Palisades TahoeTwo mountains, 6,000 acres, the 1960 Olympic stage — Lake Tahoe's biggest ski resort

Alex Cushing opened the original Squaw Valley ski area on November 24, 1949 with the world's largest double chairlift, two rope tows, and lodging for fifty. Five years later he won the bid to host the 1960 Winter Olympic Games — the smallest ski area ever to host an Olympics — and the run-up turned a one-chairlift hill into a world-class resort. Sixty-five years later, those Olympic peaks (KT-22, Headwall, Granite Chief) still anchor the front side, and the original tram cabin to High Camp still climbs from the village every twelve minutes.

In 2011, KSL Capital Partners merged Squaw Valley with the neighboring Alpine Meadows ski area — a 1961 resort founded with a different philosophy of skiing-for-skiers — into a single 6,000-acre operation. The two mountains stayed physically separate (a six-mile drive over the ridge between them) until the Base-to-Base Gondola opened in 2022, finally connecting the bases by lift in nineteen minutes. In 2021 the resort changed its name from a slur that had bothered the community for decades to Palisades Tahoe, after the Palisades Peak that overlooks the village.

The mountain produces an average of 400 inches of snow a year — among the deepest snowpacks in California — across 6,000 acres, 288 trails, and 39 lifts including the iconic Aerial Tram (110 passengers, opened in 1958), the 28-passenger Funitel, and seven high-speed six-pack chairs. Terrain runs 25% beginner, 43% intermediate, 24% advanced, 9% expert — but the expert percentage is misleading. KT-22 alone has produced more Olympians than any other single chairlift in North America, and the Palisades cliff bands behind it are the public training ground for half the U.S. freeride circuit.