Heavenly Ski Trip

Lake Tahoe

This was the third year that Scott and I skied at Lake Tahoe and the second that we spent most of our time at Heavenly. Heavenly is such a large place (it's in two states: California and Nevada!) that you can return year after year and not get bored. Scott was my roommate in college and we also shared a house after college in Savannah and Tybee Island, Georgia. He and his family live in Fresno, so he picked me up at the Sacramento airport in his new Acura TL for the drive "up the hill" to Lake Tahoe. The TL was is quite a performance car and the drive up was a lot of fun.

To make the trip even better, we stayed at the Marriott resort next door to the Heavenly Gondola in South Lake Tahoe, California. It was only a five minute walk from our room to the gondola. So sweet! The Marriott location was so great that we parked the car on our arrival Wednesday and did not drive again until we left Sunday. Everything, including the major Nevada casinos, were within walking distance. The view from our room above shows the mountain the gondola goes up - the white clearing is where the gondola runs. The other pictures show the resort's pool and two large hot tubs.

As you can see, I took few pictures that were not ski pictures. We spent nearly every available minute on the slopes - from opening time to closing. Conditions were very good as they had received over eight feet of new snow a week before. So while we did spend some time at the casino's and we enjoyed great meals at local restaurants, we had little energy left after the long day's skiing. The casino's were interesting, but neither Scott nor I are much of a gambler and we also found that the excessive smoking inside was quite irritating after a while. Smoke free California was a much more enjoyable place to spend our time.

Pictures:

• I am wearing the gray/red ski clothes, Scott is wearing blue/black
• Several pictures of "The Face" and Gunbarrel - a double black diamond, straight down, tough as they get run
• The Big Dipper Bowl on the Nevada side (notice the "brown" valley vs. the green of the California side)
• A panoramic sequence of three showing Lake Tahoe to the west, then a north view and finally Nevada to the east
• On the last day, we drove to Sierra at Tahoe for one last day of skiing
• An interesting sequence of three pictures where I caught a novice trying to ski and falling as a friend tries to help

We left Sierra late on Sunday and Scott dropped me at the Sacramento airport for the red-eye flight back to Georgia as he headed back to Fresno. We were already talking about where to go next year - maybe Mammoth!