he legendary California ski resort formerly known as Squaw Valley officially has a new name as of this week: Palisades Tahoe. The name comes from a storied zone on the mountain, a steep, chute-riddled area above its Siberia chairlift, that has been the focus of many classic ski movies, dating back to the era of pioneering freeskiers like Scot Schmidt and Shane McConkey.
Neighboring resort Alpine Meadows, which is under the same ownership, will also fall under the Palisades Tahoe brand, although Alpine Meadows and Olympic Valley—the incorporated area at the base of what was Squaw Valley—will retain those names to help differentiate between the two adjacent base areas.
Changing the resort’s name—due to the derogatory nature of the word squaw, a slur toward Native American women—has been decades in the making. In the 1990s, members of the American Indian Movement first pushed the resort to go by something different. This was prompted in part by a Minnesota law, passed in 1995, that resulted in the modification of 19 geographic titles in the state that contained squaw.