March 25, 2007: Tahoe and Heavenly.

It's been a while (like...more than a year!) since I've been in California, and even longer since I've been in Northern California, so I flew there for the weekend (writing this on the plane back home). The program: (1) hang out with my friend Andrey who moved from LA to Mountain View a few months ago and (2) ski Tahoe

There is not much to write on the web about (1), except I now remember that when I was living in California, I had no problem claiming out loud that Vegas is the Easternmost point of the United States where you can still get really good food at a restaurant that doesn't require a reservation. I now see what I meant :-)

As far as (2), I've been in South Lake Tahoe before, but not in the winter. With the number of Tahoe resort pictures in the Ski Magazine, I just couldn't miss a chance to check it out. So, we spent a day skiing Heavenly.

Heavenly spent enough money on advertising in the past couple years in order for me to know a lot about its strong points: highest elevation (of the top, not of the base) among Tahoe resorts, plenty of casinos/nightlife on the Nevada side and beautiful views of the lake. With the exception of casinos and nightlife, which we didn't have time or inclination to experience, things looked as advertised. Terrain-wise, I was less impressed: first, if you don't ski bumps and trees, you'd do more poling than skiing on this mountain, second, if all you ski is bumps and trees, I'm not sure they have enough challenging bumps and trees for you. Interestingly, though, for me personally this would be close to an ideal terrain right now and probably well into the next season: I really want bumps and trees, but I'd like my bumps and trees gentle and forgiving. So, it's somewhere between possible and likely that I'll be back there next year for a full-blown week of skiing.

Here, I should probably put up a disclaimer to the effect of:

• the conditions were spring-like, so parts of the mountain were not accessible, and
• I didn't ski even all of the open parts of the mountain.

Pictures

Not much new to take pictures of in Silicon Valley, so all the pictures come from Heavenly. It was a nice, relaxing and sunny day. I had to take off my goggles and mittens, not to mention my jacket and helmet. Some people were skiing in shorts and tank-tops. I got sunburned.

This is how it looks in [late] winter:

And this is a view to the Nevada side from the same spot:

Andrey said this was a good spot to take a picture from:

This was taken from the same spot as the first two pictures. I just couldn't ski away from it, I guess. Or maybe I thought I would have nothing better to do than to glue them into a panorama.

...and one more:

For those whose idea of Nevada is Vegas and who wonder where Nevada might be getting its name from:

A typical view from the Sierra to the East (the Nevada's capital — Carson City — is basically in that valley):

And that's me playing silly before putting my skis on after a post-lunch beer: