Palisades Tahoe

Last updated on January 19, 2022

My overly optimistic plan of arriving for the opening lift at Palisades went south. We leisurely rolled out after breakfast and made the 2 hour drive with no trouble, got our rentals and stored our luggage at the front desk. We were pleased all went off without a hitch as last week the area was inaccessible due to a huge snow storm that stranded people on the roads for many hours.

The snow here is more than I have ever seen with 6 foot high walls of snow lining the machine shoveled sidewalks and road ways. We have mostly skied on the East Coast where the biggest danger to you is the out of control, 20-year-old kid from NYC flying down the mountain. Here there is more to consider…Could we make the drive up or was the pass closed?…Did we need chains to get up?…Would we get stuck here due to impassable roads and miss our next flight?…Is it windy enough that one of our littles could get blown off the mountain?…Should we be concerned with the sounds of avalanche prevention dynamite going off around the area? On our first two days, the wind was so high that various lifts were opening and closing throughout the day based on where it was safe to run them. We also realized pretty quickly that East Coast trail ratings don’t apply here. A black diamond out here is really a black diamond.

It is very beautiful here. The scope and grandeur of the mountains is breathtaking. Two sides of our condo have mountain facing views which makes sunset amazing and opening the curtains in the morning very special. 

Trey very smartly got us a ski-on/ski-off condo so we happily went up the Resort Lift to ski and found it went straight to some blues and blacks. Griffin had an epic meltdown as he had “forgotten” how to ski entirely so the first run took about an hour with a combination of sliding down on his ski boots, sliding on his rear or actually skiing while crying “I don’t remember how to ski!” We had been feeling pretty good about our planning for this trip between visas, vaccines, packing, home schooling, covid tests, masks etc.. In hindsight, a day or two at our home favorite Blue Mountain in December would have been ideal to get his ski confidence back. Oh, well. I spent the following day with Griffy on the bunny slope and by the end he was doing the jumps on the side in the trees again and racing me to the bottom.

We have a lovely view of a very appealing, super-heated, large pool with 3 adjacent hot tubs. It is lit up with white lights and looks inviting! We marched down there in the wind and snow to swim and enjoy a soak. Marin, Sy and Trey swam some laps while Griffin soaked in the hot tub and I stood by watching and thinking it looked fun, but anticipating that the aftermath would be terrible. I let the time there pass me by and was the happiest in the end! Everyone else ran for the condo soaking wet with no time to put clothes or shoes on, as it was too cold. Bad idea was the conclusion, but on a warmer less windy day the kids want to go again!

Better weather for the rest of the week…we got Griff back on track and were able to ski together the last few days. We had a lovely warmer trip to the pool and hot tub and several late afternoons at the fire pit drinking hot drinks. Trey ended each day taking the big kids back to the resort on the blues with an occasional foray on to a black. Palisades Tahoe just recently changed their name in September 2021. They used to be called Squaw Valley. It was the host site for the 1960 Winter Olympics. They have an awesome app that can track your every move. All in all we skied 6 days, on 60 lifts, and 137 trails for a total of 51,583 vertical feet, 74 miles and 19 hours. Trey’s max speed was 45 mph.

Homeschooling:

Many people have been curious about our homeschooling plan. After getting advice from my friend Stacy, who has homeschooled her twins for years with great success, we were able to officially register as home schoolers starting Jan 1st, 2022. We also had great support from our school who discussed our plan, made suggestions and provided us with links to some helpful online apps like Epic, Sora, Dreambox, IXL, and Seesaw.

In addition to the world schooling that goes on daily when you are traveling, we have fallen into a daily school routine. We set up expectations for each kid and divided school into 4 main categories: Math, Reading, Writing, Spanish. This means something different for each kid and they know what they need to accomplish each day. So far, first thing in the morning seems ideal to get everything completed. You could imagine that the degree of supervision varies from none (Marin) to a little “checking in” (Sy), to sitting at the table to keep things on track (Griffin). Many of these apps make learning feel like games so it is not difficult to motivate them to complete the activities. Interestingly, Griffin prefers to read from a paper book over an iPad if given the choice so we are lugging a bunch of small paperbacks for him.

We also have a friendly family competition going on with Duolingo Spanish. The goal is to be somewhat functional by the time we get to South America in the end of March. Marin is in the lead with a 166 day learning streak.

Next stop: Davis to pick up a few things we left with the Mayhews and a trip to the UPS store to mail our ski gear back home. We need to pick up some pencils and a sharpener and onto San Francisco to the airport hotel for our flights to Kona on the Big Island in Hawaii on Sunday morning.