Overview
A very productive season. This is my 3rd season skiing, but the first “real” one where I really got to ski a lot.
The first season I skied 4 days, 2nd 5 days, but for this season I skied + snowboard 19 days. I hope I can get around 20 days each season from now on.
This season I progressed from blue to easy double blacks for skiing (16 days), and zero to easy blacks for snowboarding (3 days).
My favorite terrain to ski is moguls for now. You’ll have to be very agile to ski through them. Planning a few moguls ahead also helps. Now I find groomed runs to be super boring, especially when there are no views. In ungroomed trails you actually need to work your way down, which is fun.
Snowboarding is much easier to learn than I thought. If skiing is easy to pick up but hard to master, than snowboarding is easy to both pick up and master, if we define “pick up” as being able to survive on a green run and “master” as being able to do S carves on a groomed blue/black run, even though reaching that is far from mastering to be real. But I don’t think snowboarding is easy to go from surviving on greens to doing moguls and cliffs so I don’t think the original “hard to learn easy to master” quote is talking about that.
Another thing that makes snowboarding easy is how easy is it to just cheese. When you end up on a slope outside of your comfort zone, instead of fighting your way out, you can just side slip the whole way down. You cheated not only the slope, but yourself. You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. But you can still claim that you just snowboarded a double black, like the IGN journalist who “beat” Isshin by slowing him down to 0.5x.
On skis you can also do a side slip, but that’s already a lot less straightforward and takes a lot more skill than the snowboard version, as you’re moving forward/backward instead of leftward/rightward. Skis are also longer so it’s not as easy to cheese you way out of obstacles with side slipping.
I still find skiing to be more fun and enjoyable. It’s more fun because I still have far more controls on skis and can zig zag through moguls with ease, while I’m still struggling with that on a snowboard. Snowboarding boots are much more comfy but the overhead of each lap is HUGE … you need to unstrap before a lift and restrap after it, while for skiing you just speed through the dumb snowboarders trying to unstrap before the lift queue, get on the lift, and immediately start carving again after hopping down the lift, lap after lap.
It also hurts a lot more when losing balance and falling down on a snowboard. I’ve experienced a dozens of yard sales when skiing but never ever felt any pain, but with snowboard you’re mostly likely falling down on your butt and it hurts.
I’ll probably do 2 days skiing and then 1 day snowboarding from now on. It complicates my plan of buying my own skis tho, because I’m NOT buying both skis and snowboard. I’d be fucking broke. Maybe I’ll just buy ski boots.
November - Heavenly & Kirkwood
4-day skiing trip at Heavenly & Kirkwood at the Thanksgiving holiday, Nov 28 - Dec 1.
I originally planned to do 2 week-long trips in Lake Tahoe and Whistler in December with a week apart, using all the PTOs left in Amex, but after jumping to TikTok, I only got 3 PTO days to use for the rest of the year, so I had to make full use of the public holidays, which were Thanksgiving and Christmas.
With 2 public Christmas days, I can get a 9-day trip by adding in 3 PTOs, so I decided to do a 4-day Thanksgiving Lake Tahoe trip (0 PTO) + a 9-day Christmas Whistler trip (3 PTO) instead.
I spent 2 days in Heavenly, 1 day in Kirkwood, and then the final day in Heavenly.
Day 1-2 Heavenly
In the first 2 days at Heavenly, there are not a lot of lines opened, so I just cruised Mombo and Ridge Run (all blues) lap after lap. Both days were bluebird days and the view from Ridge Run was amazing, racing toward the grand blue Lake Tahoe.
Ridge Run was a bit challenging to me because it was only late Nov and there were a lot of icy parts.
I spent the second morning in the Nevada part, but there was only 1 trail, Stagecoach, open, and the view of the Nevada plain was pretty boring compared to Lake Tahoe, so I went back in the afternoon.
The line appeared to be bad in Heavenly, but after I figured out there’s a single lane (never seen it in Europe probably because there’s minimal lift line there), the line became a non-issue. Single lanes were super fast, effectively bypassing the line,
Day 3 Kirkwood
At the 3rd day I decided to go to Kirkwood, because it literally opened that day.
The view from south Lake Tahoe to Kirkwood was absolutely stunning. One of the nicest drives I have.
The opening was actually pretty epic at 30/101 trails open, while Heavenly was at 15/200 the day before. A guy on a lift told me that it was the best snow in recent years.
After a few blue runs in lift 5 I got bored because they were just some very straightforward slopes with zero views. So I work up the courage with a sip of whiskey and went on lift 6 to the black diamonds.
Before that I observed the runs from the top of lift 6 multiple times, and they looked like some moguls with people zigzagging through them slowly, so I thought I’d probably be fine too if I just skied slowly.
It was soooo fucking scary viewing from the top. The first drop was especially steep. After a few minutes of observing I finally hopped down and they were actually not exactly moguls but just ungroomed.
Fell a lot in the beginning, but after 5+ laps I could finally ski those black runs semi comfortably. The ungroomed black runs there were actually pretty forgiving because they were all very wide and covered with powder snow. You were never in danger, and when you fell, you could easily stand back up and got on your skis. If you don’t feel like skiing down you can even comfortably walk down.
Day 4 Heavenly
Went back to Heavenly in the last day because it opened a lot more trails. There were only 3 blacks opening unfortunately, unlike the abundance of them in Kirkwood. I still struggled with thick powder runs.
Review
All 4 days are bluebird days, some more bluebird than the others. I thought it’s just the norm of California until later in the season when it’s like 50/50. I guess skiing in early season has its pros other than the crowd.
I think Kirkwood is great for those who just wants for ski, but for those who wants to enjoy their ski vacation, Heavenly is better. Kirkwood just doesn’t offer a lot of views, and the blue runs are very straightforward while the black runs are stressful. I actually like Ridge Line & Mumbo combo in Heavenly a lot. Great view, and the trails have some twists.
December - Whistler
8-days skiing trip in the Christmas holiday, Dec 20 - Dec 29. Not a very rational trip finance wise, because the hotel was fricking expensive. I didn’t schedule it at Christmas initially but the week prior because I want nothing to do with the Christmas crowd, but then I switched company at late Oct and only had 3 PTOs accumulated at year end, so I could only utilize the Christmas holiday.
I focused heavily on training my black runs this trip.
See my Whistler Review for all the black runs I skied.
January - Northstar
My first time in Northstar. Couldn’t enjoy it much because I was teaching other people how to ski, but I like this resort.
The upload is very poorly designed, having only 1 gondola and 1 lift to the main hub, causing a huge bottleneck. But the main hub is really cool, kind of like the bottom of a half bowl where you have access to so many lifts on one place.
I spent most of my time in the magic carpet to teach my partner, and I think it’s a pretty decent learning area. It’s a mild wild straight slope with a conveyor belt with manageable traffic. It’s divided into 2 sections horizontally, the upper part a bit steeper and the lower part very mild.
The mountain is super easy to navigate. The map is just like a leaf. You have access to many lifts in the base to get up. And if you take Comstock to get to the very top, you can follow the ridge line blue run East Ridge to get to so many straight runs on the fall line. You can also turn right and ski down in the back of the mountain, which is full of straight blacks on the fall line.
Whatever run you take, if you ski in the front side, you almost always end up in the common base. And if you ski in the back mountain, you still end up in a common base. Incredibly well designed.
In a brief moment of freedom I speeded all my way to Arrow Express and then Comstock Express, traversed a long blue run East Ridge, enjoying some view of Lake Tahoe, and then entered Samwill Glade.
Samwill Glade is a gladed run with trees far and few in between, but it was still super hard for me because of the super old and hard snow.
Another difficulty is the navigation. From the map it seems like it’s totally possible to miss the connection to the blue runs leading back to the main area, and if that happens you can only ski straight down to the village. But the woods isn’t flat but with a big hill at the left, and I’m right of the hill, so I was constantly finding ways to get back to the left.
January - Heavenly & Kirkwood
I skied my first double black ever in Heavenly. There are 3 double blacks under the upload from California Lodge, Gunbarral, The Face, and East Bowl, tho they’re kind of the same run.
They’re marked as double blacks but if in Whistler they’d just be some easy blacks. They’re also very safe because it’s such a wide and straight slope without rocks.
I skied a lot of the gladed and tree runs on the Nevada side this time, including North Bowl, Bohemian Grove, and Stagecoach Woods, and they made me love Heavenly a lot more. Heavenly felt rather straightforward the last time I visited, but this time it felt like a true complicated mountain. The variety is very high, with lots of tree skiing, lots of groomers, and some moguls. For experts there’s Mott & Killebrew canyon but I don’t think I’m quite there yet.
I spent 2 days in Heavenly and 1 day in Kirkwood. I was pretty disappointed with Kirkwood this time because it was snowing hard, the mountaing just felt kind of basic and boring, and many lifts are still the old non-detachable models.
February - Boreal & Northstar (snowboarding)
Feb 28 - Mar 1
Finally picked up snowboarding! I had been wanting to learn snowboarding for some time, but the opportunist cost was just too high. Lesson fee in big resorts is astounding (meanwhile the instructors are still being paid minimum wage …), and snowboarding would also mean losing progress on my skiing as I was still progressing fast.
A friend of mine wanted to get into skiing/snowboarding, and I felt like that would be a great chance to finally learn it, so we went to Boreal to take snowboarding lessons.
Day 1-2 Boreal
Boreal is a pretty small resort, which was kind of why I chose to go there. The smaller the the resort the better the price. And Boreal is also the only resort in Tahoe that offers night skiing. The lesson package even includes lift ticket & rentals, making the overall value just unbeatable. For beginners you’re only going to be skiing the few green runs anyway so going to big resorts wouldn’t make any sense (or so I thought).
The lesson package included a 90-min lesson. I thought it was too short, but it turned out to be a perfect length.
The quote “snowboarding is hard to learn, easy to master” is such a bs. It being easy to master is absolutely true, from carving S on a green to a groomed black to an ungroomed black is almost effortless, but hard to learn is wrong. If we define “learned” as being able to carve S on a green, than achieving it on a snowboard is so much easier than on a ski.
The correct version is “skiing is hard to learn and hard to master, snowboarding is easy to learn and easy to master”. My familiarity with the snow might help, but after the 90-min lesson and a few laps of green runs, I could already ski blue runs semi comfortably, on the first day. Whereas when I learned skiing, after 3 hours of lesson, I was still struggling linking turns.
You only have one blade to control, and you turn by leaning forward or backward, meanwhile in skiing you need to control 2 blades, shifting weight from left to right and right to left to be able to do parallel turns, which is much more error prone than snowboarding. So snowboarding is much easier to learn.
It’s also easier to master because the natural position of snowboarding is side heel, a very safe position, while that of skiing is facing downward with your skis cutting the slope, which is very dangerous.
The 2nd day I also took the 90-min lesson in the morning, and then I could pretty much ski the whole tiny resort, even the black runs, tho the black run really is just a blue run in big resorts.
Day 3 Northstar
I was a bit bored at the end of the 2nd day, so I drove to Northstar the 3rd day, and was having so much fun at the backside of the mountain doing groomed black runs and even tried a bit of moguls.
The groomed black runs at the backside are not really black according to my definition. A groomed track below 28 degrees (they’re around 23-26 degrees) should never be a black.
It’s mostly effortless to snowboard on those tracks, tho they’re suuuper long. Some of the the longest single tracks (not counting multiple concat together) I’ve ever seen. Vertical drop is 1800 ft. And all the backside tracks are supported by 2 long lifts, no intermediate ones, so there’s minimal overhead.
I discovered the technique of rotating your body against the direction you want to turn yesterday, much like how you do fast brake on skis. The instructor didn’t mention at all. In fact, when I questioned him about it he still said you need to lead your snowboard by rotating your body to the target direction first, which is complete bs.
This technique is especially useful in ungroomed blacks as it allows you to turn swiftly.