Northstar-at-Tahoe
Sunday 16 January 2000

Weather

Conditions

Overall

The weekend turned out to be quite an adventure. I took a new member of Open Group staff, Ian Lloyd, with me for his first taste of skiing. With the threat of snow, we headed up towards Lake Tahoe early Friday afternoon. Traffic was dreadful and by the time we got to Sacramento we had been driving for more than 5 hours. At least we escaped chain controls.

During the night it rained, turning to snow at about 6am. When we got up, there was a couple of inches of snow on the road.

• We headed towards Alpine Meadows only to find that route 89 was closed because a truck had gone off the road
• So, we headed towards Northstar, only to hear that there was chain control on Brockway Summit
• After breakfast in Carmelian Bay, we drove back through heavy snow towards Homewood. Just South of Tahoe City, the snow turned to rain and conditions at Homewood were unskiable.
• Finally, we headed back towards Northstar, with chains on our car

We got to Northstar at about 10am, far too late for the pay parking. There was a long queue for ski rental, so it was almost 11am when we started up the gondola.

It was raining at village level; sleet at mid mountain and heavy wet snow at the summit. I left Ian to his own devices to take a lesson and headed for the summit using Lookout Chair because of the enormous queue for the high speed quads. With fresh heavy snow, Back Door was really hard work.

After a couple of runs, I tried the snow in the trees between Burn Out and Rail Splitter. This proved to be a painful mistake. What looked to be a virgin powder field had enormous rocks just beneath the surface. I hit one and tipped forward hitting my knee on another rock. It was several weeks before my knee stopped hurting. The snow was very wet and by the time I got going again, I was wet through and getting cold. 

A cup of coffee warmed me up a little and returning to the front side, I enjoyed the best runs on the day on Powder Bowl and Crosscut from Rendezvous chair.

Meanwhile, Ian had a successful beginner lesson and decided to follow-up with another. After a break for lunch, I tried to restart by my knee had stiffened up and didn't want to play any more. 

This was probably the wettest day's skiing since the first day in Les Deux Alpes in 1991!

Runs

Last updated: 19/02/00