Ski Weekend Lake Tahoe - February 2008

We try to go skiing every year.  It seems we alternate between Tahoe and Colorado.  This year, we chose Lake Tahoe over Presidents' Day weekend.

We stayed at friend's townhome and skied at Kirkwood and Heavenly.  The slopes were pretty busy due to the holiday weekend, but we managed to find some runs that were less crowded at each place.


The weather was a little warm, in the 40s and 50s.  We flew into Reno on a  Fri morning and met up with Mike's brother and a friend.  We drove to South Lake Tahoe after enjoying lunch at In and Out Burger.

We were staying at a friend's townhome and he was driving in from San Francisco.  We had a few hours to kill before we could get into the house.

We decided to go rent our ski gear and wander around Heavenly Village.  We did a little shopping and ended up having a few drinks at Fire and Ice out by the fire pit.

Kirkwood Ski Resort

We started our ski adventure on Saturday by driving to Kirkwood from S. Lake Tahoe.  It was a bit of a drive and we got there by 11-1130am.  We found parking and carried our gear to The Lodge to find lockers for our lunches.  We were able to get a locker and put our food and some clothes inside and left for the lifts.

We started on lift 5.  After getting off the lift, we took the run to the right, Zachary.  Ok, this was the first time down for most of us since last year's season.  It was a horrible start.  We all fell down several times before finally getting to the bottom.  We went back up lift 5, but decided to go to the left, Monte Wolfe.  Much better, we all managed to only fall down once or twice on that one.  We made a couple more runs down Monte Wolfe before deciding to go back to the lockers for lunch.

After lunch, we moved to lift 1.  We skied down to lift 2 and took that up to the top.  These runs were a little less crowded, but seemed to be a little icy in spots.  We repeated the lift 2 runs a few times before heading down and calling it a day.  I ended up having one of my most embarrassing moments skiing during this time.  I was riding on a lift with Mike and when we got to get off, something happened where it was going too fast or something and we had to actually jump off the lift.  I ended not getting off in time and had to ride all the way back down.  It was not fun having everyone look and laugh at me...oh well!  I think the lifts closed at 430.

This resort also had tubing and ice skating.

Heavenly Ski Resort

We arrived at Heavenly, California Lodge, between 10 and 11am.  We bought lift tickets, $81 each, and rented a locker for our lunches and things.

We headed off to the lifts.  The lines were so long for most of the lifts.  We took about 3 Express lifts to get to the top and started to make our way down some slopes.  We took Skyline Trail and saw some amazing views of the lake and the valley on the other side.  We then hit the Big Dipper, which was a little steep in the beginning and found Galaxy run.  Once we got to Galaxy, there weren't a ton of people and the grade was perfect for all of us.  Once we got to the bottom of Galaxy, the lift to go back up had no line!  The lift is pretty long to go back up, but it took us right to the Galaxy run again.  We did that one a few times since we all liked it and it wasn't crowded.

After a few runs, we decided to take a break and agreed to head to East Peak Lodge after riding the Galaxy lift back up.  We decided trying to go all the way back to where we started would take too long.  Somehow one of our friends got separated and ended up at Stagecoach Lodge.  We all ate lunch and decided on a meeting place to get back together.

We took a few lifts and met up with our friend at the Top of the Gondola.  We made a few more runs before deciding to call it a day.  We were all exhausted from skiing all day yesterday as well.

We decided to take the Round-a-bout down.  It was a pretty narrow trail and was really crowded.  We all went down at our own speeds, but had a hard time with all the people stopping in the middle of the trail.  The narrow trail also made it harder to control our speed.

It was a great day of skiing, but exhausting.