America has some great skiing. One of the great regions, known for its fine powder snow, is Lake Tahoe. Having finished at 5:00 at Intel after three days with 10 hours’ sleep (losing access to equipment required to finish my PhD proved a pretty serious stimulant!), a few beery good-byes and a delayed aeroplane, I flew down to San Francisco.

From there, Chuck, Joyce, Hugh and I headed up to Squaw, which is one of the resorts just north of Lake Tahoe. Its a very beautiful place, sitting at about 6000 feet elevation. We’d organised to stay in-snow, which made such a massive difference to our enjoyment. It was expensive, but so worth it!! What a treat. :-).

We arrived down there at 2:30AM and about -17 degrees C! We checked in, slogged back  a little whiskey mixed with snow. A cool five hours’ sleep later, we hauled ourselves up and out to the ski hire store before hitting the slopes.

The snow was incredible. We were so lucky! Until a week prior, there had been a 4” base. Although, at 4”, I’m not sure that it should be called a base. For the past week it has absolutely dumped with snow. Then, a blue-bird day on the day we arrived. It doesn’t get much better. Without the really deep base underneath, there was quite a few rocks and trees sticking out, but the quality of the snow was just awesome. The biggest difference with Australia: its actually frozen! For some comparison, these guys get an average annual snowfall of 450”. That’s about 11m of snow! For comparison, Thredbo, in a pretty good year, will get 2.5m!

We had three amazing days’ skiing some of the great terrain that Squaw had to offer. Steerps and off-piste. Speed and adrenalin. Chuck and I were at about the same level when it comes to this stuff, and we hit the mountain hard, covering everything except the greens (I suspect that my quads will take a few days to recover!).

At night, we wandered back to our hotel and let the muscles relax in an outdoor spa surrounded by snow.

A little stress about the traffic, and the possibility of missing my flight (which I didn’t - I’m about 10km up in the air at the moment) didn’t dampen what really turned out to be an amazing few days. 

Some more photos are here.