The streets are quiet in a residential neighborhood of South Lake Tahoe, California, and I’m standing in three feet of snow on an unplowed street at the base of a 100-foot-tall ponderosa pine tree. The snow continues to fall and pile up around me. I’m wearing an old pair of leather hiking boots, heavy DaKine gloves and have the new Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra tucked into my North Face ski jacket.
Sounds like the perfect start to an adventure.
All the photos you see in this story were taken on the S24 Ultra. Below is an image I shot at lake level, an elevation of more than 6,200 feet, during the relentless storm. Blinding winds and blizzard conditions shut down nearly everything.Â
Storms didn’t just flurry, they roared in with a jest of deceptive tranquility that could quickly turn consequential. The weather made the act of simple human survival transport me out of a world of modern convenience and made me feel like I was a pioneer in a vast, indifferent wilderness.
I arrived after three days of continuous blizzard conditions. Lake Tahoe was in the middle of getting hammered by a historic storm that ended up dumping more than 10 feet of snow on the Sierra Nevada Mountains by the time it ceased.
And I was stuck right in the middle.
A storm of this magnitude on a major travel corridor such as Interstate 80 requires patience. Traffic came to a halt. We passed dozens of stranded tractor trailer trucks buried in the accumulation on the winding road into the mountains. The closure of Interstate 80 earlier this month disrupted logistics and deliveries in nearly every industry.
A Tahoe local’s modern survival instinct for a storm like this doesn’t just include food, water and shelter; it means skiing and…
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