Deep powder day in Tahoe

You already know that my greencard got approved. As a celebration, I decided to head out to Tahoe for a half day on the slopes.

The idea? Be at Sugar Bowl by noon, get a half day pass, leave by around 4pm and get home around 9pm.

It was going to be a good snow day. That much was obvious even on the road. I had not even passed the 5000 foot elevation marker when I began to see snow on the trees and on the ground. When I got to the ski resort, the road to the parking lot was so icy that three cars lost control and skidded - me and the two cars in front of me.

It would have been pretty funny if I hadn't been one of the skidding vehicles. The first car right in front had to hit the brakes because it was following a snowplough and the snowplough had apparently either slowed down or stopped. He tried to decrease speed, but all of us were on a downhill incline, so the car just wouldn't stop! In desperation, he swerved right. The second car directly behind the first also suffered the same fate and had to swerve left. Me, I had a snowplough in front of me, a car to my left and a car to my right, and I couldn't get a grip on the road either.

So I decided to swerve REALLY sharply, run headlong into the snow embankment, and hope that it killed my speed enough to prevent me from sliding headlong into the cars in front. So I turned, and my SUV hit the snow embankment. The tail of the SUV gracefully glided around the head of the SUV and I soon found myself staring at the headlights of the car behind me.

It was not at all scary in any way cos I was driving really slowly (5+ mph). It was just really amusing because even at a slow speed, there wasn't enough friction between the road and the tires to keep the SUV from spinning. I'd hate to think what would have happened if I had been going at maybe 10 miles per hour!

Eventually, I made it to the parking lot in one piece on time, just a little before noon. It was snowing rather heavily now and the wind was whipping the snow almost horizontally. I was a little apprehensive, a little cold, and very excited to hit the slopes.

Once I got on the slopes, I quickly realized that the powder was pretty darn deep! By deep, I mean if you stepped into the snow, you'd sink in up to your waist. I had a really frustrating first run. I fell down midway downhill, and just could not get up. My snowboard was packed under 3+ feet of snow. I'm not an experienced powder rider, so I just couldn't seem to keep my snowboard above the snow. At the end of the first run (which took me more than an hour to complete), it was snowing a lot more heavily, and visibility had degraded to the point where I couldn't reliably see 20 feet from me with my goggles on. It was time to pack up and go (AFTER ONE LOUSY RUN!)

Once I got back onto 80 West, I found myself sitting in a virtual parking lot. A big rig, an SUV, and a car had collided and the entire Donner pass was shut down while CHP worked to clear the road. I "parked" for well over an hour, then had to suffer through agonizingly slow traffic and icy roads all the way down the mountain. All in all, the return journey took 7 hours, including a quick dinner stop.

I finally got home dead tired at 10.15pm.