Conditions Report
Report from Tuesday, February 8th, 2022
It’s all too easy to look at the forecast in Tahoe and feel a bit… disappointed. After a historically snowy start to the season in December, Tahoe has been bone-dry ever since with no end in sight. Those of us who have been skiing and riding Palisades Tahoe this week know, however, the lack of snowfall doesn’t tell the entire story.
We arrived at Palisades Tahoe late yesterday morning to warm temps and bluebird skies and made our way straight to the Funitel. The ride to the upper mountain offered views of increasingly exposed granite on Broken Arrow, but also some very alluring spring corn. This is an area of the mountain I’m typically only interested in following a recent storm, but we decided it looked too good to pass up – we’d have to get over there before heading out for the day.
We loaded Gold Coast for our first run, to see that the Palisade’s Park Crew had been busy finally building up the Gold Coast terrain park (I was told later the build has been done for about a week, guess I need to get over to Gold Coast more). The park has some of Palisade’s larger features, with a two-pack of medium-large jumps, both beautifully shaped. We opted for a couple of warm-up runs through Belmont, which was packed with smaller jumps, rails, and jibs.
Just beyond the Belmont park was the beginning of the Riviera Boardercross course, which was immensely fun with our party of 7 blasting through banked turns and rollers, all neck and neck. The course brings you to upper Mountain Run, where we found a couple of slushy side hits before loading Siberia Express.
Siberia had some of the best runs of the day with soft, but still fast corduroy from top to bottom. After a couple of laps of Siberia, we made the trek to Broken Arrow where the snow had turned to fantastic spring corn covered with soft bumps, as well as a rock to gap over here and there. We rode out to Mountain Run for our last turns of the day before returning to the parking lot for some apres over a live DJ set by our buddy, Matt.
Say what you will about Tahoe’s recent lack of snowfall, but things are still pretty darn fun out there!
