Tahoe Report: Mountains Are Open Early, If You Don't Need Much Snow

Even at Sugar Bowl, which looks like the best early season bet, the ground cover looked a tad thin by Friday afternoon. Photo via: Sugar Bowl

After last year's abysmal season in Tahoe, we're holding out for a more bountiful season this year. While we definitely won't see the best powder days until well after Christmas, several of the bigger resorts are already open for business right this second and will gladly take your hard earned money in exchange for a couple runs on the bunny lifts. For the adventurers, however, there are already some good backcountry spots to be found.

A couple October storms made the early season look pretty promising a couple weeks ago, and dumped enough snow to allow Squaw, Northstar and Heavenly to open earlier this week. Unfortunately, there's still not a ton of ground cover and none of the big mountains have anything deeper than a 20 - 25 inch base at this point. Which means you'll be shelling out $60-$70 at the ticket window for three or four open trails of packed man-made snow.

At Squaw, on the northwest side, it looks like this rain we're getting in the city isn't translating into snow on the mountain. With temperatures hitting the low forties this week, conditions look could be pretty thin and sloppy by Thanksgiving weekend.

South of the lake, where the storms tend to linger, Kirkwood is also open and got some new snow today. With only the mid-mountain lift #5 open though, you'll probably only get a couple blue runs in before starting the aprés-ski drinking at 2:30 p.m.

That said, if you're backcountry-inclined, we hear there are backcountry lines to be had at Kirkwood, Alpine Meadows and Sugar Bowl if you're willing to hike for them. Some of those lines at Sugar Bowl will get even more accessible when they open three chairs and 15 runs this weekend. So, if you desperately need to break out the skis and snowboards in mid-November, Sugar Bowl looks like your current best bet.

As for the rest of the season: well, the jury's still out on whether this is going to be one of those weak El Niño years which tends to mean less snow for the Sierra, but this early in the season any precipitation is good precipitation.

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