25 Sep Decades-Old Mountain Mystery Put to Rest
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....
25 Sep Martin Arrouge: The Sheepherder Who Unlocked World-Class Ski Terrain
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...
26 Apr Steve McKinney: Transcending the Continuum of Excellence
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. ...
30 Nov An Extreme Journey
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...
25 Apr Dick Buek: Wild by Land, Air and Ski
Lake Tahoe and Truckee tend to attract free spirits. Few have been freer than Richard “Dick” Buek....
25 Apr Family Ties
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...
06 Dec Grooving on the Go
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....
25 Jun Reinventing the Wheel
It wasn't altruism that drove Max Jones to clear brush from the antiquated trail that once served as a flume from Lake Tahoe to Virginia City. “It was purely selfish,” Jones says. “It was all just so I had a ride to do.”...
19 Feb Frog Lake’s Forgotten Past
For the better part of the past century, Frog Lake sat in relative obscurity in the rugged high country near Truckee—a serene alpine oasis visited by few with the exception of the landowners and their close friends....
01 Dec A Legacy Set in Stone
In the winter of 1973, Jake Smith left his job-with-a-future and drove his flat-land car through a storm to Tahoe. Alpine Meadows was hiring for the spring. Lodge maintenance was a toehold in the mountains. He found a small cabin to rent on the West...