS Ski World Cup tour. The Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup was set to be back on the legendary Red Dog racecourse at Palisades after a 6-year hiatus. As our teams watched the weather forecast, we had no way to guarantee that we’d be able to pull off hosting the international race. You see, while we were excited for the epic powder days to come following the storm, ski racing requires a very specific, firm surface — a surface that is in stark contrast to fresh powder.
As we look ahead to this coming winter, our Operations teams are gearing up to start the season again. We’re checking in with each team about what they worked on this summer, and what is new for this coming season. This week, we’re featuring our Grooming departments at both Palisades and Alpine.
Have you ever wondered how we maintain our ski runs as the snow starts to melt? There is a TON of work that goes on behind-the-scenes to move and shape existing snow into the mountain you see each morning. This is no simple task, and it requires a decent amount of experience and expertise from our seasoned snowcat operators, but there are tools to help make it easier. We’re going to take a look at SnowSat, the technology that PistenBully snowcats come equipped with.
Read an interview with Sidney Ossenfort, a Groomer in the Alpine Grooming department at Palisades Tahoe, as part of our International Women’s Month Spotlight.
Last weekend, against all odds, the Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup (a stop on the Audi FIS Ski World Cup tour) took place in Olympic Valley. It was a nail-biter as record-breaking snow pummeled the region. Like magic, there was a 36-hour break in extreme winter weather in which the race was able to occur. The break in the weather wasn’t the only thing that made this event possible, though. The real story here is the incredible work of our operations teams, who were on the hill around-the-clock slipping and clearing the racecourse until the final moments before the Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup kicked off. Let’s look back at their heroic work, as well as the weekend’s events.
By request of our readers, we’ve put together a primer on grooming in our current conditions. The grooming team completes their work at night, so guests don’t get to see the difficult, nuanced work that they perform.
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