In the 1980's and 1990's I took a 3 or 4 day ski trip to Lake Tahoe nearly every season. Through 1996, 12% of my skiing was in northern California. Since then only 3% of my skiing has been in this region. My medium distance travel has shifted to Utah due to connections to and eventual purchase of a timeshare at Snowbird.

Most of the 1980's trips were based at South Shore, so Heavenly was my third most skied area for my first decade of skiing. 1982 was one of the best, coming about a week after a 6-foot dump to lake level elevation.

My notes from that long ago are brief. Conditions remained 80% packed powder a week after the big storm. I skied 27,100 vertical, which tied for my second highest up to that time. The early 1980's Tahoe trips were with a group from my work Transamerica, and one of them had a brother living in Reno who joined us that day to provide some local insight.

I noted that we skied all marked runs in Nevada that day, and this archival map of Heavenly makes for some interesting comparisons to today.

Mott and Killebrew Canyons are labelled "undeveloped 5,000 vertical guided tours only." I first skied Mott in January 1989 when a snowcat exit was provided. The Mott chair was installed in 1991.

More noteworthy are the two lifts which have since been removed. The Wells Fargo lift, installed in 1973, enabled 4,000 vertical of skiing from the top of Milky Way Bowl and also gave Heavenly the potential to host a World Cup downhill. Heavenly had hosted World Cup slalom and giant slalom events the prior two seasons.

During the summer of 1982 the Wells Fargo lift was relocated to a flattish mid-mountain area higher up and renamed Galaxy. The 6,100 foot Wells Fargo base on the leeward side of the ski area had historically erratic coverage, and snowmaking was rarely used on long advanced runs in those days. When I first skied that 4,000 continuous vertical in 1979 as an intermediate it took me 45 minutes. January 17, 1982 was the second and last time I skied that run.

During the summer of 1988 the East Peak chair was relocated to become the Olympic chair, paralleling the upper half of the Olympic run. While this made it possible to run repeat laps of that run, the removal of the East Peak lift made it necessary to ski the long and flat Crossover catwalk in order to get to either of the Nevada base areas from the upper mountain. The Crossover catwalk traverses a south facing slope which makes the run even more tedious in warm weather, especially for snowboarders.

In 2000 the gondola from Stateline was installed to the new Tamarack Lodge. To this day there is no lift making the short connection from Tamarack Lodge to East Peak, which would allow skiers to avoid the Crossover catwalk.

One of Heavenly's strengths is nearly ideal tree spacing between the cut runs. These enabled my first powder success (20/10) on January 14, 1980. I had another excellent powder day (20/8) at Heavenly on January 16, 1984.