It's 8 a.m. at a highway pullout near one of Mount Rose's numerous trailheads. The Nevada air is crisp and you can almost see to the top: 10,776 feet. Fresh snow gathered in old tracks suggests hard backcountry use, both by nature-loving Tahoe free-heelers and Sacramento sled-necks whose fuel of choice is PBR not GORP.

Different mountain groups, after all, love mountains differently.

Big-mountain master Jeremy Jones is no stranger to this scene. The 33-year-old snowboarder pockets a Clif Bar, clips a pair of snowshoes to his pack and walks over to the sled trailer where Ryland Bell is doing the grunt work. The snowmobile being unloaded is one of the first on the scene, yet seven more soon show up on bouncy trailers, old F-250s and salt-licked double-loaders. It hasn't snowed in Tahoe for nearly a month, so the excitement of a late January powder day crackles in the air like static. The joke, of late, has been "June-uary" and it's one the locals are keen to ditch. Stat.

Sleds fire up all around and Jones becomes visibly annoyed by the braaps and blue smoke. The noisemakers idle for 10 minutes at a time, stuck into snow banks like mechanical cigarettes. "Let's go wait in those trees over there," he says in his trademark monotone, a no-B.S. hybrid smacking of a sea captain from his native Cape Cod crossed with the uninflected easiness of a Cali ski town bro. "Sled exhaust makes me kind of sick to my stomach."

ESPN