SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Palisades Tahoe reopened Thursday, a day after a deadly avalanche closed the resort.
The ski resort said delays will be more significant than usual and KT-22, the area where the avalanche happened, will be closed.
"Since both mountains closed just shy of 11 a.m. yesterday, it will take longer to assess all terrain and get everything open," Palisades Tahoe said in an operations update.
There are 17 lifts on the Palisades side and 8 lifts on the Alpine side scheduled to be open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The avalanche happened at the GS Gully area of the KT-22 lift, an expert trail that had just opened for the season 30 minutes earlier. According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which tracks U.S. avalanche deaths, this was the first death of the 2023-2024 season.
Palisades Tahoe said they lost access to the road to KT-22 because of avalanche debris. They couldn't reestablish the road overnight because of heavy snowfall. The resort said it would be a "rigorous snow safety morning" for Palisades and Alpine.
Find the status of the lifts and trails at Palisades Tahoe HERE.
Deadly Avalanche at Palisades Tahoe
The avalanche happened around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday above the GS Gully area of KT-22 on the Palisades side of the resort.
Four people were swept up in the avalanche and one of the people died. The man was identified by the Placer County Sheriff’s Office as Kenneth Kidd, 66 of Point Reyes and the Tahoe Truckee area. Palisades Tahoe confirmed he was a skier.
Palisades says three other people had non-life-threatening injuries and they were released.
Of those people impacted, Michael Gross, vice president of Mountain Operations, said two of the people were caught in the slide but ultimately removed. The two others were buried in the snow, one of which was Kidd.
Gross said avalanche control assessment has been ongoing since Sunday, with crews evaluating conditions and setting up safety markers.
The debris field was 150 feet wide, 450 feet long and 10 feet deep. The mountain closed for the rest of the day Wednesday.
The cause of the avalanche is under investigation, officials said. It happened as a powerful storm was expected to bring as much as 2 feet of snow to the highest elevations by early Thursday.
The resort was renamed in 2021 to Palisades Tahoe from Squaw Valley Ski, which included a derogatory term used to refer to women in the Native American community. The new name references two of the resorts' terrain areas: the Palisades side, formerly known as the Olympic Valley side, and the historic Alpine Meadows side, now called the Alpine side.
The resort hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics.
Watch more on ABC10 California Winter Storm | Lake Tahoe avalanche and dangerous winter storm
