Adventures in Tahoe

This last weekend, we went up to Lake Tahoe again with a group of friends. I hadn’t realised that it was Martin Luther King weekend, i.e. schools and some lucky people (not us!) had a bank holiday today. That meant that it was an extremely busy weekend for going skiing. This became apparent 30 minutes or so into our 200 mile journey, when we hit seriously bad traffic.

We finally arrived at South Lake Tahoe at around 12:30 am. Our friend, Dave, had reserved the rooms over a website called Travelocity. Because it was a holiday weekend, he’d had trouble finding a place for us all, and ended up booking at a hip-hop themed motel, which had very loud “music” (good grief, I sound old!) blasting out while the exceedingly young staff sloped around in oversized baseball caps. Dave had received a confirmation and they’d charged him for the rooms, but the motel people informed us that they’d never confirmed the booking themselves and couldn’t honour it because they had no space (other than a very expensive room which only slept two people – but hey, it did have a bar and DJ decks, as Mr Hip-hop informed us). We decided to take our chances, and headed off into the (very cold) night to find another motel. Everywhere looked closed, but a nice Croatian chap responded to our buzzing of the night bell at the first place we tried, and luckily they did have room for us, albeit only for the one night.

The alarm went off next morning rather too early and we all headed off skiing. Jon and I had to rent our equipment first. This turned out to be a major hassle because of the sheer number of people, and it took nearly two hours of queuing to get the stuff, leaving us vowing to invest in our own. The lifts were busy, but we had a good ski once we finally got up the mountain: it was beautifully sunny and the views were as spectacular as ever. We also found a couple of quiet runs on the Nevada side, which we enjoyed very much.

That evening we went out for dinner – which fortunately was at walking distance from our new motel. I only had one glass of wine, fearing that a mixture of alcohol and altitude had been the cause of my upset stomach on the previous visit. We headed back quite early, ready to take on the next day’s skiing.

On Sunday the winds were pretty high, which meant that the Sky Express lift (which goes up to an altitude of over 10,000 feet) was closed. This in turn meant that almost the whole of the Nevada ski area was inaccessible (you have to ski down to it from Sky). As a result, the lifts on the California side were absurdly crowded. It was a case of standing in line for some twenty minutes or more to get on a lift and ski down in around five minutes, then repeat the whole thing again. However, we persevered and still managed to get some good runs in before partaking in a nice lunch at a restaurant looking straight down at the lake. While we were having lunch, a storm drifted in and it began to snow. At least that meant that the lifts were quieter afterwards, but unfortunately it also led to very poor visibility. We decided to call it a day just before 4 o’clock and skied down to the bottom.

The snow was now falling in thick flakes. It took an age to get out of the car-park and down the road. When we reached a corner, we realised the cause of the delay: a pile-up of three cars that had skidded into each other at the side of the road. We were in Dave’s car, an all-wheel-drive Audi. He took the corner confidently, but hit sheet ice, so we too skidded into the pile-up. Just as we were half-out of the car assessing the damage, there was another clunk as someone slid into the back of us. About an hour later, after observing plenty more carnage (a stand-off between a snow plough and an ambulance, a stuck vehicle being towed and several people falling dramatically on the ice), a sixth car joined the back of the pile-up. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the damage to Dave’s car was just to the bumpers. The hilarious thing was that all the while I’d been expecting us to have to be towed, when some 90 minutes or so after the accident happened, the car in front just drove off and we were all able to follow, which begs the question as to why on earth he didn’t do that earlier!

It was very slow drive back from Tahoe, as snow chain inspections were in force. Dave’s car was OK, but we saw several people struggling to put chains on their two-wheel drives at the side of the road. In the end, it took some seven hours to get back.

However, in spite of all the drama, I actually had a great time. I got in some good skiing and there was some great camaraderie. I’m paying the price now, though – exhausted!