In 1969, I was walking along the base of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley with a couple of climbing buddies when we ran into Galen Rowell. I was new to the sport and not up on my Yosemite climbing history, and thus had never heard...
If trails could talk, the Marlette Flume Trail would fill volumes. As one of the most historic, popular and scenic trails in the world, the Marlette Flume Trail represents far more than just a tourist attraction. This 4.5-mile-long ribbon of decomposed granite along a benched cliff...
Living within my 67-year-old body is a 20-year-old playing Frisbee with friends on a drought-stretched beach in North Lake Tahoe. It’s early spring 1977 and there’s zero snow at lake level. Between throws and catches, a faraway flash from across the lake, high above the...
Only while skiing Sun Valley Resort’s Bald Mountain was Jeanne Smith Gaida able to feel the spirit of a man who had cast a long shadow on her life....
The story of how Wayne Poulsen developed Olympic Valley in company with—and then without—Alex Cushing is well documented. There is no need to repeat it here. What is far less known—even among ski historians—is the embryonic influence of Martin Arrouge, the man responsible for introducing...
Steve McKinney was one of the best all-around athletes in Tahoe history. Given the long line of exceptional athletes who have called this region home—dating back to the skiing pioneers of the mid-nineteenth century—that is saying a lot. ...
Tahoe has played a pivotal role in the world of winter sports several times in recent history: the 1960 Winter Olympic Games and, in the 1980s, the creation of the snowboard halfpipe and the birth of the “extreme skiing” phenomenon. My intersection with extreme skiing was...
Lake Tahoe and Truckee tend to attract free spirits. Few have been freer than Richard “Dick” Buek....
Many an athlete has represented the Lake Tahoe region over the years on the grandest winter sports stage of all: the Olympic Winter Games. After the most recent iteration in Beijing, JC Schoonmaker can add his name to that lengthy list. But while a significant...
The ability to listen to music whenever and wherever you want, at least by 2021 standards, is relatively unremarkable. However, this wasn’t always the case. Before smartphones became home to vast libraries of music, there were mp3 players, some more memorable than others. Microsoft’s Zune....