The Mountain Run, a top to bottom, three and one-half mile intermediate run is priority. Palisades Tahoe’s professional ski patrol opens up the mountain piece by piece. Squaw’s a great playground where the steeps and the drops are all good clean fun,” says JT Holmes, a member of Palisades Tahoe’s Freeride Team. The Patrol is so good that they take a lot of guesswork out of trouble spots. “What I love about Palisades Tahoe that it is radical as it gets, but within relative safety. Simply speaking, powder snow, especially with modern-day equipment, makes ordinary skiers and snowboarders into gods. Carving over powder snow changes your relationship with mountains forever it changes your picture of what is possible on boards. It is loose, ice-like flakes that form a frothy lip of complex, crystallized and suspended water. We define it as a freeing of the heart's soul."īecause of a single cosmic quirk, the tilting of the earth on its axis, we are blessed with powder snow. "Powder skiing at Squaw raises the vibe, it's a feeling beyond belief. “We'll line up on top of the West Face, maybe seven or eight of us, and start reeling off into fighter pilot formation," says Larry Blue, a long time local known as one of the ‘West Face Boys.’ He gets in 120 days a season at Squaw. And the better it gets the more you simply cease to exist, until finally there is only the mountain and the snow and a soul and spirit. It’s as if nature lets you in come inside via some secret seam as you slip through wind drift, between padded trees, over rocks and drops, and through a mix of air and snow and timber that is all a part of you. On a great powder day at Palisades Tahoe, you fall almost perfectly in sync with the snow and the world around. Early morning, untracked lines welcomed people in Haiku simplicity from within the timber of Red Dog Ridge, Olympic Lady, and all the way across the ridgeline to Skunk Rock and the secrecy of pine stashes in The Enchanted Forest. Riding KT-22 you watch enthusiasts arc turns down Ladies’GS, The Nose, and into the Fingers with smiles as fixed and large as if they were on acid. Slopes looked like football fields of sparkling diamonds. Overnight Palisades Tahoe had received a foot to two feet of dreamy dry snow, the type that blows off the windshield and floats in the air like Michael Jordan.Įven with clear skies and rocketing sunlight, new-fallen snow stays windswept and clean. All your attention is focused on sustaining the pulse, sustaining the rhythm, the motion, and flow until the waltz down carpeted slopes become all a blur. Clumps explode off skis down wild shots and sweat-induced plunges. Plummeting down Palisades Tahoe’s KT-22, you carve back and forth through lightly tufted snow that curls mid-calf. The day smells clean and sharp snow dusts your face and massages the senses with sensual fingers.
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