I was able to join Jon at Northstar and Bill and Kat at Heavenly for three days of skiing mid-week last week – and we had lots of sun and snow to play in.

Click through for the full gallery and a short video montage:

Three weeks into February and Lake Tahoe ski resorts have already received record snowfall for the month: Squaw Valley got over 21 feet this month so far and nearly 43 feet for the season, and Homewood even more at 23 feet for the month.

Crazy!  As in awesome fun! Well, except when the roads are closed due to nasty, accident-prone weather conditions – we spent one Saturday night trying to get back to the house in Tahoe Vista from Homewood.  First the lake road was closed due to numerous accidents and when we finally tried to take the long way around via Truckee (and through some crazy whiteout conditions across the meadow below Northstar), they ended up closing Brockway Summit.  After taking a break in Truckee for dinner and going back around through Tahoe City, we finally made it back to the house by 10 pm – maybe only barely before the unplowed snow on Regency Way got too deep for us to pass.

Three bountiful feet of snow overnight and many resorts had trouble opening for Sunday morning.  (Squaw and Alpine didn’t and Homewood was overwhelmed with people and only one chair lift they could run.)  That pattern of three feet of new snow repeated again and again over the month.

Short video montage at Homewood, Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows over February.

Click through for more pictures in the full gallery.

I went up to Tahoe last week (Monday through Friday) to catch a series of storms.  Monday night delivered a couple of inches on top of the old frozen stuff.  That made for some very rough and bumpy rides off of the groomed runs on Tuesday.  However, then we got a couple of feet Tuesday night but Wednesday was windy and gusting enough to keep the upper mountain from opening at Squaw or Alpine and eventually even closed the mid-mountain lift by noon at Alpine.  It was super wet and heavy snow too and way too tiring after the previous day so I bailed mid-day.  Resi, Troy and Aiden came up Wednesday afternoon and we got another couple of feet overnight.  Thursday proved to be fantastic and Troy and I spent all day making fresh tracks at Homewood until they started closing all the lifts on us.  Sheesh!  They stayed for another day but I had to head home to prep for the weekend.

Click through for pictures and video.

Darlene and I joined Resi, Troy and Aiden at Homewood this past weekend to play in the much needed new snow.  Click through for the gallery:

Finally got some snow to ski in Tahoe this past week.  Chased the storm up with Troy on Thursday night.  We had eighteen inches of powder to play with at Homewood, which was nice, but there wasn’t much of a base (like 25″), so still tons of obstacles to watch out for everywhere.  Creeks and rocks and trees and those sneaky, ski- and board-eating shrubberies!  As a result, lots of terrain wasn’t really accessible and you had to be pretty careful where you went, but there was still plenty of room for fun.

Here’s some pictures and a little video – though I really should’ve recorded some of the obstacle-dodging craziness and the digging of ourselves out of heavy, sun-saturated powder traps!

I joined Resi, Troy and Aiden for a ski weekend in Tahoe (at Homewood) in early April and we lucked out with lots of fresh powder both days.  Click through for pictures and video.

Darlene and I spent the weekend with Resi and Aiden, and Greg, Erin and Merritt as their kids made their first visits to Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley – on the road to their future Olympic Winter Games!  We also met up with Colin, Richard and Jennifer at Squaw.