Before the invention of the freeway, Reno was a six or eight hour trip on a narrow two-lane road. I had to drive through and stop at every stop sign or red light in downtown Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, Vallejo, Fairfield, Dixon, Sacramento and Auburn, as well as all of the smaller towns in between.


Finally the car started laboring up into the foothills. Occasional stretches of highway had three lanes and you took your chances on pulling out to pass another car. When you tried it, you hoped that someone coming the other way didn’t pull out into the third lane at the same time you did. For miles and miles you just had to mosey along behind a big semi-truck that was crawling along behind several other even slower semi-trucks.

As I slowly ground my way up through Colfax, the rain was turning to sleet so I stopped and bought what I thought was a bag of skid chains for my five-year-old, very bald tires. When it came time to put on the chains, I discovered that the bag contained 11 pounds of bailing wire, some short pieces of rope, along with assorted nuts and bolts as well as a hand drawn set of directions on how to assemble the stuff into skid chains. I had been had, but the guys in the yellow slickers standing beside the road with their Coleman lanterns had a deal for me that I couldn’t pass up. The ‘No chains, No farther’ sign cost me $25 for a real set of chains, but included putting them on my car. That’s in 1945 dollars, when a Coca Cola only cost five cents.


I didn’t know where I was going to stop for the night so I wouldn’t know it when I got there, and since I didn’t have reservations anywhere it didn’t matter where I stopped. For the next 17 miles, at nine miles an hour until I saw a small sign shining through the wind-blown snow that said ‘Donner Summit’ something and it looked like I could park my car and maybe rent a place to sleep for the night.

My dim headlights cast an eerie glow on the semi-truck that I had followed. There was only one room left that I quickly rented for the then exorbitant price of $6. The night clerk-janitor-breakfast cook told me, “the room has a great view,” but he didn’t tell me that the view was a close up view of the railroad tracks.

If the trains had passed any closer to my bed they would have run right over my feet and I was jolted awake by every east or west-bound-freight-train that passed close by my window. The giant steam engines had loud, melancholy whistles that you could hear 11 miles away and every train that went by blew their whistle right under my window. On the other side of the railroad tracks was a moving piece of rope that hauled skiers skyward once again.

Thirty minutes later, after I tried to devour the single worst stack of pancakes ever cooked on the planet, I rented some ski equipment for $3 a day so I could join the skiers. My rented leather boots came almost up to my ankle bones and had turned up toes. I was told, “Your rental skis are much safer because they don’t have any edges.” The bamboo for my ski poles had come from India with a giant rug wrapped around them.


I paid $4.95 for a pair of White Stag gabardine ski pants, $1 for a pair of woolen mittens and with a $1.50 rope-tow ticket stapled to my navy foul weather jacket, I was off to try and ski after a long layoff. I moved slowly towards the small ski hill because of the wrong wax on the skis and my blood was still thin from my recent tour of duty in the South Pacific.

While waiting in the rope-tow line, I found out that in 1945 there was only one chairlift and one other rope tow in that part of the world and it was at the nearby Sugar Bowl.

Very few people were brave enough to travel any farther into the Tahoe Basin unless you were going on to Reno. The east side of the Donner Summit Highway was snowed shut many times during the winter. The road on the eastern side of the pass was notorious for its steepness, sharp curves, deep snow and out of control trucks.

There was no reason for skiers to go there in 1945 anyway, because there was not one single ski resort east of Donner Summit in the Tahoe Basin.

There was no Palisades Tahoe, Heavenly Valley, Alpine Meadows, Kirkwood, Northstar, Granlibakken, Homewood or Incline Village.

At the Sugar Bowl, on Donner Summit, Bill Klein ran the ski shop and the Ski School, but only the experts dared to go there. To get to the Sugar Bowl from the highway seemed to be about a two-hour ride in a freezing cold sled without any heat. It was pulled by a small tractor driven by Brad Board. It arrived every couple of hours, sometimes and when you finally got in to the Sugar Bowl Lodge your room might have been taken by someone who caught an earlier sled ride. It would be four years before Alex Cushing would build the third chairlift in California. It was also the first chairlift in The Tahoe Basin.

The Donner Summit something where I stayed had one small rope tow with about 200 vertical feet and I had never heard of such a thing as a rope-tow gripper. A lot of the almost 100 people skiing that day didn’t have edges on their ski either. Some brought brown bag lunches and had to sit in the snow to eat their peanut butter sandwiches because there was no place to sit, except in the snow. Even without any long underwear I wasn’t cold, but I was very hungry however.

To eliminate the long drive to the Tahoe Basin, you could take a narrow gauge railroad train to Lake Tahoe for $1.50, but that train only ran during the summer. The tracks ran along the banks of the Truckee River and when you got to Tahoe City, and if you could afford it, you could stay in The Tahoe Tavern. Rooms were available at the unheard-of, high price of $10 a night.

When I stayed in The Donner Summit something that weekend, I didn’t know that I should drain my car radiator or add anti-freeze. I found all of this out when I got a $146 repair bill. I showed up two days late to my ship in San Francisco. My commanding officer didn’t buy my excuse of a frozen engine because it had been 62° degrees and sunny in San Francisco and my weekend pass was limited to a 50-mile radius.

Wayne Poulsen and Marty Arroge bought Palisades Tahoe in the late 1930s for $10,000, or so the story goes. In 1948 they traded Alex Cushing 25 of the most valuable acres in Palisades Tahoe with the proviso that he build a chair lift and have it running by the winter of 1949. Alex did that and it went all the way up to the bottom of the headwall. It stopped there because in 1949 very few people were good enough to ski anything that steep. He also built a small lodge that slept 40 people and two rope tows that you could ride for $2 a day, but the chairlift cost $4 a day. (Minimum wages in 1949 were 25 cents an hour.)

Alex Cushing was paying ski instructors $125 a month and room and board. I shared a room in a navy surplus wooden barracks with almost no insulation. The room was small, the bed uncomfortable and the heat marginal. Alex had bought them from a navy supply depot near Reno. They had cut them in half by sawing them down the ridge, put them on a truck and hauled them to Palisades Tahoe and nailed them back together.

I had a brand new Bell and Howell 16mm movie camera and started to film my first ski movie. I had a lot of spare time on my hands but no spare money to buy $10, 100’ rolls of 16mm for my camera, so I took souvenir still photos of people on their lunch breaks. After dinner I would drive to Tahoe City and develop the negatives and print the still pictures. The next morning I would try and sell the prints to the guests. I sold the 8x10 souvenir stills for a $1 each, unless the lady in the picture was not the man’s wife. Then I sold the man the print and the negative for $10, which was the approximate cost of one roll of 16mm film for the voracious appetite of my movie camera.

That first winter, on my wages and my still photos business, I managed to buy 31, 100’ rolls of film to create my first, feature-length, ski film. The entire budget for the finished film was under $600. Then in the fall of 1950 a ski club in Los Angeles rented an auditorium in Pasadena, charged a $1 to see that movie and I got 40% of the gross of $837. It was later shown in 11 other cities from San Diego to Vancouver B.C. that winter at no cost to Alex.

Probably the biggest change in that part of the world was not when Alex Cushing opened Palisades Tahoe, but when Palisades Tahoe was awarded the 1960 Winter Olympics and the California State taxpayers paid for the two-lane Donner Summit Highway to become a six-lane freeway. This cut the driving time from San Francisco in half and today it’s anybody’s guess how many people are skiing at all of the resorts around Lake Tahoe on any given weekend.

The six-lane freeway has passed by The Donner Summit Lodge rope tow which was a very simple and inexpensive device that introduced tens of thousands of people to skiing in the 1940s and 1950s, for only $1 or $2 a day.

Today a lot of senior citizen skiers have one arm two inches longer than the other, from hanging onto those rope tows for so many years. Maybe that’s why we get accused of having a hard time reaching for our wallets.

1945 was a long time ago and I’ve taken for granted my different length arms. Two generations after that first winter at Palisades Tahoe, most skiers and snowboarders take for granted the incredible ski resort development that has taken place in the Tahoe Basin. Arguably the single largest concentration of major ski resorts, anywhere in America.

But, since I first skied in 1937, I have never take for granted the feeling of turning a pair of skis on the side of a hill. Regardless of the size of the hill, its place in history or what the weather was like. I also know that I can never accurately describe the gut feeling of skiing. Even after talking about it since 1937. All I can really do is open up my memory bank of experiences and write stories about the old days and the new ones and never let the absolute truth ruin a good story.

Photography courtesy of the Norm Sayler Collection at the Donner Summit Historical Society.

Editor's Note: This article is from the February 2009 issue of Sierra Heritage Magazine. To subscribe to Sierra Heritage (founded in 1984), go to Sierra Heritage.com