“Who in the hell is gonna skate pools when it’s dumping snow and 27 degrees outside?” I asked my confidant Greg Goulet. He assured me over a static induced cell phone, “Chris, you’re gonna like this idea, it’s totally different and I think it’s gonna work.”

At a frequency that happens less and less every year, Tahoe gets those storms that hang out for a few days (if not a week) at a time and just dump feet upon feet of snow anywhere from powder at Lake level to rain-snow at the bottom of Squaw. This here is a rather odd session that took place while the weather was in this mode; mostly producing wetpack and accumulating about a foot a day at areas surrounding The Lake.

Scotty Kroener, Eric Adleson and Greg Goulet called me up with an idea having something to do with drained pools in an area near the Nevada-California stateline, around an abandoned apartment complex. Apparently the snow at the time was falling inconsistent and changing from wet slush and not really sticking one minute back to heavy snow accumulating rapidly the next. But somehow, after a few days worth of work they had actually gathered enough of it with their trucks to form a snow bridge across the unbailed bottom of this 8 foot deep bowling shaped beauty of an almost empty pool (remember almost). All in hopes of creating a runway to ride the vert, tiled and coping filled walls with their snowboards. When I arrived to this part of town that looked like home to many a ghostly spirit and major power blackouts, I was pretty ecstatic about their creativity and original idea. The water in the deep end was too deep and it just wasn’t cold enough outside to keep it solidified; so we figured maybe later. Down the road about 3 blocks, another smaller egg shaped beauty was formed with snow transitions that had already worked just fine as a test pilot. In fact, Goulet was killing it the day prior mid-blizzard while my camera was nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, Greg had now officially overextended his abilities for the day trying to conquer a rail earlier in the evening. To make a long story short, he bailed off its long and triple-kinked bent metal surface (lacking sufficient speed) thereby landing on the rough cement steps where he not only cheese-grated his base, but also caught his knee in one of the rungs under the rail. Ouch! Game over. He couldn’t walk too well when I arrived fresh off my two-hour blizzard adventure over the pass, so we helped him pack up his gear as he propped himself into the truck and drove the night shift all the way back to his home in Boise, Idaho. It was about 10:30p.m. and in between storms when myself, Eric and Scott not only waved bye-bye to Goulet, but headed down the road to pick up snacks, hot chocolate, some fuel and a quart of two-stroke motor oil (how romantic). After our arrival to what seemed like a Hollywood horror set, we climbed the snow-covered fence made of chainlink, scoped the snow in the egg bowl, and hooked up some lights. We nearly ruptured our arms by pulling so hard to get the damn generator started. When it finally turned over we realized it was mixed too heavily with the 2-stroke oil when it uncontrollably covered our clear starry Tahoe skies with a smoke infested puke grey. Over the course of an hour or so the generator idled anywhere from really rough (like it was dying) to really horsepowered and hyper speeds, like it was going to explode. For the most part it was consistently noisy compared to the sleepy remnants of this Tahoe neighborhood. So we stuffed the power puker inside of the pool shed and ran extension cords accordingly; somehow never getting busted or even noticed (or shocked to death). The session that ensued was one of the most memorable in my many years of riding boards. The stealth winter pool mission was now successful and over the course of the next few days the weather warmed too much for the bowling pin bowl to ever even have a chance of happening. In fact the season from there on out was kind of a dud. Winter just melted out. This “snowpool” session was a definite highlight of the winter.

(I curiously went back months later in the summer with my skate in the car and a high interest in bailing and possibly skating the bowling pin pool but by chance both bowls and the boarded up apartments were completely gone; almost like it never happened. Was this just a weird dream or something?)