An up-and-down ski season that ended well. Photo: Palisades Tahoe//screenshot
Palisades Tahoe is finally wrapping up its 2025-2026 season, the resort announced on Tuesday. Closing day will come on May 24, 2026, squeezing a surprisingly late season that got off to a later start than originally planned, endured low snowfall all winter, and recovered after a brutally warm March.
Palisades 2025-2026 season began on December 5, 2025. The resort had initially announced an opening day just before the Thanksgiving holiday, but warm temps in November set things back into the first week of December and only allowed for opening limited terrain. The historically warm and dry March that followed just a few months later prompted California’s largest resort to share that it might join the swarm of ski areas shutting down as much as a month earlier than usual. Palisades is usually one of the last resorts in the Sierra Nevada range standing at the end of each season, but “the lack of early and mid-season snowfall and a quickly diminishing base” made the goal of a Memorial Day closing unlikely, the resort said.
“We do not have a specific closing date because we are committed to going as long as conditions allow. We believe that Alpine can continue to operate into the first week of April and that Palisades can go until late April,” said Palisades in a release.
Then April delivered just under seven feet of new snow on the upper mountain to turn things around. And now here we are, with the longest season of the Tahoe resorts wrapping up over Memorial Day Weekend after all.
This leaves just one last resort open in California: Mammoth Mountain, about three and a half hours to the south. That resort has yet to announce a closing date, only sharing so far that it will remain open through at least Memorial Day 2026.
View this post on Instagram
