Winter Driving in Tahoe: What Actually Matters

Three things, in order

Most winter driving advice online is a long, unranked list of tips, which doesn't help much when you're standing in the driveway on a Friday night trying to decide what to do. Three things matter most: what's on your tires, how much room you leave, and whether you go at all.

People skip the third one. Not driving, or leaving several hours later, is a perfectly good call, and you can always make it. No ski day is worth a night parked on a closed highway.

What lives in the car all winter

Our gear list has two items for the road rather than the slopes. Keep them in the car from the first storm to the last. Both are on the packing list:

• Tire chains, filed under traction. Fit them to your own car once in a dry driveway, long before you need them in the dark.
• A folding emergency shovel, filed under safety. It takes up almost no trunk space, and it means you can dig yourself out of a berm instead of waiting on someone else.
• Gloves you don't mind destroying, and a headlamp. Neither is on the gear list, but you'll want both to use the first two at night.

Most bad drives end in a stop, not a crash

Most bad Tahoe drives don't involve hitting anything. You get stopped instead: turned around at a chain checkpoint because the chains are at home, parked on the highway behind someone else's spinout, or pulling into the resort to find the lot filled while you were sitting still. Mostly you're trying not to be the reason a lane gets closed.

So drive like it. Leave more space than feels silly, make every steering and braking input slower and smaller than you would on dry pavement, and stay off cruise control once there's snow on the road. Going uphill, keep steady momentum. Going downhill, be slow before the corner instead of braking in the middle of it.