The Palisades Tahoe ski resort has a lot going for it: an idyllic location 7 miles from Lake Tahoe’s western shore, a peak elevation of 9,050 feet with 2,850 feet of vertical, and 6,000 skiable acres spread over two bases and served by 43 lifts. The California destination, which is marking 75 years, has cool, swagger and a wealth of demanding terrain. The resort hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics when it was still called Squaw Valley, and is among the Alpine Ski World Cup’s few regular stops in the United States. Yet at times, it feels as if all people talk about is the weather.

Take my first visit to the resort this past February, which took place in a windy whiteout.

On the first day, I rode up the tram from the Palisades base area, then felt my way down the blue runs off the Siberia Express and Gold Coast Express lifts in a sea of white on white. Palisades Tahoe is known for its bowls, chutes and gullies, especially off the KT-22 chair, but I was not ready to venture there essentially blindfolded.

While I was trying to find my bearings on Emigrant Face — a bowllike blue area off one of the highest lifts — a snowboarder zoomed by so fast that he didn’t see a ridge in the fog and took off like an eagle. An eagle that couldn’t fly, because he crashed.

Still, against all odds, I was having fun.

And so was Joan Collins, 60, from Madison, Wisconsin, whom I met during lunch at the Alpine base area the next day, when it was marginally less foggy but snowing hard. “For me the hardest part was not seeing the horizon, snow blowing in your face so you can’t really see where you’re going,” Collins said. “But we’ve been hollering all the way down on some of those runs — it’s like a big, powdery playground.”

As snow fell relentlessly, parts of the mountain were closed for avalanche mitigation. Several lifts were on hold because of winds that, I later learned, could reach 100 mph on the ridgetops. By noon it was obvious I really should have refreshed my jacket’s waterproofing.

My visit coincided with a big dump of snow after an alarmingly dry December and an average January. Not long after, in early March, a major storm dropped 8 feet on the resort. Which might sound amazing to powder hounds, except that the roads and lifts were closed.

Last year, true to form, good conditions allowed the resort to kick off its season five days early in November.

This yo-yo pattern comes from the resort’s location, 200 miles east of San Francisco. The local Sierra Nevada is first in line when moisture-laden storms travel eastward from the Pacific. And with nothing to slow it down, the unimpeded jet stream can hit Palisades Tahoe with hurricane force. The resort’s relatively low altitude, with a main base at 6,200 feet, helps create conditions that can vary drastically within a single day as well as between the upper and the lower mountains. At least the Palisades base has great easygoing terrain at the top, so beginners and intermediates can enjoy good snow quality instead of being stuck on scraped-out or wet runs at lower elevations.

There are other big upsides. When it’s not snowing, “we have really nice weather for a Western ski destination,” said Bryan Allegretto, the Northern Sierra specialist at the forecasting and conditions site OpenSnow. “When the sun’s out, it’s warm relative to a lot of mountain areas, so you get this beautiful, amazing weather for skiing that isn’t super cold.” (The average daytime high in January is 36 degrees.)

And in a good year, the season can extend well into the spring. “I ski as long as the resort is open — there’s been several years when I skied on July 4,” Stephanie Yu, 49, of Sacramento said in a phone interview after my trip.

A long history and a new name

Palisades Tahoe is among the most popular winter destinations in America, even if, technically speaking, it was born only a few years ago.

The mountain opened in 1949 as Squaw Valley and acquired its neighbor, Alpine Meadows, 7 miles away, in 2011. The new entity went by the cumbersome umbrella Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows until it was rebranded as Palisades Tahoe in 2021 to avoid a term that is offensive to many Native Americans.

The next year a gondola connecting the base areas at the two mountains was installed; there is also a free on-demand shuttle between the two.

Yet part of the Palisades Tahoe draw is how distinct its two components have remained. Palisades is bigger and sleeker, with more and better dining options, an active après scene, activities like disco tubing (which adds party lights and pumping music to regular tubing), and big-time concerts — this year, Diplo was among the performers.

The plentiful lifts include a tram and a hybrid known as the Funitel (a mash-up of the French words “funiculaire” and “téléphérique”), and there is an abundance of signature terrain, which, in addition to the KT-22-served runs, includes open steeps off the Headwall and Siberia lifts (unfortunately, among the first to close because of wind) and a bumps minefield named after local Olympic freestyle skier Jonny Moseley.

The Palisades side is so spread out that you can easily move on to another section of the mountain if one gets closed off or too crowded. After struggling with low visibility on my first day, I eventually found better conditions in the Shirley bowl on the back side. Then, to flee both the crowds and the increasingly strong wind, I headed to the Snow King area, tucked away to the far left of the mountain as you look uphill. From the Red Dog and Far East Express lifts, I made laps on runs that meandered through trees.

More complicated was securing a parking spot for my rental car. Palisades Tahoe is part of the Ikon multiresort pass and in recent years has experienced an increase in crowds and traffic. Palisades visitors who don’t stay on-mountain tend to favor Truckee, a town 11 miles away, but Route 89 from there to Palisades can easily turn into a long ribbon of vehicles. (I stayed 7 miles from the resort in the other direction, in tiny Tahoe City, which offers an easier commute.)

To deal with the crunch, Palisades has started requiring parking reservations Saturdays, Sundays and some holidays. You can book a spot for $30 or try your luck when free reservations open on the Tuesday before the weekend, with sign-up windows at noon and 7 p.m. On my first attempt, I hadn’t even completed setting up my account before all the spaces were gone in 12 minutes. A few hours later, it took only six minutes for them to fill up, but I was ready and got a free spot.

Unassuming Alpine

Compared with the Palisades side’s extroverted, big personality, Alpine still feels like an unassuming locals’ hill, with a trail map that looks underfed. Don’t underestimate it: “A lot of the best terrain is hike-to only, well hidden to where your average user won’t find it,” said Mark Fisher, who, with another local, runs a site called Unofficial Alpine that reports on the mountain.

For a newcomer, though, the layout felt instinctive and easy, and I was able to have fun with the handful of lifts open on my visit, like the punishingly slow two-seater Yellow Chair — where a wild gust made me slide backward when I disembarked.

I also got schooled on an innocent-looking blue run off Roundhouse Express, when my skis hopelessly sank into what looked like mounds of fluffy powder but felt like quicksand. Welcome to the notorious heavy snow known as Sierra cement.

Yet something was happening. Trees offered shelter when I needed it, the runs were half empty, there were no lines anywhere, and the snow kept falling. I wasn’t even cold.

Fine, count me in: There is something to be said about California skiing.