Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

The snow line wasn't too low when I started driving up, except for a bit of surprise slush when I was passing a truck. Thankfully my tesla stability control, did the right thing:

strangely, the road was quite clear higher up (localized snowfalls)

Carson Spur was still in very good shape

After a bit under 4H, including a 20mn recharging stop in Manteca, I arrived at Kirkwood just before 15:00:

Sadly, by then only solitude was open, I did 2 runs that weren't bad but on my 2nd run up, I got the very bad news that while Vail said they would stay open that same morning, a few hours later, while I drove up, changed their minds and closed off everything for the season due to COVID-19. Needless to say that I wasn't happy that they couldn't make that decision in the morning, and mislead everyone into coming:

those were 2 expensive runs

Now, life sucked, it was clear that I had to leave kirkwood as quickly as possible, as the weather was worsening, but my car was very discharged. I had to recharge it just enough to get out and hopefully make it to some charging source under the snow line.

I had to take the Omo Ranch Rd by Cook's Station to get the shortest path to the Placerville Supercharger, where I barely arrived with a 5% of battery left. Omo Ranch Rd, while open, is not a safe road with snow, and doesn't get plowed. The top was dicey and I had the tradeoff of getting down quickly to get out of the snow line, without driving off the road due to snow.
The tesla estimator has been very wrong, on the trip out, it told me I'd arrive with 14%, but I arrived with 5% while driving quite slow and taking an unsafe road (the safe road around would not have gotten me there with enough battery left):

estimator went from 14% to 9% to 5% by the time I arrived

thankfully it stabilized at 5%

on the plus side, the new superchargers are fast, I got back to 80% in 30mn

That's definitely been my worst snow trip ever, except for the fact that I avoided crashing my car on the way up after that slide, or running out of battery and having my car die on the side of the road in a snowstorm.

The next morning, looked good. It looked nice, but the powder was not bottomless. You could definitely feel the crud underneath, which was unfortunate. Later in the day, 2 extra inches helped, and wind blowing made some nicer pockets of snow:

I was able to keep snow from burrying my car by using the heater

the line at cornice was surprisingly short for a sunday

the wall looked bony for this time of the season

eagle bowl was very bony

past resort boundary on the backside, was nice as usual

anything wind exposed was definitely bony, though

After a day of reasonably good snowboarding (cold though), I stayed at the towers, where I found something last minute for a couple of nights:

Unfortunately, it was a waste to have stayed for a 2nd day (monday) as anything worthwhile was closed because of the heavy wind. Such is life, but on top of that, somehow heavenly managed to open sky express during that time.
While solitude was as slow as I remember it to be, the few runs I did were not great, even in the trees, some of the snow had iced up hard (or all the new snow had been blown off, leaving the heavy crust underneath)

So, after a few crappy runs on solitude, I just drove home: