Pioneer Ski Area of America

The headline is the Olympics and the argument is a century older. A thousand competitors from thirty-four nations came for the 1960 winter games, but the bronze is titled Pioneer Ski Area of America and spends most of its text on 1860, when mining camps in the Sierra, Whiskey Diggings and Poker Flat and Port Wine and Onion Valley and La Porte and Johnsville, ran the first organised ski clubs and races in the western hemisphere. The corporation that rededicated it in 1996 is now Palisades Tahoe.

What the plaque says

PIONEER SKI AREA OF AMERICA ONE THOUSAND COMPETITORS FROM 34 NATIONS CAME TO SQUAW VALLEY TO COMPETE IN THE VIII OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES OF 1960. THE GAMES, BROUGHT HERE BY ALEXANDER C. CUSHING, COMMEMORATED A CENTURY OF SPORT SKIING IN AMERICA. BY 1860 MINING TOWNS IN THE SIERRA NEVADA, PARTICULARLY WHISKEY DIGGINGS, POKER FLAT, PORT WINE, ONION VALLEY, LA PORTE, AND JOHNSVILLE, SAW THE FIRST ORGANIZED SKI CLUBS AND COMPETITION IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. CALIFORNIA REGISTERED HISTORICAL LANDMARK NO. 724 PLAQUE PLACED BY THE CALIFORNIA STATE PARK COMMISSION IN COOPERATION WITH THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, VIII OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES, FEBRUARY 14, 1960. REDEDICATED BY SQUAW VALLEY SKI CORPORATION, FEBRUARY 1996.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Donner Memorial State Park — 8.8 mi
  Where the Donner Party spent the winter of 1846, marked by cabin stone and a monument built to a remembered snow depth.
• Donner Summit Tunnels — 9.6 mi
  Granite bored by hand at fourteen inches a day, by Chinese crews the country spent a century forgetting.
• Sand Harbor — 16 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 18 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

More markers nearby

• Lake Tahoe Outlet Gates — 5.4 mi
• Donner Monument — 8.8 mi
• First Transcontinental Railroad — Truckee — 9.4 mi
• Sand Harbor — 16 mi