fbpx

Freeway to Skiing

A couple of decades after the Olympics, the Lake Tahoe basin was full of ski resorts

By Warren Miller

This is about the unanticipated consequences of skiing in the 1950s. That was when Alex Cushing, who owned Squaw Valley, Calif., put in a bid to host the Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley in 1960.

At the time, Squaw Valley consisted of a handful of houses, three or four stores, a few ski lifts and a post office.

I think Cushing was as surprised as anyone when the international governing body of the Olympics awarded the 1960 winter games to Squaw Valley, which is located in the Lake Tahoe basin. To access it, you had to drive a lengthy, steep and winding two-lane road that switched back and forth up the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas to an elevation above 9,000 feet where annual snowfall averages between 30 and 40 feet. It is called Donner Summit.

When you got over the summit it was a very scary, white-knuckle descent of about 4,000 vertical feet to Truckee. All of the traffic from Northern California to anywhere east of Reno had to use this two-lane road. The 18-wheelers ground their way up the western slope of the Sierras at 6 or 7 mph. You had to just sit there in your car at the same slow speed because there was almost no place to pass them on either side of the summit.

Converting that narrow two-lane road into a four-lane freeway cost untold millions of dollars for the people in California, not to mention the federal government.

The unanticipated consequence of cutting the drive time over the summit by at least 75 percent opened up the entire Tahoe basin to the bigger populations centers of San Francisco and Sacramento to additional ski resorts and other commercial development as a result of the 1960 Winter Olympics.

When I worked at Squaw Valley as a ski instructor during the winter of 1949-50 you could buy the best vacant lot in Squaw Valley, with a fabulous view of Squaw Peak, and the prices were as high as $2,000 but most of them were only $1,000. That same property today is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, all because of Alex Cushing’s sales pitch to get the Winter Olympics California.

A couple of decades after the Olympics, the Lake Tahoe basin was full of ski resorts such as Alpine Meadows, Heavenly Valley, Kirkwood, Incline Village, Homewood and North Star. At the same time real estate values around the basin have risen dramatically and the narrow two-lane road that encircles Lake Tahoe is jammed with cars.

Thousands of people now own vacation homes and condos in the Tahoe basin unlike their grandparents who occupied two or three maybe even four small villages along the waterfront of the lake.

A lot of readers out there are very anti-growth in any mountain area. But remember, any person’s life is changed every time they spend any time on skis, so the more one can enjoy the mountains and share them, the better off humanity is.

Very little Forest Service land in America is devoted to ski areas. Talk to any of the 15,000 people who ride the chairlifts at Squaw Valley on a given Saturday and all 15,000 of them would like to see the ski resort boundaries expanded.

When I taught skiing at Squaw Valley in 1949-50 there were only four of us in the ski school and on a crowded day each one of us was lucky to have a pupil. Management boasted that they had one of only two double chairlifts in the world, but we did have two rope tows, one restaurant, one ski shop, and two bars that had accommodations for 42 people.

In the winter of 1962-63 when Vail opened, I was there filming, and on one of those days they sold only eight, I repeat, eight lift tickets. Today skiers and snowboarders on the hill at Vail on a midwinter Saturday or Sunday will total as many as 26,000.

Ponder those growth numbers and try and figure out the future of skiing and snowboarding in America.