Saturday was a busy day on the mountain. The combination of new snow and warm weather drew folks from all over the place. It was so busy that I couldn't get over to the Nevada side because I didn't want to wait in the 100 person deep singles line on the Sky Express. Instead I stuck it out on the California side, moving from the Canyon Express to the Powderbowl Express and skiing where no one else seemed to want to ski, in the trees. The snow was still really great between the pines. There was 6-12 inches of fresh fluffy powder and no one around.

By lunch I had skied about 25 runs and was exhausted. I was planning on skiing a few more runs and then hitting the road, but at the last minute I decided to join the ski tour with a US Forest Service Ranger, a nice older guy named Mike. It was a small group, just Mike, me, and a snowboarder from Palo Alto named Beth.

We skied a few runs, stopping at places on the mountain where Mike would talk about the trees, the wildlife, the relationship between Heavenly and the U.S. Government (the whole resort in on public land). It was interesting, but mostly unmemorable. That is, until Mike told us about the dead of Lake Tahoe. Mike said about 6 people per year drown in the lake.

There are all sorts of accidents, he said. Sometimes people get drunk, fall off the boat, and get hypothermia before they can be rescued. The lake is cold. It's so cold, says Mike, that unlike in other places where drowned bodies decompose, release gas and rise back to the surface, the dead bodies of Tahoe just sink to the bottom and stay there, perfectly preserved in a lake with an average depth of 1000 feet.

Supposedly there are hundreds of bodies down there. Accident victims. Murdered Chinese railway workers. And certainly some wearing concrete galoshes. There are rumors around that Jacques Cousteau took a film crew down to the depths of the lake, but decided to destroy the footage saying something like, people are not ready to see what's down there, but it's just a rumor.

Days Skied This Season: 5