It’s been a rough winter for Tahoe-area skiers.
An early, record-breaking spring heat wave — and the rapidly melting snowpack as a result — have prematurely closed many Tahoe ski resorts, and caused others to announce early end dates for the 2025-26 season.
This state of affairs is even more pronounced after the relatively wet start to the season, with heavy precipitation in November, a big snowstorm over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday and a record-setting dump of snow in mid-February.
But a severe dry spell early in the year, and then a second one in March — with temperatures running 9 degrees above average — has ultimately sealed the deal for many resorts, said Bryan Allegretto, California forecaster for OpenSnow.
“That snow has melted at a record pace here in the month of March,” he said. “So that is really what is shutting everyone down early.”
Here’s what you need to know about which Tahoe ski resorts are still open, which locations are now closed and what this season’s quick end could spell for the future of the region.
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Among the resorts that have already closed are:
Closing this weekend is Diamond Peak and Bear Valley has closed temporarily to preserve its snowpack.
These resorts represent about half the ski areas in the Northern Sierra, Allegretto said.
The other half are trying to stretch their seasons until mid-April, like:
Palisades Tahoe and Mammoth are hoping to extend their seasons as late as Memorial Day on May 25.
These resorts are looking ahead to colder temperatures in the next week or two and even hoping for a final dusting of snow around March 31, but it’s far from guaranteed.
Meanwhile, the snowpack “has crashed,” Allegretto said.
“The snowpack, which peaked at 75% of average just four weeks ago, has crashed down to 15%,” he said. “We’ve lost 60% of the median in just four weeks.”
Much of the resorts’ own snowmaking happens at the beginning of the season, Allegretto said — when snow machines that blow very dense, low snow to create a base that freezes solid and slowly melts all spring long.
But many of the resorts weren’t able to establish a very big base before the storm at the end of December, noted Allegretto, because it simply wasn’t cold enough.
And once that natural snow fell on top during the Christmas period, he said, it was at risk of melting away faster without a strong base.
Cole Zimmerman, spokesperson for Vail Resorts — which includes Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood — said that despite Heavenly’s best efforts, “it hasn’t been easy. We’re getting scrappy,” he said.
The South Lake Tahoe resort has hundreds of snowmaking guns, he said, but this machinery is dependent on the temperature and the humidity — meaning they can only be run when it’s cold enough for the water and compressed air to freeze into snow.
Sometimes, snowmaking is only possible at high-elevation areas of a ski resort, which is why much of the lower resort areas are looking particularly bald at the moment.
With temperatures high all month long, Andy Buckley, general manager at Homewood, said his resort made the tough call to close in mid-March based on guest safety. Even as their higher-elevation skiing remained good, he said, not enough snow at the base of the mountain was raising safety concerns.
“We’re looking at the ability for our patrol team to be able to egress in the event of an emergency to bring people down should they need to,” he said.
Heavenly, by contrast, can stay open a few more weeks because its gondola can bring skiers up to 9,000 feet and back down without needing snow at the base of the mountain.
Homewood is planning to install its own gondola this year, Buckley said, and is exploring some other technologies on the horizon out of Europe that may help elongate the season.
But these efforts are expensive — and could potentially mean resorts further raise the price of tickets and season passes for visitors.
“This industry tends to be a capital carnivore,” he said.
While the sunny weather is set to continue through the weekend, Allegretto’s forecast on Tuesday reported that cold temperatures should start to roll in early next week, and “significant snowfall is possible on the mountains” between March 31 and April 3.
“We are gonna get colder next week — we may even see some measurable snowfall,” Allegretto said. “So that’ll rapidly decrease the melting and may even start adding back some snow from a storm or two the first week of April.”
But Allegretto said it’s not typical to have giant dumps in April, so it’s unlikely that the snow will come in the magnitude of feet.
But “it will definitely slow down the melting and help extend the seasons if [resorts] are trying to make it to the middle of April,” he said.
In the last 10 years, Tahoe has seen its lowest snowfall year on record and its highest snowfall year on record, Allegretto said.
“We’re seeing more variability, and we’re seeing slowly warming temperatures,” he said.
But it’s hard to see those swings in the data, Allegretto said, because “the big snow years are offsetting the low snow years. The 10-year average for snowfall is higher than the 50-year average,” despite global warming, he said.
“But the average doesn’t matter when there’s a 9-degree above-average March,” melting away all the big storms we got this year, he said.
Buckley said Homewood — which is at a lower elevation right by the lake — struggled to retain any snow it received this season. Each storm came just in time to rescue their base, but the last big one in February was followed by rain, which washed away almost all they had gained.
That is affecting not just on the resorts’ bottom lines, Buckley said, but on the entire area’s industry, whose restaurants, hotels and other service-oriented businesses often rely on ski tourism.
“It is a very unusual anomaly,” he said. “It is tense and tough for the people working in the industry and tough on the community.”
Despite this year’s conditions, snowmaking technology is getting better and more possible in warmer temperatures, Allegretto said — creating more potential opportunities for skiing even in record-breaking heat years.
But Vail spokesperson Zimmerman said the key is to “be flexible” and “prepare ourselves for whatever Mother Nature may or may not bring.
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