Squaw Valley Record Snowfall

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:

A post shared by Squaw Valley | Alpine Meadows (@squawalpine) on Apr 8, 2017 at 4:07pm PDT

Meet your guide

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel has written for The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Travel + Leisure, Wallpaper and Afar, as well as The Cut, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and McSweeney’s. She once drove from London to Mongolia, via Siberia.