Journeys›Photograph

Early August up at Squaw Valley

·Truckee, California·#summer#lake tahoe#sierra nevada#gondola#squaw valley
A lake with silhouetted mountains under a light sky at the horizon, with several wooden docks in the foreground.

Early August up at Squaw Valley. The base area still wears the Olympic rings from the 1960 Winter Games, and the big lift-status board by the ticket window lists every run even though it's the middle of summer — Red Dog, KT-22, Cornice II, all of it waiting for snow.

We rode the aerial tram up from Base Camp, about a mile and a half of cable from 6,200 feet to High Camp at 8,200. The village and the parking lots shrank fast under the car, and then it was all granite — rounded boulders, wind-twisted pines growing straight out of the rock, a dead snag or two. Looking back down the valley from the top, the ridges stacked up in haze with Lake Tahoe a pale flat shape behind them.

On the way back down the cables ran out ahead of us to a single tower planted on a rocky knob, and past that, nothing but the valley floor.

Olympic rings on a stone building near a large sign for Squaw Valley Ski Resort with ski lifts and mountains.The Olympic rings are above a stone building with a ski lift, a mountain background, and a Squaw Valley ski resort sign.Aerial view from a cable car showing a resort town with many buildings, a parking lot, and forested mountains in the background.A mountainous landscape with smooth foreground rocks, a tree-covered slope, and a deep valley with dense forests.Hazy mountain landscape with dense forests, a winding road, and distinctive large rounded rocks in the foreground.Rounded boulders and trees in the foreground, with distant hazy mountains covered in dense pine forests and a winding road.A cable car system with a prominent tower on a rocky peak overlooks a vast valley and distant mountains.A hazy mountain landscape with a cable car tower and cables stretching over rocky terrain and dense forests.

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