We got a couple more storms in mid-May along with a nice cold snap to bring fresh powder to the slopes… yay! I was able to head up with the cats and hit Squaw the morning after each storm and even just happened to catch Granite Chief moments after it opened on Sunday:
Darlene and Marvin the Martian joined Resi, Troy and Aiden for the closing ski weekend at Homewood in Tahoe this past Easter weekend:
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Darlene’s niece, Joslyn, came out from Wisconsin for her spring break from school and I think we managed to fill her time here. We visited Shark Fin Cove, Pigeon Point Lighthouse, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and saw dolphins while flying the drone from the sea cliffs near Pescadero. We spent one morning to see the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park and a deserted Roaring Camp Railroads. We introduced her to the sea otters at Moss Landing and got in a guided walk at Año Nuevo to see the elephant seals (lots of weaned pups at this time of year) and she and Darlene stayed overnight at the Monterey Zoo and fed the elephants. Besides a couple of movie nights and several interesting board games, we also went up to Tahoe for three days so she could learn to ski – and she was careening down the mountain in no time!
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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.
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Record loads of snowfall (and occasional bouts of rain) mean lots of snow and ice on the Tahoe house – enough to build up ice dams all the way around the house and to eventually find water streaming down the walls in the dining room.
It looks like the problem spot is where one of the dormers meets the roof. Melting snow collects above the ice dam below the dormers, getting under the shingles until it gets high enough to stream down where the dormer wall joins the roof. There is some heat tape installed under these dormers to create drainage through the ice dams but it’s not installed quite correctly and I had mistakenly understood that it’s not necessary to run it at night when the temperatures get down to the teens outside. Apparently there’s enough heat getting through the roof to melt the snow even when it’s that cold outside. So I ended up with water streaming down the inside walls (past electrical outlets, to boot):
Not good. I’ve got a crew coming from Mills Roofing later this week to remove the snow and ice buildup. There will be more snow and then more melt and more ice dams though. The heat tape that is there now is only on a portion of the rear of the house and it wasn’t installed properly. It doesn’t hang over the edge of the eaves as it should (to let the water drain off the roof) and a good 8-10 feet of it is wasted strung up on the wall coming from the junction box. I was able to rearrange some of it but the roof here is too steep for me to deal with most of it.
I’ve been in contact with Brian from Summit Ice Melt Systems and will be looking into potentially installing their product to prevent these ice dams from forming at all. However, that still leaves the issue of all this melt water collecting and refreezing on the deck below – and potentially leading to further water intrusion into the house:
There’s also still the outstanding damage to the roof from prior seasons. There are several sections of shingles missing from the roof but I wasn’t able to find anyone that wasn’t already booked up to repair the damage over this past year. I did eventually sign up with Jeff’s Roofing Truckee but he also wasn’t able to get to it before the first snows arrived. He did manage to locate a supply of the Tamko shingles in South Lake Tahoe though. Hopefully, he’ll get to my roof later this year once the snow and cold weather is gone:
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.
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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.
We stayed up in Tahoe for a week and a half up to Christmas and got in a few half days of skiing at Homewood. Not a lot of snow yet, but skiable. Christmas Eve day was mostly rain, but it eventually turned cold enough to get some new snow for Christmas Day.
Troy, Resi and Aiden came up to the Tahoe house in mid-April to get a couple of last days in before Homewood and several other Tahoe resorts had their closing weekend. Definitely spring skiing conditions with slush (and mud) at the bottom and, up top, overnight frozen snow turning too soft mid-way through the day. But then, as they headed back to the Bay Area, the temperatures dropped and we got another snow storm Sunday night. Jon joined me at Alpine Meadows and then Squaw Valley to enjoy a last couple of powder days for the season!
Troy got a friendly visit from a bear overnight. He woke to find all four doors on his truck open and the evidence of a bit of ransacking from a dirty bear – so lucky it was unlocked or the bear might have broken in:
A cute little video of Pan falling asleep at the wheel:
March really came through for snow in Tahoe! We got one storm after another including some nice cold ones for some great light powder days. I also closed on the purchase of a house in Tahoe Vista and with the help of Darlene, Resi, Troy and Aiden, we were able to put it to great use right away! Troy’s brother Rick and his son Grayson also joined us for a few days at the… “Moose Haus”? “Moose Lodge”? Even Pan and Hera came up for a couple of weeks.
Click through for the full gallery of pictures from our five various days of skiing at Homewood over a couple of weeks in mid- to late-March:
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.
This is a handful of pictures and a couple of videos from this season of skiing (and an afternoon of sledding). Featuring… Darlene, Mike, Nanci, Rick, Maxine, Greg, Erin, Jon, Bill, Kat, Jim and myself.
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Here’s the pictures and video from our annual week of skiing and tabletop gaming, this year back in Tahoe again with Jon, Jim, Bill, Kat and Brin. We were unfortunately in a bit of a very warm and dry spell for California at the end of February. This kept us to the freshly groomed runs, rather firm in the morning, soft in the afternoon and refrozen over night, but we hit up Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows, Sugarbowl and Northstar over the course of the week.
