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Sierra Sun
Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows
A project, viewed by some in the Truckee-Tahoe area as controversial, is officially underway at Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows.
On Monday, the first work began on the resort’s base-to-base gondola an undertaking years in the making that will eventually allow guests to ride from The Village at Squaw Valley to the Alpine Meadows base area.
Tree cutting is already underway at the Alpine Meadows base area and adjacent Caldwell property, and will be followed in the coming months by excavation and blasting work.
The resort has no estimate on its website on when the gondola will be operational.
How it All Began
The Western States Trail finds its origins with the Native People who lived as hunters and gatherers as part of sophisticated trade and seasonal migration patterns who moved across the Great Basin from what is modern-day Utah into northern Nevada, California and the mountains around Lake Tahoe. From their various ancestral homes, these routes of seasonal migration proved key. The Washoe people, for example, traveled to the shores of Lake Tahoe “
Da ow aga” (“edge of the lake”) to harvest spring plants, to pick berries and seeds that had both nutritional and medicinal value and to catch the lake’s native fish. With the arrival of white explorers and settlers years and years later, the footprints of the Native People would prove to be a guide, a link through the wilderness, and would aid another group of people on their journey.