Sugar Bowl

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Sugar Bowl

I am a product of skiing. My parents met at the South Bay Ski Club and spent time at the club’s lodge on old Highway 40 in Soda Springs, California. They even honeymooned at another ski resort, Mammoth Mountain, although during the summer.

Highway 40 is historic and follows some of the path over Donner Summit the the ill-fated Donner Party traveled. It also parallels the original path of Central Pacific’s Transcontinental Railroad.

Just west of Donner Summit is a historic ski resort: Sugar Bowl. This resort was opened on December 15, 1939 and the single person chairlift was the first in the state of California and only the second in the nation. This is one of the oldest ski resorts in California (the first in the state in fact) and laid the blueprint for others that followed. It also was the first resort on the west coast to install a gondola, named the Magic Carpet.

The shed off of Highway 40 where the Magic Carpet gondola shuttles skiers to the Sugar Bowl Lodge. In the background are Mt. Lincoln (left) and Mt. Disney.

The ski area has made it onto the silver screen when in 1924, Charlie Chaplin filmed part of the Gold Rush on Mt. Lincoln, standing in as Alaska. When the film was released in 1925, it was the highest grossing silent comedy of the year.

Much has changed at Sugar Bowl since the days when I skied there as a child. Judah Lodge was built as the main lodge for the resort making the gondola an afterthought.

On a recent jaunt to Donner Pass I pulled into the the Gondola parking lot and looked out at the resort with Mt. Lincoln and Mt. Disney in front of me. I sketched the view in my panoramic sketchbook with my brush pen. In early June, the resort was closed for the season after the record snows of the winter of 2023.

The Donner Summit area and this stretch of Highway 40 has a deep meaning in my life. My parents met here and later our family spent time together here. It is a location of deep history from the Native Californians, the immigrant trail to the Donner Party to the Transcendental Railroad and to birth of California’s winter recreation at Sugar Bowl.

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South Bay Ski Club

I think it must be rare that you can trace your existence to a time and a place that is still in existence. And I don’t mean the hospital where you where born but the place where your parents met and started a relationship which led to your appearance in the world.

For my genesis, it can be firmly placed in a certain location: Norden, California and a building: the South Bay Ski Club cabin on Historic Highway 40.

The cabin is a short drive to one the oldest ski areas in the Lake Tahoe Region: Sugar Bowl (1939), where the first ski lift in California was erected. To this day, Sugar Bowl remains my favorite ski resort in the Tahoe Area. Mammoth Mountain, where my parents honeymooned, will always be my favorite ski area in the Golden State.

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The “cabin of my birth”, the South Bay Ski Club cabin in November 2017. The snow on the deck is from an early November storm. In late November, there was not enough snow to open the ski resorts in the area.

In 1965, my mother returned from teaching in Germany and joined the South Bay Ski Club in 1966. At the time the president of the club was Jack Perry.  They both loved to ski, no matter what the weather and went up to the snow every weekend of the season. They fell in love and in 1968, they were married. A few years later, I was born on August 31. And I was on skis four years later.

My parents gave to me the love the mountains and skiing. I have snapshot memories from the South Bay Ski Club. I remember one summer night in the upstairs dorm as a violent thunderstorm passed over. Being a coastal Bay Area native, these metrological dramas where very rare and I always remember my first Sierra Summer thunderstorm hiding under the bed with a pillow covering my head.

On another summer visit, we watched as a helicopter flew in the towers for the chair lifts at Soda Springs ski area.

On this day I was heading back from the railway tunnels of the Transcontinental Railway at Donner Summit. And I came back along Highway 40 looking for the large rocks on the right that signaled the driveway of the South Bay Ski Club cabin. On the day after Thanksgiving, there was no cars in the driveway and not much snow on Soda Springs and Sugar Bowl but this building was full of memories of my father, the Sierras, and the South Bay Ski Club.

A photograph from the early 1970’s. My father up in the Sierra snow. Me in one hand and his trusty Nikon in the other. He is wearing his ski hat that he wore for many years on the slopes of California: an engineer’s cap with the South Bay Ski Club pin in the middle.

One of my father’s South Bay Ski Club pins.