BEIJING, Beijing —

Team USA earned its first medal of the 2022 Winter Olympics in snowboarding but it didn't come from reigning two-time Olympic slopestyle champion Jamie Anderson.

Instead, fellow American Julia Marino won the silver, bested in the final moments of the competition by Zoi Sadowski Synnott of New Zealand for gold with her best score of 92.88 points.

South Lake Tahoe's Anderson, the favorite to win the event, failed to make the podium and came in 9th place.

The slopestyle snowboard final was a windy Saturday for the 12 women qualifiers, which also included Southern California's Hailey Langland who finished 11th.

The competition is scored by a panel of judges that grade performances based on execution, difficulty, amplitude, variety and progression of the run. The slopes are full of several different features snowboarders can use depending on their creativity.

The format of the final is that the best score of three rounds is the final score.

Tess Coady from Australia won a bronze medal with a score of 84.15 points.

How Anderson fell short

Anderson fell in her first round. By the second round she was in 8th place with a score of 60.78 points, her best of the three rounds, before falling again in her third round.

At Anderson's Olympic debut at the 2014 Sochi Games, she became the first-ever women’s Olympic slopestyle gold medalist. In PyeongChang, she won gold in slopestyle and silver in big air.

She grew up in South Lake Tahoe and said when she got on a snowboard for the first time, "I, like, fell in love with the winter season."

She’s now based in Whistler, a town in British Columbia.

Ahead of taking off for the Olympics, she announced her engagement on social media to Canadian snowboarder Tyler Nicholson.

“What I love about our partnership is that we are willing to work through the challenging and darker times to rise above to the lighter vibrations and in doing so, we are a stronger team!” she wrote.

Longtime Tahoe area resident Mel Smothers played his violin while being stuck in two hours of eastbound evacuation traffic on Highway 50 after mandatory evacuation orders were issued to all of South Lake Tahoe.Traffic was backed up Monday afternoon for miles along Highway 50 as drivers were making their way out of the South Lake Tahoe area eastbound toward the Nevada state line to escape the encroaching Caldor Fire.CHP South Lake Tahoe officer Ruth Loehr urged those sitting in traffic to “have some patience. We’re doing all we can to open up another route.” Video credit: Alvin Jornada / San Francisco Chronicle