Sugar Bowl is a ski and snowboard area located in northern Placer County near Norden, California, along the Donner Pass of the Sierra Nevada, approximately 46 mi (74 km) west of Reno, Nevada on Interstate 80. It opened on December 15, 1939. Independently owned and rooted in the love of sport since 1939, Sugar Bowl has stayed true to the spirit of adventure, inspired by those who founded this magical place, offering an authentic and unfiltered mountain experience.
Sugar Bowl is a medium-sized ski area in the Lake Tahoe region, and is well known for its long history, significant advanced terrain, high annual snowfall and being one of the closest ski areas to the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, it’s not about flash or frills, but in honoring the founders: the visionaries who tapped into the timeless vibe of snow-covered peaks, untouched powder, and wide-open runs. Sugar Bowl was founded by Hannes Schroll and a group of individual investors and is one of the few remaining privately owned resorts in the Lake Tahoe area.
With the highest elevation in Tahoe, the first stop from the west, and the shortest lift lines, Sugar Bowl brings you closer to the heart of what skiing is meant to be. From the rugged beauty of the landscape to a commitment to a pure skiing experience, this is where memories are made, stories are shared, and the soul of skiing lives on.
A Storied Past
One of the oldest ski resorts in California, Sugar Bowl has a storied past with ties to Austrian ski culture, Hollywood and Walt Disney. This special place helped bring skiing to “sunny California,” was home to the state’s first chairlift, and the west’s first ski gondola.
The mountain peaks of Mt. Judah and Mt. Lincoln, which eventually became the ski slopes of the Sugar Bowl ski resort, were a part of the American pioneers route, back in the 1800s. A part of the California wagon trail called Roller Pass ran between Mt. Judah and Mt. Lincoln. It was one of the wagon trails through Donner Pass that was used by settlers and prospectors, on the Emigrant Trail, coming from the eastern United States across the Sierra Nevada. Today the same pass can be reached by way of the Pacific Crest Trail or a new trail created by Sugar Bowl ski resort, in 1994, called the Mt.
Read also: A Look at Sugar Bowl's Past
The Central Pacific Railroad first began train services to Donner Pass in 1868 after the completion of the First transcontinental railroad across the United States. A new tunnel constructed two-miles (3 km) through virtually solid granite, dubbed The Big Hole tunnel, was later constructed through Mt. Judah in 1925, offering trains better protection from snow storms on the summit. The area became more accessible to tourists in 1913 when the Lincoln Highway, the first road across the United States opened over the Donner Pass. Route 40, although snow plowing operations by the state of California didn't start until 1932, making travel to the area by car difficult in the winter.
In 1924 Charlie Chaplin filmed scenes upon Mt. Lincoln for his silent movie classic The Gold Rush. The land that Sugar Bowl ski resort is built on was originally purchased in 1923 by Stephen and Jennie Pilcher. They paid $10.00 for 700 acres (2.8 km2) to the Southern Pacific Railroad, who by then had taken over for the Central Pacific Railroad by lease and acquired its operations by 1885.
During the early 1930s, before Sugar Bowl installed the first chair lift, skiers who wanted to ski the Donner Pass mountain peaks, like Mt. Lincoln, would have to climb up to the peaks on foot in order to get the chance to ski. In 1936, Austrian ski instructors Bill and Fred Klein opened the Klein ski school, serving the Sierra Club out of the Clair Tappaan Lodge in the area and local skiers from Sacramento and San Francisco. The Klein brothers and a few other instructors they had taught, were often teaching 100 to 150 students a weekend, taking the more advanced students up to the crest of Mt. Lincoln on foot.
This was partly attributed to the fact that new skiers were just venturing into the mountains more and with an improved Highway made travel easier. The term "leisure" was beginning to take hold in America during this time, after the passage of the Wagner Act and other labor laws of the 1930s. The following year in 1937, the 700 acres (2.8 km2) around Mt. Lincoln and Hemlock Peak were put up for sale by the daughters of the Pilchers. Bill Klein contacted Hannes Schroll, a famous Austrian skiing champion and ski instructor he personally knew, who was working at Yosemite at the time, about the sale of the land.
Schroll, a colorful character who would always be found yodeling when he would ski, visited the area. When he and Klein saw the steep boulder field sloping down towards Donner Lake, they could not believe that it would all be covered in snow by winter. By March 1938 Schroll had made a deal with the Pilcher sisters for the purchase of the land for $6,740. But when Schroll tried to retrieve funds from his home in Austria, the war had just broken out and his funds had been taken. Schroll then had to borrow the funding to buy the property from Hamilton McCaughey, a local realtor, and ice-skating champion George Stiles.
Read also: Winter Adventure at Mt. Hood
Schroll had also sent a wire via Western Union to Walt Disney while seeking funding to purchase the property, but Disney was out of town and did not receive the wire in time. Schroll then became president of the Sugar Bowl Corporation in 1938 with the help and support of Wellington Henderson, Sherman Chickering, and Donald Gregory. Shortly after, Schroll began seeking other investors to help build a Slope side Tyrolean style village and ski resort modeled after those in his hometown of Kitzbühel, Austria. The Southern Pacific Railroad agreed to build a facility adjacent to the Norden telegraph office to accommodate 600 people, to support the opening of Sugar Bowl.
Walt Disney, who had taken ski lessons from Schroll at Yosemite was approached again for funding and became a shareholder when he gave Schroll $2,500. Schroll then changed the name of "Hemlock Peak" to "Mt. Disney" to honor Disney's support. Soon after, others followed suit, and Schroll was able to raise $75,000 by June 1939 to help start and build the resort.
Construction of the Sugar Bowl lodge and the first chairlift began during the summer of 1939. The lodge was designed by William Wurster and was erected with a sloping roof so that snow would slide off towards the back side. The chairlift was designed by Henry Howard and built by the Riblet Tramway Company. Moore Dry Dock Company was hired to install the 13 towers in Howard's design to span the 1,000 vertical feet up to the top of Mt. Disney. Miners were brought in from Nevada City and used shovels, picks, and sometimes dynamite to clear away trees and dig footings for the towers by hand. Lava formation in the mountain was encountered during construction and some of the footings had to be set within it.
Sugar Bowl opened on December 15, 1939, but it hadn't snowed enough to open the mountain for skiing, so a makeshift ice rink the size of a tennis court was quickly set up for everyone to enjoy. Towards the end of the very first ski season at Sugar Bowl, Schroll held the inaugural Silver Belt race in April 1940. The race was won by Gretchen Fraser and Friedl Pfeifer. Prior to the international World Cup ski competition, the Silver Belt race was considered one of the most challenging of that era and often attracted the top European and American skiers. Jannette Burr and Christian Pravda were the only competitors to win the race three different times.
Because Sugar Bowl had the first chair lift in the Sierras with full lodge accommodations, the resort quickly became a popular skiing destination for many notable guests and Hollywood personalities. Storytelling, dancing on the open deck, and wearing suit jackets to dinner was the norm during this colorful time. Guests included King Vidor, Robert Stack, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Jean Arthur, James Bryant Conant, Doris Duke, Claudette Colbert, Lowell Thomas, Leland Hayward, Errol Flynn, Sterling Hayden, and Marilyn Monroe. Robert Stack, who grew up in Lake Tahoe, could often be found skiing with Schroll. Actress Janet Leigh was even discovered at Sugar Bowl ski resort by actress Norma Shearer. Leigh's father, Fred Morrison, was a front desk clerk and had his daughter's photo visible when the actress checked in at the lodge. After seeing the photograph, Shearer brought Leigh into contact with MGM.
Read also: The History of Ski Bowl
The movie Two-Faced Woman, starring Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, and Ruth Gordon, was filmed at Sugar Bowl in the spring of 1941. Sugar Bowl was also featured in the 1941 Disney cartoon The Art of Skiing. Operations to a temporary halt when the US became involved in World War II. The resort had few guests and Schroll retired as president of Sugar Bowl in 1945. Klein returned to Sugar Bowl in 1946 as Sugar Bowl's ski school director and held the position until 1957. Klein believed skiing was a fashionable sport and started his own ski shop, out of the Sugar Bowl lodge. Howard Head, who invented the first metal skis, asked Klein to test his new laminate skis he was developing at the time and then offered Klein a one-fourth interest in his ski company.
A second chairlift was installed at Sugar Bowl in 1950. The new double-chair lift made new terrain on Mt. Lincoln accessible to skiers without hiking. Two years later in 1952, the original ski lift going up Mt.
The Sugar Bowl Gondola
Based on the original design plans of Sugar Bowl, Jerome Hill determined that a gondola would be necessary to move people better into the ski area. In 1953 Heron of Denver installed "The Magic Carpet", the first aerial tramway on the west coast. The Gondola has been rebuilt and upgraded twice since the original installation. It brings guests from a parking lot on the north side of the railroad line, crosses over the tracks just past the west portal of Tunnel No.
Skiing was becoming more popular and better, with over 3 million skiers hitting the slopes each year and improved equipment entering the market. Filmmaker Warren Miller came to Sugar Bowl in 1963 to shoot scenes for his film "The Color Of Skiing", Junior Bounous the ski school director at Sugar Bowl in 1958 and the first American-born ski school director in the US, was also featured in over 10 Warren Miller films.
Sugar Bowl is one of the oldest and longest running ski resorts on the west coast, having been in operation for over 70 years. During the last several decades Sugar Bowl ski resort has replaced its older double chair lifts and added new quad lifts to open up new trails on its 4 mountain peaks, Mt. Judah, Mt. Lincoln, Mt. Disney and the Crows Nest Peak. A 10-year expansion of the resort began in 1992, with addition of a new parking lot and a lodge at the base of Mt.
Another addition came in 1999 with the founding of the Sugar Bowl Academy (SBA), a college preparatory high school for competitive skiers. The School Academy was co-founded by Jim Hudson, Barbara Sorba and Dr. Ski Team and daughter of Warren Hellman. A new ski race was added at Sugar Bowl in 2004, modeled after the Silver Belt races of the past that descends down the same slopes of Mt. Lincoln, called the Silver Belt Banzai.
The race differs from the traditional Silver Belt races that were held during the 1940s, in that 4 to 6 skiers or snowboarders race down the hill at the same time, known as a skier cross-style format. Mt. Judah is named after Theodore Judah who was the railroad design engineer for the Central Pacific Railroad, who surveyed and planned the route that the rail road tracks follow through Donner Pass to Nevada. Mt. Bill Klein’s Schuss is a moderately steep blue square towards the bottom of Mt. Lincoln, named in honor of Bill Klein, once the ski school director and ski shop owner at Sugar Bowl ski resort. Jerome Hill is named after Sugar Bowl stockholder Jerome E.
Visiting Sugar Bowl
Once you discover Sugar Bowl, you’ll see how the same man who brought the Matterhorn to Southern California, out did himself with a grander, truer alpine experience in the Sierras. Park your car in our garage, have your luggage loaded onto a personal gondola and be whisked away to America’s only snowbound village.
Sun poking through on Mt. Sugar Bowl is one of the quickest resorts to get to from the Bay Area via I-80, which is why I had a season pass there in 07/08. It is also known for getting more snow than any other of the North Lake ski resorts. It’s a pretty compact area which makes it easy to get around and great for families. The Mt Judah/Jerome Hill area has easy parking lot access and is the most popular place to start the day. The runs are fairly long and not that steep.
After a couple of runs on Judah, we like to head over to Mt. Lincoln, which is the main attraction at the resort. There is some seriously steep terrain to skier’s left off the top. We usually finish the day on the Disney lift, which accesses some shorter groomers. It also has some of the most interesting terrain on the mountain. The Sugar Bowl run and Strawberry Fields were some of our favorite powder stash’s on a powder day. We have not visited since the new lift on Crow’s Nest, which should be an interesting addition.
There is a general lack of consistent pitch groomers. The lodge at Mt. Disney is ancient and could really use an update. The Sugar Bowl run on a powder day. Steeper terrain on Mt. Yes, but it is probably not going to be any time soon since we spend our time in South Lake these days.
Terrain Parks
Both Coldstream and Caboose Terrain Parks are located off the Mt. Judah Express chairlift. The Coldstream Park hosts a variety of medium-sized features from boxes to rails and rollers to Jump lines. The Coldstream Park can be accessed by taking Buena Vista down about a third of the way down the hill. The entrance to the Caboose Park is located at the end of the Coldstream Park.
Hotel
Old-World charm with a hint of European flair, the Hotel offers a unique and memorable mountain getaway. Slopeside accommodations in a classic high-alpine lodge are just steps from the lifts.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Location | Near Donner Summit, California |
| Founded | 1939 |
| Annual Snowfall | Over 500 inches |
| Peaks | Mt. Judah, Mt. Lincoln, Mt. Disney, Crows Nest Peak |
| First Chairlift in California | Installed at Sugar Bowl |