This is one of the weirdest little ski mountains I’ve visited. The approach is foreboding. There was a great forest fire that nearly burned down the whole place. They used snowmaking equipment to save their infrastructure. Now, you approach on a windy road through a forest of burnt trees.

The terrain was lightly covered, not too much snowfall. There was a 48″ summit snowpack, but lots of places on and off piste had very light cover.

The terrain is pretty interesting. Since the forest fire, they’ve had to log and remove the dead burn trees away, yielding a desolate landscape of stumps and rocks. You ride through ghost-glades of trees that used to be there. There are real chutes and cliffs, some rideable, none I trusted given the strange conditions. The snow was heavy and wet, so I found I had to unstrap in lots of places to get around. At the base of some of the ghost-glades we found ourselves going over huge rollers that you also couldn’t trust, since a few were bottomed out into sticks and stones.

Once, we dodged through living trees to get into an interesting area and… it was just enormous boulders covered in snow – almost impassable.

This is one of the weirdest mountains I’ve been on. An ecological tragedy has yielded a unique experience – fun in a wasteland, more challenge than expected and in ways we aren’t used to. A real stretch. It was not the fun I might have been looking for, but it was exhilarating and provoking. Everyone we talked to that was local knew about the fire and was rooting for Sierra-at-Tahoe. They talked about how they bought tickets there or joined Ikon pass to make sure that Sierra-at-Tahoe didn’t go out of business, a little support to help it bounce back.

I’m rooting for it too.