Welcome to California, Now Home to Eternal Ski Season

Squaw Valley got so much snow it may not close this summer

April 18, 2017 9:00 am

Show up at Squaw Valley — the ski resort just a few miles above Lake Tahoe — on a July afternoon and you may be walloped by heat. If anyone’s tackling the ski resort’s peaks, it’s most likely mountain bikers or hikers. 

That, though, might change this summer, following a season of head-spinning snow totals: Squaw got so much of the white stuff that its management now say the resort may be open through the summer months: “It’s been an incredible winter, an unprecedented winter — all the different words you can use preceded a lot of times by expletives. It’s just amazing,” Squaw CEO Andy Wirth told Truckee Tahoe Radio.

The resort had already projected a closure on July 4; Wirth said he hopes to keep open the Shirley lift, which serves a back-side, west-facing slope that gets more snow than its brethren. 

So how much snow did Squaw get, after all is said and totaled up? Seven hundred inches. It looks like this: 

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