Sierra-at-Tahoe was once famous for its trees, tall giants that protected the ski area from the wind on powder days and provided a sense of calm in the middle of a storm. I remember it for its lush forest filled with tall mossy trees. But what I saw as I drove up to the ski area on a recent January morning took my breath away.
A moonscape of charred trees, granite and white snow has replaced that formerly green landscape. On the front side of the mountain, few trees remain after the destruction of the 2021 Caldor Fire, which burned over 221,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada and ran straight through the heart of this beloved Tahoe ski area. The Caldor Fire burned with such intensity that it incinerated the entire landscape, destroying anything in its path. It caused millions of dollars of damage and forced the resort to close for an entire season, a penalty that can shutter a ski area permanently.
And yet, in January, Sierra-at-Tahoe hummed with life when my husband and I pulled into the parking lot. A few skiers made turns down a steep groomer, tails of snow flying behind them. The parking lot was filling up quickly with cars and trucks. As I was buckling my ski boats, a dad next to us was helping his two little girls lace up their snowboard boots. "I'm ready to party," one of the girls said. Music played from a car on the other end of the parking lot.
Compared to before the fire, Sierra-at-Tahoe is unrecognizable. Without the trees, it resembles an alpine environment -- except for its base elevation of 6,640 feet. The new, wide-open slopes and bowls had a feel similar to ski resorts in the Alps more than the Sierra Nevada. But about three years after the fire, Sierra-at-Tahoe's slopes, sun decks and tailgating embodied signs of hope and resilience -- proof that while the fire transformed the landscape, the soul of the ski area is still alive and strong.
"We were able to do what was basically impossible -- bring back a completely roasted landscape and come out and say, 'Hey, we're back,'" said John Rice, who was the vice president and general manager of Sierra-at-Tahoe during the Caldor Fire.
The Caldor Fire ignited on Aug. 14, 2021, near an old logging town outside of Pollock Pines, about 34 miles west of Sierra-at-Tahoe. At the start of the fire, no one thought it would travel that far, let alone reach the Tahoe Basin. Yet the Caldor Fire defied expectations and assumptions, over and over and over again.
Gusty winds and a dry forest loaded with fuels caused the Caldor Fire to explode. The fire raced up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada toward the crest, and it eventually became only the second fire in recorded history to cross the mountain range and into the other side, threatening the town of South Lake Tahoe. As it approached the Tahoe Basin, the Caldor Fire became the nation's top priority for firefighting resources.
The fire was exacerbated by climate change, which is creating longer droughts and hotter temperatures that can leave forests moisture-starved, resulting in more extreme wildfires. A legacy of fire suppression in the forest exacerbated the fire even more.
Rice said Sierra-at-Tahoe had a plan in case of a wildfire, but when he looked out at the Caldor Fire ripping across the ski resort with an eerie orange glow -- sparks whirling, winds gusting -- he realized that natural disasters did't follow plans. Rice worked at Sierra-at-Tahoe from 1993 until he recently departed in the fall of 2024 (He is now the CEO of a group representing ski areas in California and Nevada). He was standing on the roof of a building at the base of the ski resort when he picked up a charred oak leaf that had fallen from the smoke-filled sky. "The nearest oak tree is down in Placerville," he said, a town in the Sierra foothills and near the fire's origin.
Shelby Dunlap was evacuating her home in South Lake Tahoe when she looked up toward Echo Summit and saw an orange, smoky sky. "That is at Sierra," Dunlap realized. Now, Dunlap is Sierra-at-Tahoe's PR and communications manager.
Returning to Sierra-at-Tahoe was the beginning of Rice's reckoning with grief over the loss of not just the entire landscape but also the ski resort's identity.
"We were all just in shock at how much destruction. I mean, when you see the gray ashes on the ground and beautiful, tall trees with moss on them -- gone, just scorched," Rice said.
Rice said he was angry. He wanted to blame someone. Eventually, he landed on acceptance, and that's when he was finally able to get back to work to bring Sierra-at-Tahoe back.
"There's a lot of opportunity that we had to find in that sad situation. We had to say, 'What can it be? Let's reimagine it,'" Rice said.
The first year after the Caldor Fire was critical to rebuilding. The damage was greater than the ski resort first anticipated. Infrastructure needed to be repaired. Thousands of fire-weakened trees had to be cleared. Only then could the ski resort figure out how to adapt to a dramatically altered landscape that would fundamentally change the skiing experience.
The Caldor Fire burned 1,600 of the ski area's 2,000 acres, destroyed a maintenance shed that contained about $5 million worth of tools and equipment, and damaged lift towers, terrain park features and brand new snowcats, according to the ski resort.
The fire damaged several of the ski resort's chairlifts, including the Grandview Express, a high-speed quad that takes skiers up about 1,500 feet to the top of Huckleberry Mountain, on the eastern end of the ski resort. After inspection, Sierra-at-Tahoe's lift maintenance crew realized the fire had burned Grandview's haul rope, the cable that chairs are attached to, from the inside out.
In January 2022, the maintenance crew, led by Paul Beran, the director of mountain operations at the time, tackled the seemingly impossible task of replacing Grandview's 10,000-foot haul rope in the middle of winter. The replacement of Grandview's 42,000-pound haul rope was the first sign that Sierra's comeback would succeed. But the work was just beginning. Thousands of dead trees still needed to be cleared. The following summer, Sierra-at-Tahoe endured another tragedy. Beran was a leader and beloved employee who believed that Sierra-at-Tahoe would come back from the fire and become an even better ski resort, but he died unexpectedly on July 12, 2022.
When Rice told the operations crew that Beran had passed, he said: "Each one of you has been challenged and asked to rise to the occasion which you all have. I am going to ask you to rise again."
The landscape changed. But the people came back.
Sierra-at-Tahoe lost an entire winter's worth of business due to the fire recovery effort. Its longtime skiers and snowboarders bought passes at competing ski resorts in Tahoe, Rice said. However, when Sierra reopened for business in December 2022 -- more than a year after the Caldor Fire -- many of those skiers and snowboarders returned to the mountain they loved.
"It's got a little special place in my heart," said Hector Peccorini, a South Tahoe resident who has been skiing at the resort for more than 20 years. Peccorini snowboarded at larger resorts like Heavenly and Kirkwood when Sierra-at-Tahoe was closed, but he missed Sierra's vibe and the people he'd come to know over the years of snowboarding there. Sierra has always felt less corporate, more welcoming, he said.
"Everybody just lets you be you," Peccorini said, adding that "... I realized what I missed the most was the sense of community, like running into friends there, but also just the ease of access."
As the ski resort struggled to get back on its feet, Sierra had to come to terms that it was a new and different mountain. Employees reassessed everything about how the ski resort operates -- from grooming to snow safety, Rice said.
The new terrain was a discovery. Without the protection of a forest, West Bowl was, truly, a wide-open bowl. In good snow, it's now a canvas for huge, arcing powder turns, Rice said. But the exposure also creates weather and snow phenomena the ski resort has never before experienced. Ski patrols set off avalanches bigger than veterans had ever seen. Last year, a crevasselike rift suddenly opened up from massive snowdrifts caused by the winds.
Sierra installed a wind fence this year to protect aspects of the mountain, Dunlap said. The fence has helped catch snow blowing in the wind in West Bowl, and after the wind subsides, grooming machines can smooth out the snow drifts and push the snow back onto the ski runs.
Rice expects the mountain will continue to evolve as it discovers more ways it can adapt to the new realities of its fire-altered terrain.
When I visited Sierra-at-Tahoe in January, my husband and I skied onto the Grandview Chair, which took us to the top of Huckleberry Peak. From up here, the view is long. We stood in the middle of the burn scar. In every direction, blackened trees polka-dotted the white snow.
A skier from Sacramento rode up the chair with us. We talked about what was on all of our minds -- on everyone's minds -- the before and the after. Huckleberry used to be well known for its shady steeps with old trees watching from above. The fire spared a grove of giant trees along the top western part of the ridge. But otherwise, the mountain now resembles a clear-cut boulder field.
"You get used to it," the Sacramento skier said.
A few runs later, we were in the West Bowl, riding up with a vagabond from Washington who was traveling across the West to go skiing at different ski resorts on the Ikon Pass. Tahoe was in the middle of a dry streak without any storms for weeks. In the West Bowl, wind scoured the terrain, pushing us onto groomers that looped and curved down the mountain. Despite the not-so-great off-piste conditions, cutting big turns across the groomed slopes gave me that rush of freedom I seek when I go skiing. We skied lap after lap.
At the bottom of West Bowl, in the lift line, someone echoed the same mixture of shock and gratitude I'd been hearing all day. "This place used to be so tree-covered," a woman said. Her companion agreed and said, "But at least it's still open."
Sierra-at-Tahoe's visitation numbers still haven't fully recovered since the fire, Dunlap said. But every season has seen a steady bump from the previous one. Slowly but surely, they're closing the gap.
This winter, Sierra-at-Tahoe joined the Ikon Pass. They're still independently owned, but Ikon passholders can ski a handful of days at Sierra-at-Tahoe. Rice says the Ikon Pass has helped with marketing and getting the word out about Sierra's resurgence, and it's helping to bring people back to the mountain.
Some longtime passholders grumbled when Sierra-at-Tahoe announced it was joining the Ikon Pass, afraid that hoards of visitors carrying the Ikon Pass would overrun the mountain's charm. Yet, the Ikon has given Sierra a much-needed boost in business, and there's also been a resurgence in passholders and day tickets, Dunlap said.
"The skier volume this season, to me personally, has put some wind in our sails," Dunlap said.
We skied a few more laps, circumnavigating the mountain in a continuous loop, but I grew envious of the people lounging on the sundeck. My husband wanted to lap the park a few times, so I let him do his thing while I found an Adirondack chair made out of old skis and facing in the sunshine. The scene was festive, family-oriented, low-key and relaxed, with people young and old celebrating a great day outside. It was everything I love about a ski area, and at the end of the day, that's all that really mattered.