December 27, 2004, Kirkwood

Kirkwood is a medium to large resort with interesting terrain and slow lifts about 45 minutes southwest of South Lake Tahoe. A trace amount of snow had fallen overnight and the day's forecast called for a few more inches of snow. We arrived a bit after 10 to moderate winds and light snow flurries. Conditions were classic "dust on crust" causing us to spend a good amount of time on the--I hate to say it--groomers which were packed soft snow with progressively increasing soft bumps. Intermittent sunbreaks emerged mid-day though the general pattern was that of snow flurries. As the day was beginning to end we took a run off leeward Thunder Saddle which was relatively quite good, 4-5"s of new on a smooth base. This area is quite interesting and deserved several more runs (remember this for your next road trip) though it was getting late in the day. We skied at a leisurely pace making several stops. Our total vertical was 15,770 vft, almost half of what we did yesterday though the skiing today was much better in terms of both terrain and snow quality.<br><br>Here's Ben in the run off Thunder Saddle:<br> <br><br>Crowds for the day were astoundingly light, we never waited in a line over a few minutes.<br><br>Jeff

Kirkwood is my personal fave tahoe area. Features some good in-area quasi BC such as hiking into various chutes and along ridge to Glove Rock; these typically just 10 minutes of booting sorta like hiking to Big Chief/Hut/Wenatchee at Stevens. The Sunrise chair also accesses a large bowl that is slow to track out after a big dump. Nothing as steep as Squaw and not as big as Heavenly but I like the lack of pretension combined with some pretty strong terrain. Downside is that only one chair (last time I went) was highspeed.