Drive past the Homewood base area on Highway 89 this month and you won't see a ski resort. You'll see a construction site: graders reshaping the slope above the parking lot, a generator parked where a chairlift used to load, and no sign of the eight-passenger gondola that's supposed to be running by winter. Those gondola cabins and towers spent the better part of a year staged in a lot in Sparks, Nevada before installation crews finally broke ground on the route this spring, the same route that used to carry the Madden Chair.
Fifteen miles up the shore, Northstar has already put a date on its website: November 20. Homewood hasn't. If you live between Tahoe City and Rubicon and you're used to checking the resort's site every September for a season kickoff, that blank space might read like bad news. It isn't. It's the normal shape of a Homewood fall, and it's not actually the deadline that should have your attention right now.
What Happened After the Last Chair Stopped Spinning
Homewood's 2025-26 season ended abruptly. The resort didn't get lifts turning until December 27, after a run of late-December storms finally built enough of a base, and it closed early on March 17 after a stretch of warm, dry weather cut the back half of the season short. Homewood's general manager Andy Buckley later described the closure to a Reno television station as the moment the real work began: crews started dismantling the Madden Chair, a lift installed in 1966, within days, because its cable lines run through the route the new gondola needs.
Some of those retired chairs are being sold, with proceeds going to charity. That detail matters less for what it says about the lift and more for what it says about the pace: Homewood didn't wait for summer to start construction. It started the week the snow stopped.
According to Buckley's March interview, gondola installation itself was scheduled to begin May 1, running alongside new snowmaking infrastructure meant to fix a specific weakness from the 2025-26 season, thin coverage on the lower runs connecting the upper and lower mountain. Buckley said the goal was to have grading and dirt work finished by October 15, with the gondola itself targeted for December, in time for the 2026-27 opening.
The Timeline, Set Against What's Already Happened
None of this is a promise. It's a sequence of dates, some already passed, some still ahead, and it's worth laying out plainly so you can watch it the way the resort is:
| Date | What's supposed to happen |
|---|---|
| March 17, 2026 | Homewood closes early for the season; Madden Chair teardown begins within days |
| May 1, 2026 | Gondola installation and new snowmaking work both begin |
| October 15, 2026 (target) | Grading and dirt work complete, per Buckley's March timeline |
| October 31, 2026 | Deadline to verify West Shore residency for the discounted resident season pass |
| December 2026 (target) | Gondola operational, ahead of the 2026-27 opening |
Two of those five dates are already behind us. The mountain hit its early closure and started teardown on schedule. Whether the October 15 grading target holds is the next real checkpoint, and it's one a West Shore resident can actually observe by driving past the base rather than waiting on a press release.
Why the Silence on an Opening Date Isn't the Story
Homewood has never announced its opening day months in advance the way Northstar does. Northstar can commit to a Thanksgiving-adjacent date because its snowmaking system can manufacture a base almost regardless of what the sky does. Homewood's opening has historically tracked actual snowfall: last season's December 27 start came only after storms delivered enough natural snow to work with, and the early March 17 closure came from the same dependency running the other way.
The new snowmaking investment underway this summer is aimed at loosening exactly that dependency, but it's not finished yet, and a resort mid-construction has more reason than usual to wait on weather before naming a date. Unofficial Networks, which tracks California ski resort announcements, listed Homewood among the mountains still without a published 2026-27 opening date as of mid-September, in the same group as Boreal, Sierra-at-Tahoe, and Tahoe Donner's downhill area. That's a list of resorts waiting on conditions, not a list of resorts behind schedule.
"It's the start of the revitalization of the West Shore," Buckley said of the current construction push.
That's a general manager's framing, not a neutral one, but it lines up with what's actually visible from the road: work happening in real time, on a schedule laid out months ago, rather than a project stalled or quietly abandoned.
The Deadline That Actually Has a Date on It
While the opening day stays open-ended, Homewood's West Shore Resident Pass does not. The pass is built for full-time residents living between Tahoe City and Rubicon, and it carries the same access as the resort's Value Pass at a lower price. To use it this season, residents need to complete verification, including a driver's license or government ID with an address that matches the pass shipping address, by October 31, 2026.
The pass itself isn't unrestricted. Like the Value Pass it's built on, it excludes a handful of peak dates: December 26 through January 1, January 16 and 17, and February 13 through 15. Outside those windows, it's valid seven days a week. Homewood also offers an Unlimited upgrade with no blackout dates at all for residents who want full flexibility, and last season's Unlimited pass for adults was priced at $1,199, a figure the resort had already moved off an earlier, lower estimate that circulated before pricing was finalized.
None of that pricing has been republished for 2026-27 as of late September, which is one more reason the verification deadline matters more than the still-unpublished opening date. Missing October 31 doesn't just cost convenience. For residents who've relied on the discounted pass in past seasons, it's the one date on Homewood's calendar this fall that doesn't move with the weather or the construction schedule.
What This Looks Like From the Road
For residents between Sunnyside and Tahoma, the practical read this fall is simple. The base area will keep looking like a work site through at least mid-October, when the grading target comes due. West Shore Sports, which rents gear out of three West Shore locations including Homewood and Sugar Pine Point State Park, will make its usual seasonal swap toward ski and snowboard gear once the calendar turns, regardless of whether a lift is spinning yet. And the one form of paperwork that actually has a hard deadline this year isn't a permit or a construction milestone. It's a resident's own ID upload, due by Halloween.
Homewood's construction updates and season pass terms are posted directly on the resort's site, and worth checking again in mid-October once the grading target comes due.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on the West Shore, from how construction timelines like this one tend to affect nearby values to what a property near Homewood is worth once the gondola is actually running, Kane Schaller is a call away.
