Squaw Valley, USA, February 29th to March 7th, 2004

Jon, Marci, Helen and I spent a week in Squaw Valley, USA, the first week of March, 2004. It was a great trip. Squaw Valley is an excellent ski area with a wide variety of terrain and an excellent lift system. We also spent one day at Alpine Meadows, and half a day at Sugar Bowl.

This page is broken down into four sections: Squaw Valley, Helen's Broken Arrow Pictures, Alpine Meadows, and Sugar Bowl.

Here's a bit of video that we shot while we were there: SquawValleyMarch2004s.wmv

Squaw Valley, USA

Squaw Valley is in northwest Lake Tahoe, CA. 4,000 acres of terrain over six peaks with 2,850ft of vertical. They do something with their "trail map" that I've never seen before... they don't designate trails at all, they only mark the lifts and assign difficulty levels to lifts as a whole. The good thing about the system is it forces you to explore more than you normally might. The bad thing is it makes it difficult to plan for a party of mixed ability levels. After a few days, I found a reasonably sized copy of an aerial photographic map and used it for a trail map instead. It was far more helpful.

Another interesting thing about Squaw (and most of the other Lake Tahoe areas we've visited) is their surprising capacity to provide at least one groomed run from the top of every lift. They must have more winch cats that you can shake a stick at! This helps mitigate the problem caused by their odd trail map, but it also means that they stick groomers where I would have really rather seen an ungroomed face. (Siberia Bowl is a good example of this... I'd much rather see that as a nice, wide open ungroomed bowl instead of having a groomed run the width of I405 down the middle of it.)

All-in-all, we skied 5 1/2 days at Squaw. I'd highly recommend it as a place to spend a week. It's got enough good terrain spread over a wide enough area to keep you busy for that period of time.

Helen, tearing it up down Poulsen's Gully through the trees under the Red Dog chair.

 

We saw a group of ski patrol rescue dogs at the top of (how appropriate) the Red Dog chair. This one just got off the chair with his patroller.

 

Happy puppies.

 

These are really beautiful dogs. They're highly trained to find skiers buried in avalanches.

 

This little guy is still being trained. The patroller was trying to teach the dog to run behind him as he skis down the hill, and not beside him. If the dog runs beside the skier (which is what he naturally wants to do), then when the skier turns he runs over the dog. Later down the run, I saw the guy skiing with his legs spread wide, and the dog running along between his legs. Pretty cool.

 

This one was tired of being a model :)

 

We went down and saw the lake near Tahoe City. What I really remember is that it was cold!

Jon and Marci at Lake Tahoe, trying to look warm.

 

Riding up the KT-22 lift.

 

A view of the Palisades, at the top of Siberia bowl,  from the side. You have to hike to the top, and you can see people doing that to the right.

 

A look down Siberia Bowl, with the wide groomer down the middle.

 

A shot of the Palisades from the bottom.

 

Jon and Marci... at the top of something, I don't remember what!

 

Jon, finding out he should have been on a leash.

 

Idiots...

 

More idiots...

 

Helen and Marci on the tram at night. We're headed up to go ice skating at High Camp.

 

Another idiot...

 

Ice skating at 8,200ft, at night, in the open air. Okay, now that was cold! Unfortunately, all the motion shots are blurry!

 

Marci kicked ass ice skating. This shot doesn't really show it, but all the others were blurry.

 

Mike and Jon at the top of the Funitel. "Are you ready to have fun-i-tel?" Nevermind...

 

We rode up the funitel with these two chicks who were talking about various drops off the Palisades. They made me think I could do it... that's me in the yellow jacket starting my walk up.

 

Mike, at the top of National Chute on the Palisades. The wind was howling. I watched two skiers enter the chute a few minutes prior, so I had a plan... it was pretty damn steep though, so I had to psyche myself up for it.

 

In mid-turn. It was steep enough to require hop turns, and that's me mid-hop :)

 

Riding out of the steep part, enjoying the best snow in Siberia Bowl at this point.

 

Helen, chilling out at the top of Rockpile, in the Attic area on Granite Chief.

 

This is a shot of KT-22 from Broken Arrow. The long bump run down the center of this picture is called Jonny Moseley's Run, named for a famous mogul skier. Helen and I ended up on this run after a little bit of a misunderstanding... it's perhaps not worth going into here... At any rate, it was a great run. Helen did extremely well on it, making very respectable turns all the way down. This is awesome given her comment once we were in the top of it: "Holy shit, how the hell did we end up here?!!?!" Of course, she blames me... :)

 

Trees are my friends...

 

Helen's Broken Arrow Pictures

Helen spent a lot of time on Broken Arrow on the afternoon of the last day taking pictures. She was there for at least an hour, and she had a blast. She got tons of great pictures of the rocks, trees, and landscape in that area, and they're stunning. Below is a selection of pictures that I've made... but realize that I have no eye for pictures like this. These are just the ones that appealed to me. I'm sure some of the pictures Helen took this day will be appearing on Artgeek Studios very soon.

 

Alpine Meadows

We went to Alpine Meadows for one day. It's on the next ridge closer to the lake from Squaw, and it's essentially the same snow, weather, and type of terrain. It's a small ski area, with a slower lift system, and what seemed like a lot of flats. It was nice, though frankly I prefer Squaw.

One neat thing about Alpine Meadows that would make me go back for sure is that they have designated hikes to access controlled "back country" terrain above the ski area. The only way to access this terrain is by walking, making it much less traveled. I walked out to Estelle Bowl from the top of the Summit Six chair for my last run of the day. I walked for 40 min, and I saw one other person. It was an easy ridge walk with very little vertical gain. I dropped into Estelle Bowl, then cut over to Bernie's Bowl. I ended up at the parking lot, overlooking our car. Unfortunately, I was stuck on a 15ft wall of snow that dropped down to the gravel lot, so I had to walk back to the base area to get around to the car :) The snow in the bowls was great, though. Nice powder, and I got a lot of fresh tracks. Well worth a walk.

 

Helen and Mike at Alpine Meadows.

 

A view of the ridge line that I hiked at Alpine Meadows. I started at the peak that is cut off on the left of the image, and I hiked out the the least peak before the trees on the right.

 

Cool rock wall near the start of the hike.

 

I liked the rescue sled tied to the sign along the way.

 

Half way through, a view back where I've come. You can see a bit of a trail in the distance.

 

Looking towards where I'm going. I ended up dropping in on the ridge in the very center of the picture, just on this side of the trees.

 

A wooden ski patroller... these guys have too much time on their hands :)

 

Sugar Bowl

We went to Sugar Bowl for a half day on Saturday morning. Sugar Bowl, was, well... underwhelming. The terrain was really mellow, and it really wasn't that interesting. Given the weak terrain, crowd, and Disney-esque atmosphere, we decided we didn't like the area.

 

I ended up with two pictures that I liked from Sugar Bowl. Here they are:

Marci, looking for hope in the trail map.

 

Jon, relaxing at the top of the Disney Express.