The Wrong Side of the Mountain
A California school district kept its kids out of dangerous snow by keeping sports in Nevada. Then the culture war came.
Hello! My hiatus is going well — thanks for asking. Below is a story I wrote for The Dispatch. Hope you enjoy, and please stick around for a brief after-thought below the story itself. I’m going to try to make a habit of adding something a little extra whenever I publish one of my Dispatch pieces here, like I did last time.
I can’t really explain the very complicated, extremely American conflict engulfing California’s Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District without explaining the road I took to get there in March.
Let’s say you do what I did: Berkeley to Truckee. You start in the San Francisco Bay, at elevation zero-ish. You take Route 24 out of Berkeley. That’ll bring you, via a number of valleys, through the hills of the Coast Ranges—a mere appetizer, by the standards of this drive, but striking in their own right and dazzlingly lush if your timing is right regarding season and recent rainfall. Eventually you hit the main highway, I-80, connecting the Bay to the Tahoe region, which will take you the rest of your way, including through the Central Valley towns of Dixon and Davis. Here it’s farmland and farmland and farmland, much of it dedicated to growing tomatoes. This middle part of the drive isn’t all that pretty, but it doesn’t last long either.
It’s once you’re past Sacramento that the true majesty starts. Sacramento sits basically at sea level, and it usually doesn’t get any snow. But it is situated just west of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range—one of the snowiest places in the country—and that’s where I-80 brings you next. The last 90 minutes of the drive take you into those foothills, and then up, up, up—the mixed flora of Sacramento giving way to a landscape of coniferous forests that gets more dramatic with every passing mile. And all of a sudden you’re in the sky; all of a sudden you are straining, as you drive, against the temptation to gawk at the vistas that present themselves whenever there’s a gap in the trees or whenever the highway takes you around a particularly spectacular bend. It is patently ridiculous that you were just rolling through level farmland, that you saw your last palm tree, like, 45 minutes ago. Now it’s mountains and valleys and cliffs and pine trees and rocks extending out forever.
And, for about half of the year: snow. So much snow.
Then, the Donner Pass. We’ll get back to the Donner Pass, trust me, because in many respects it is the main character of the story. But once you’re over the Pass, I-80 dips you swiftly back down more than 1,000 feet into Truckee, the biggest town in the North Lake Tahoe region: approximately 17,500 year-round residents, the population swelling significantly during prime tourist season in the winter (skiing and snowboarding) and summer (hiking, rock climbing, and lake-enjoying). The cute downtown, which looks like something out of a western, consists mostly of a strip of diners, coffee shops, and art galleries lining Donner Pass Road.
And not far from that strip is the headquarters of the region’s school district, Tahoe-Truckee Unified (TTUSD). Which brings us to the present conflict.
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TTUSD has two traditional high schools, North Tahoe and Truckee. Their students mostly head east, rather than west, to play high school sports—since the early 1980s they have been part of the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, or NIAA. That’s because of the Donner Pass.
You have probably heard of the Donner Party, the group of emigrants who became trapped during the final stretch of their planned journey from Illinois and Missouri to the fertile promised land of the Sacramento Valley in the winter of 1846-1847. Some of the survivors, pinned down by relentless snowstorms in dirty, ramshackle camps not far from present-day Truckee, eventually ate their deceased pets and human companions.
As they so horrifically found out, there’s nothing you can do about a sudden juggernaut of a storm dumping 4 feet of snow atop you and your family. And while the idea of a 4 feet of snow is hard for those of us from more forgiving American climates to fully understand, it isn’t particularly unusual, in the higher-altitude regions of the Sierras, from December to March. And storms that are rather—to dip into contemporary Californian parlance—gnarly can, from time to time, hit as early as November and as late as April.
Today, of course, you traverse the emigrants’ path through the Sierras in hours rather than months, from the safety and comfort of a climate-controlled car. But while I-80 is a wide, modern, well-maintained highway, three or four or seven times a year, its higher-elevation Sierras stretch gets walloped by a big storm. During these storms the state’s transportation authority will bar passage to cars lacking four-wheel or all-wheel drive, unless they have chains on their tires, or to even close parts of the highway entirely. Despite the warnings, the flashing signs on the side of the highway, and the checkpoints where Caltrans employees ensure that the cars passing through are appropriately equipped, people always make this drive who shouldn’t. More often than not, the big snowfalls generate scenes like this, from a storm in February that dumped more than 100 inches (yes, more than 8 feet) of snow on the Pass in five days:
That, more than any other reason, is why the Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District has long competed in a Nevada-based athletic conference: To avoid sending student-athletes over the Pass in the winter, instead placing the district’s athletic center of gravity in a region with much, much gentler weather.
But soon, TTUSD student-athletes might be forced to go west, over the Pass, even during prime blizzard season.
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TTUSD’s troubles originated thousands of miles to the east, in Washington, D.C., and they center on a long, complicated game of White House ping-pong over how sex should be defined in federal law. President Barack Obama and then President Joe Biden argued that the preexisting “on the basis of sex” language of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 includes gender identity in that category—thereby (they argued) ensuring trans Americans’ access to certain spaces in certain contexts. Both Trump administrations have begged to differ, insisting on the traditional definition of “sex.” As I wrote in The Economist last year, this all has “led to what Doriane Coleman of Duke University School of Law described as a severe ‘whiplash’ effect, with the government’s understanding of sex swinging wildly back and forth depending on the current administration’s policy preferences and, in some cases, the latest court rulings.” (The more recent battle in this war was concluded last week, when a Supreme Court ruling upheld state laws segregating school sports by biological sex.)
It’s no surprise, then, that when Trump was inaugurated the second time he quickly signed an executive order threatening to “rescind all funds from [federally funded] educational programs” that used gender identity, rather than biological sex, to determine who is allowed to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams. This executive order applied significant pressure on many school districts and athletic conferences to conform to the White House’s preferred approach to high school sports.
One of those conferences was the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, which at the time had a policy allowing students to play sports on the teams corresponding to their gender identity, with permission from their school. That conference’s leadership voted on April 1, 2025, to amend this policy, requiring athletes to compete according to their birth sex. The conference’s executive director said he did “not think it would behoove us as a body to willfully violate” the order.
Under normal circumstances, the Tahoe-Truckee district would have likely been forced, regardless of its own feelings on the matter, to shrug and go along with the NIAA’s new policy, at least until the next swing of our giant national sex-and-gender-identity pendulum. But because TTUSD lies across the border, it is subject to California state law, which mandates that “A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.” In the wake of the NIAA change, TTUSD realized it could find itself in violation of this law by competing in a conference that had adopted a strict biological-sex standard.
The district’s reaction was swift: Just a month after the NIAA vote in April 2025, TTUSD took preemptive action, announcing that it planned to transition to the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) the following academic year, specifically the so-called Sac-Joaquin section (that’s a reference to Sacramento and the Northern San Joaquin Valley). From there, things got confusing: That announcement was followed, in rather swift succession, by that same body announcing a one-year delay to the switch, and by the TTUSD Board of Trustees voting to remain in the NIAA. Then, in late June of last year, the California Department of Education (CDE) received a complaint alleging that the district’s decision to remain in the NIAA violated California state law.
The complaint, no copy of which has been made public, came from an unnamed former TTUSD student. In April, my researcher requested a copy from the California Department of Education, which we received on July 8. “By refusing to leave the NIAA, TTUSD is undermining the rights of transgender students and violating the very legal and ethical obligations that safeguard students in our state,” the writer, whose name was redacted, stated. “As someone who grew up in this district and participated in its sports programs, I find this action deeply personal and profoundly distressing.”
The writer also stated that, by refusing to leave the NIAA, TTUSD would be “undermining the rights of transgender students and violating the very legal and ethical obligations that safeguard students in our state.” The CDE ruled that the complaint had merit and that TTUSD would, in fact, have to switch conferences. Glossing over some further bureaucratic wrangling, TTUSD now plans to switch conferences starting during the 2028-2029 season.
While this unfolded, the Trump Department of Justice sued the CDE and CIF, claiming that allowing transgender girls to compete on girls’ teams is a violation of Title IX. For those keeping track at home, we have the Trump administration suing California for allowing trans girls to play in the female category while California pressures TTUSD to leave a Nevada-based athletic conference because it doesn’t allow trans girls to play in the female category. It’s like something out of a hacky political satire.
It’s worth noting that as far as anyone knows, no current TTUSD student has complained or claimed they are being discriminated against; according to parents I’ve spoken with, as well as communications from the district, none of the district’s 800 or so student-athletes appear to be openly trans, anyway.
In any case, a group of very vocal TTUSD parent-activists have sprung up to oppose the conference switch, launching Facebook groups like Tahoe-Truckee Save Our Sports (which has almost 2,000 followers) and making themselves heard at school-board meetings and other events. One of this group’s unofficial leaders is Todd Winter, an attorney who moved to Truckee in 2015 with his wife, Hien vo Winter, a fellow attorney. Both of their kids play sports, and Winter himself coaches high school girls’ basketball in the district.
The first time I saw Winter in person was at a school board meeting in Truckee I attended in March. He was scheduled to speak after three TTUSD employees—two athletic directors and an assistant principal—gave a presentation to the board downplaying the logistical difficulties of switching conferences. Among other points, they noted that it actually wasn’t unusual for TTUSD teams to travel over the Pass to games and matches, including for soccer, football, and cross country.
Winter stood up and issued a civil but pointed rejoinder. He said he had “so much respect” for the TTUSD staffers who had just presented, “but so much of what they said was very misleading, and the Board needs to really consider this.” Yes, he explained, TTUSD sometimes went “over the hill” for sports competitions. But those trips were mostly for fall sports, a season that generally only extends to the end of November. “You’re proposing that buses and vans full of kids go back and forth over the hill for winter sports,” he said—during the very teeth of the Sierras’ monster-storm season.
I met Winter the next day at a Truckee coffee shop. During our discussion, he brought up a tragedy that had occurred a couple of weeks prior, during the aforementioned 100-inch February storm: An avalanche had killed nine skiers during a guided trip. “This year it’s only happened once, but those kinds of events happen all the time,” he told me. “Not necessarily nine people killed—that was obviously tragic—but road closures, three days in a row of no school … that’s not unusual in a season. It happens multiple times.” From where Winter sits, the school district is covering its own ass legally rather than taking into account the danger its students might face.
What alternatives? Winter has diligently catalogued all the ways in which, as he sees it, the district is falling short of resolving this conflict in the safest and sanest possible manner. Among other documents, he put together a 20-page memo laying out both what they see as the district’s errors and its best path forward, including retaining independent outside counsel and pursuing all available legal and administrative remedies (many of which, unsurprisingly, get a bit in the weeds).
Perhaps Winter’s most compelling argument is that there’s little sense in making a hasty switch given the current climate of legal chaos and uncertainty. If anything, given the active federal lawsuit against the CDE, switching might prove the more legally fraught option. “Those developments, combined with the full record of the federal litigation in which the CDE and CIF are named parties, establish that the CDE’s corrective action order is not a compliance remedy,” the memo argues. “It is an instruction to step into active federal litigation crossfire.”
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Truckee sits in Nevada County, California. It’s a fitting name given that in many ways, this area has closer ties to Nevada than to the rest of California. Reno is the closest significant population center; it’s about 35 minutes northeast from Truckee to Reno on I-80 in good driving conditions. Prices in the mountains are often unreasonable (ask me about my $20 taco truck torta), so yearlong residents head to Reno for cheaper goods, for big box stores, and to take advantage of Reno-Tahoe International Airport’s direct links to cities like New York and Los Angeles. And since housing is far more plentiful and affordable across the border in Nevada, the many service workers who keep the Truckee-area tourist industries humming often commute from Reno or nearby Carson City.
I’d done the I-80 drive from Truckee northeast into Nevada some years prior and remembered that it was breathtaking, but I decided to do it again to better understand the normal route TTUSD student-athletes took to get to their games and why it was supposedly so much safer. Not wanting to push The Dispatch’s gas-money-reimbursement generosity by picking, say, Elko (about 320 miles each way), I decided to drive the 38 or so miles from Truckee High School to one of TTUSD’s closer Nevada-side opponents: Sparks High School—Sparks being a large Reno suburb that early in the 20th century decided to name itself after the state’s then-governor, John Sparks.
During the course of this short trip, you find yourself in a rockier and rockier landscape, the vegetation getting thinner and scragglier. Once you’re a significant northeast distance from the Pass, the landscape transitions into something unlike anything you’ll find to the west—much craggier and noticeably more arid.
That’s because of something called orographic lift. This is the phenomenon by which air that is forced upward becomes colder, raising its relative humidity and potentially causing precipitation. By dint of the particular angle at which warm, moist Pacific air is blown inland and then hits the Sierras, the Donner Pass, despite being just a 15-minute drive from Truckee in good weather, gets almost twice as much snow per year, 400 inches or so, as the (itself famously snowy) town does. Truckee is east of the pass and a bit lower, so by the time storms arrive there, they’ve already been sapped of a bit of their moisture and energy by orographic lift. And as you continue on I-80 northeast from Truckee toward the Reno area, you travel deeper and deeper into the “rain shadow” caused by this phenomenon—an area naturally shielded from precipitation (or much of it, at least) as a result of these natural forces. That’s why, generally speaking, the eastern side of the Sierras is so much drier than the western side.
The rain shadow brings with it a remarkable transformation. The 40 minutes or so from Truckee to Sparks bring you from one of the snowiest parts of the contiguous U.S.—a place where six inches of snow can fall in four hours—to a city that gets less than that most years.
Sparks, like Reno, lies in what is known as a cold semi-arid climate zone. It’s not a desert, but it’s pretty dry—much drier than what you get if you turn around and head back into the Sierras, as I did after I got to the high school.
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I met another local parent-activist, A.J. Cheline, at North Tahoe High School, about 20 minutes south of Truckee in Tahoe City, a small town that sits on the lake. The high school is part of a sprawling campus that includes tennis courts, a football field ringed by a running track, and the local middle school, all tucked into quiet pines a bit uphill from the lake, which peeks through here and there.
Cheline and his wife have two kids, one of whom plays tennis and the other of whom plays soccer. He recalled the shock of hearing the announcement for the first time. “It was just like, Wow, what is this?” he said. It felt like there’d been no deliberation, no real process. And if the switch does go through, he worries that it could simply wipe out both of his kids’ ability to play high school sports at all.
This might sound like an exaggeration, but the argument is straightforward. As Cheline noted, soccer and tennis are fall sports in Nevada that are all wrapped up by mid-November, which is well before Tahoe usually sees major snow. In CIF Sac-Joaquin, on the other hand, boys’ and girls’ soccer is usually played in the winter, the playoffs occurring in February, while boys’ tennis is usually played in a spring season that starts in late January.
None of this is a problem for student-athletes and their families in places like Sacramento. There, as in most of low-elevation California, winters are famously mild and pose no obstacle to outdoor sports. Up in the mountains things are very different. In places like Truckee and Tahoe City, any outdoor surface that isn’t diligently plowed or shoveled usually gets buried by snow—feet of it, usually—from January until early April or so. That was part of why Cheline invited me to meet him at the high school, to simply show me how unplayable everything was. Even after some freak March rains had wiped out a good chunk of February’s pileup, a quick loop of the grounds made it clear how difficult it would be for anyone to be playing soccer this time of year. (To be fair, one of the seven CIF Sac-Joaquin divisions, Division 7, does have boys’ soccer in the fall. But Cheline explained that there are concerns that this division wouldn’t be competitive enough for TTUSD, since it’s for the very smallest schools, and it would still leave the girls’ team in a difficult position, since their season would start in late February.)
“If they schedule games in winter or early spring, it’s just not viable,” said Cheline. “Kids who are serious about soccer are going to look for other options. So then the question becomes—can they even fill the team? I doubt it.”
Part of the problem is the lack of local indoor athletics space: The district has raised the possibility of building some sort of indoor facility via funds that could theoretically be provided by the state legislature or a bond measure, but this appears to be purely hypothetical at this point. And indoor space or no, every game between a TTUSD school and schools on the other side of the Donner Pass would involve busloads or vanloads of kids doing a round trip over it. This, critics of the conference switch insist, would not only bring with it the safety concerns inherent to the route, but also potentially expensive logistical problems: What happens if a TTUSD team travels to Sacramento, or a vice versa, and then gets stranded at their away-game location due to the pass being, well, unpassable? In the worst cases, this could lead to frantic attempts to find overnight lodging for what was supposed to be a quick day trip, disrupted family plans, and thousands of dollars in extra travel costs.
Like the other parent-activists I spoke with, Cheline felt that the school board was simply not standing up for families like his own. “Right now, it feels like the board is just marching forward, satisfied with a delay,” said Cheline. “And that’s not what the community is satisfied with—at all. What we’re asking for is simple: Challenge it in court and have a judge look at all the factors involved. Because there are a lot of trade-offs.”
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The theme of trade-offs came up repeatedly in my conversations with parents. I kept hearing different versions of the same simple argument: The possibility of discrimination against a hypothetical student-athlete who, as far as anyone could tell, didn’t yet exist, was being addressed in as heavyhanded a manner as possible, by replacing a system that had been working for a long time with one that seemed ill-suited to the region’s geographic idiosyncrasies and the realities of Tahoe winters.
Winter, who described himself as a political moderate who is pro-LGBT in general, acknowledged that he did personally oppose “males at birth playing against females,” noting—correctly—that this is a “pretty common position around the country.” But he and the other advocates I spoke with seemed to prefer discussing what they see as the tangible safety and logistics concerns to participating in the raucous national debate over self-ID in sports. That’s part of what makes this controversy so interesting: the very, very concrete ways it could affect so many kids and families who wouldn’t otherwise have much of a stake in this issue.
The district, for its part, wouldn’t answer any of the questions I sent it, including requests to respond to Winter’s specific claims and an update on the indoor-facility planning. Via a spokeswoman, it instead replied with a canned statement that read, in part, “To help with your research, you can access our detailed presentations, family communications—including our letter outlining timeline details—and official correspondence on our athletics page. Additionally, video archives of past Board meetings are available for full context.” The spokeswoman also pointed me to a video of a recent board meeting where the district’s superintendent provided an update.
But in my view, the district’s communications and presentations have not substantively addressed the legal and logistical downsides raised by opponents of the switch.
TTUSD is clearly caught in a difficult situation. But this controversy is the natural result of the country’s deep divide. And of course we are not just any country: Our combination of federalism, increasing polarization, and the ever-growing power claimed by the executive branch all make these debates more toxic, complex, and confusing than they might be elsewhere.
There’s really no way to know how this will all resolve—it’ll be determined by court cases, elections, and local activism in Truckee and the surrounding communities. In the meantime, the student-athletes of TTUSD, as well as their families, are caught in a complex and very-2026 dispute—through no fault of their own.
Brendan Keen contributed research.
My after-thoughts are more about reporting itself than the details of this story. I love reporting. It was great to drive to Tahoe and attend that school board meeting and drive to Sparks and (this didn’t make it into the story) check out the actual sites where the Donner Party members hunkered down and, in many cases, perished.
I made that trip and did that reporting whilst juggling other responsibilities, including this newsletter, my podcast, and my book. In a perfect world I’d have been able to spend several more days in and around Truckee, attend more meetings, meet more parents, knock on some doors of school-board members, and all that other journalist-y stuff. That’s what’s so sad about the implosion of journalism: There’s hardly anyone left who has the resources to give a story like this the time and attention and care it deserves.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy with how this turned out, and even if I’d had more time to spend in Tahoe, it’s unlikely I would have gotten much from anyone who is in favor of the conference switch, given the circumstances. But working on this story did remind me how uniquely satisfying reporting is — satisfying and resource-intensive. At its best, on-the-ground reporting provides perspectives and information that really can’t be replicated in any other form, and I hope we’re able to save it from the merciless economic forces that have decimated it.
A couple points.
It looks like nature (weather and geography) are once again impinging upon "identity" and politics.
Second, is it better to have a live son than a dead daughter, killed in a weather/geography-related accident? California prefers taking on the risk, I guess.
Maybe truckee should vote to join Nevada.