Snow venues
Though two of the three snow venues used at the 1960 Olympic Winter Games were dismantled after the Games, the ski resort has gone from strength to strength and is now one of the USA’s leading ski destinations.
Ski Resort
The resort has developed significantly since hosting the Alpine skiing events at the 1960 Olympic Winter Games and has been named the best in North America on several occasions.
The resort had a solitary chair lift, two tow ropes and a 50-room lodge for visitors when it opened for skiing in 1949. The staging of the 1960 Olympic Winter Games changed it forever, with live television coverage of the events taking the resort into homes across the country.
The six alpine events at the 1960 Olympic Winter Games were held on three separate slopes: the men’s downhill took place on Squaw Peak; the men’s giant slalom and slalom on KT-22; and the three women’s events on Little Papoose Peak. The women’s slalom and giant slalom courses were used when the resort welcomed the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup in 2017, the first time World Cup races had been held at the resort since 1969.
The ski area merged in 2012 with the neighbouring ski resort of Alpine Meadows to become Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows. Receiving around 450 inches (11 metres) of snow a year and covering an area of over 6,000 skiable acres (24 square kilometres), the combined resort has 270 trails and is served by an advanced network of 31 lifts, capable of transporting 72,200 people up the slopes every hour.
Situated 42 miles (68 km) from Reno and 196 (315 km) from San Francisco, the resort is now one of Sierra Nevada’s leading ski resorts and an internationally recognised winter sports destination. Its 600,000 visitors a year are attracted by its deep snow, Californian sunshine and long skiing seasons, which have earned it the name of “Spring Skiing Capital”, as well as its 50 bars, restaurants and boutiques. The resort was voted Best Ski Resort in North America for three years in a row between 2016 and 2018 by USA Today. With a view to cementing that status, a USD 17 million investment in the resort was announced ahead of the 2019/20 season.
McKinney Creek Stadium
The venue for the cross-country skiing, Nordic combined (cross-country leg) and biathlon events at the 1960 Olympic Winter Games, McKinney Creek Stadium was dismantled as planned after the Games.
Erected especially for the Games, the stadium was located 16 miles (26 km) south of the resort, near Tahoma, a village on the shores of Lake Tahoe. It featured seating for 1,000 spectators and 200 journalists, a timing hut and scoreboard, all of which were taken down after the Games. The trails hosting the races were prepared mechanically, with a snowcat being used to pull an implement that broke up the surface of the snow to make it easier to ski on.
Many of the trails were restored for public use in 2010, while the resort now has a Nordic centre of its own. Occupying 40 acres (16 hectares), it offers 18 groomed kilometres of trails for skiers of all levels.
Papoose Peak Olympic Jumping Hill
Named after the rock face it was built on and situated in the centre of the ski resort, Papoose Peak Olympic Jumping Hill was erected specifically for the Olympic Winter Games 1960. The facility comprised three hills in all: a K80 ‘large’ hill, which staged the ski jumping competition; a K60 ‘normal’ hill, used for the ski jumping leg of the Nordic combined; and a 40-metre practice hill.
There was no great tradition of ski jumping in the western USA at the time, and the venue was little used in the years after the Games. It staged a few regional competitions and underwent some refurbishment for the 1976 US National Ski Jumping Championships before being dismantled in the late 1970s. It is now the site of the Far East Express chairlift, one of the ski resort’s 31 lifts.