Tahoe’s Best Kept Secret: Bypass Traffic and Ski Straight to Alpine Meadows
Okay, it's not really a secret-secret but I only recently discovered it!
After the five-hour drive to Tahoe, the last thing I wanted was more traffic. Plus, there were zero parking passes left at Alpine and Palisades. On top of that, my friends had already spent enough on ski passes, and I didn’t want them shelling out more. That's when I overheard it—whispers of people skinning from our ski lease to Alpine Meadows (!).
In my exhausted-from-the-week packing haze the night before, I decided not to bring my backcountry gear (skins, shovel, beacon, probe). I told myself it wouldn’t fit in my car, even though it all fits into a shoebox and I drive an Outback. I was tired.
Desperate, I fired off a text to a friend with gear stashed at the lease. A true hero, she said yes. Her skins were too long for my skis, but I made it work with some voile straps.
Two hours after the initial idea, we were finally ready for the five-minute walk to the trailhead. The moment I clicked into my bindings and felt that first glide, I couldn’t stop grinning. Skinning is always fun, but this time, it felt sneaky—in the best way—skiing through a hidden shortcut to Alpine that no one else knew about. That said, I did miss the excuse to listen to Chappell Roan’s My Kink Is Karma on repeat in bumper to bumper traffic.
We dropped into the meadows and were instantly greeted by rays of sunshine and bounding pups living their best lives alongside cross-country skiers.
From there, we began the climb—a gentle, steady uphill with a few downhill creek crossings that put everyone’s lack of skiing-in-skins skills on full display (for obvious reasons, no photos were taken).
I loved the trees on the route. These ones weren’t quite giving The Lorax Truffula Tree energy, but with their mossy coats, they looked like they were wearing thneeds. What is a thneed? In Dr. Seuss’s words:
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats!
Once I made the connection, I couldn’t unsee it—though, out of our group of eight, I seemed to be the only one who did. At one point, a pup came bounding through the snow with a bell, and I was sure he was Max from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I may have just been looking for excuses to turn everything into a Dr. Seuss story—it was all so dreamy—but is anything really wrong with that?
After more uphill, we reached the top of the lovely Scott Peak.
The descent was pure joy—powder turns and so much whooping. One of those runs where I wanted a second lap, but alas there wasn’t time.
Two weeks later, I came back for round two. This time, we skied into the run Outer Limits at Alpine Meadows and eventually made it to Lakeview Chair (gpx). It took us three hours to reach the lift, our legs were toast halfway through the day, and we were running purely on the high of our secret discovery—but it was such a fun day!!!
Yes to thneeds as a literary device! Very evocative