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I had been watching the weather forecast for a while, and drove to kirkwood just before the storm turned from rain to snow. I got there with my Tesla 90D in just 3h30, including an 18mn supercharger stop in Manteca. I ended up arriving with 10% battery left in record time, just as the rain was turning to snow:
Day #1 was nice and had a bit of sun to help see the nice powder. Almost everything opened that day, so lots of terrain with not too many people:
Day #2 didn't have sun for long, lots of good snows and self refilling tracks, but poor viz, high winds, and very cold:
everyone made a run to the Wall when cornice didn't open at 09:00 when it was supposed to
Day #3 was more difficult. Very cold too, snow storm most of the day, and kirkwood couldn't get stuff opened. They only opened 6 after a never ending 2H wait. The first tracks were nice, but open terrain was very limited.
2h wait to finally be allowed up a limited section of chair 6, that was disappointing
very hard snow, no more pictures
After only 2H of skiing, and talking to Jennifer about the show we had that evening, I decided to try and get home after one of the two roads out finally re-opened. By leaving at 13:30, that would have been plenty of time, but sadly while driving down carson pass, I made a judgement mistake which combined with heavy regenerative braking kicking in in the middle of a slippery downhill turn, caused me to understeer and drive into a snow bank. It took over 1h30 to get out
a nice Audi with 3 awesome guys who helped me shovel out, was unable to pull me out
Caltrans truck then slid into the audi and hit its front
snow plow slid off the road and got stuck, had to be towed out by caltrans scraper
finally the just arrived caltrans scraper had enough weight and torque to pull me out
The rest of the drive home was not fun, took me around 7.5h, includuing the 1.5h stuck in the snow bank. But that was nothing compared to the people driving up hwy 50 on a friday afternoon/night and who took hours and hours to get through the pass... |