[genocidicbunny]

Because flying to CO or somewhere like that for skiing is even more of a pain the arse than driving to Tahoe.

Tahoe is a nightmare of traffic, terrible winter-weather drivers and crowds. 20 years ago it used to be a decent getaway for the weekend. Now, not so much -- it's basically a guarantee that you're going to spend a full day driving to/from there, and gods help you if you leave friday afternoon and try to drive back on sunday -- everyone, their dog and grandma included, are going to be doing the same exact thing.

Once or twice a year is not implying accessible -- it's implying that it's inaccessible. It's somewhere that people do want to go, but the effort required to do so limits most. If it wasn't worth going, people wouldn't be trying to go every winter, and if it was reasonably easy to get to, perhaps people would go more than once or twice a winter.

[chillee]

Reminds me of that Grouchism:

> Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

[genocidicbunny]

That's the wonder of tiny percentages of huge numbers -- they're still big numbers!

If only .01% of 35,000,000 people go to Tahoe every week, that's still 3500 people a week that are visiting. Thats a lot of cars on the road, a lot of people waiting in lines, a lot of hotel rooms and vacation rentals taken up. I made up these numbers of course, but the point is with a state like California, even a tiny fraction of the population visiting at any given time, it's still an overwhelming number of people to deal with. And its not even just Californians that go to Tahoe -- plenty of folks from other states visit, and plenty of international visitors too.

So back to

> Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

Yep, practically speaking, a tiny fraction of people that can go to Tahoe at any time actually go -- a rounding error -- 'nobody'. But it's still too damned crowded because Tahoe can't handle the rounding error anymore.