Hoan’s extended family came up to the Tahoe house for 4th of July weekend and Darlene and I were able to join them. Six adults and six kids at the house! Over the course of four days, we caught the fireworks at Donner Lake, checked out the nearby North Tahoe Regional Park, hiked up to the vista point on the Tahoe Rim Trail above the house (and Brockway Summit) for a sunset view, kayaked from Homewood to Sugar Point State Park (and back), hiked from Donner Summit through the old train tunnels and hung out a bit at Kings Beach. Hoan, Samantha, Justine and Phong also gave one of the Tahoe Treetop Adventure Parks a try. (One of them is just a mile or so from the house.)
Click through for the full gallery – my pics plus some from everybody else:
Troy, Resi and Aiden came up to the Tahoe house in mid-April to get a couple of last days in before Homewood and several other Tahoe resorts had their closing weekend. Definitely spring skiing conditions with slush (and mud) at the bottom and, up top, overnight frozen snow turning too soft mid-way through the day. But then, as they headed back to the Bay Area, the temperatures dropped and we got another snow storm Sunday night. Jon joined me at Alpine Meadows and then Squaw Valley to enjoy a last couple of powder days for the season!
Troy got a friendly visit from a bear overnight. He woke to find all four doors on his truck open and the evidence of a bit of ransacking from a dirty bear – so lucky it was unlocked or the bear might have broken in:
A cute little video of Pan falling asleep at the wheel:
I haven’t been skiing at Mammoth since the early nineties, after college, but it’s where I learned to ski in high school from nearby Bishop. And I had forgotten what a great big and diverse ski mountain it is – though I’m sure I also wasn’t skiing as much of any mountain’s terrain back then either. Anyway, driving to Mammoth from Santa Cruz/San Jose in the winter isn’t very convenient (given all the Sierra passes are closed) and you have to essentially drive by many other great ski resorts to do it. However, with an extended stay at our new place in Tahoe last week, it was easy to hop down to Mammoth for a couple of days (just a three hour drive) and make use of our Mountain Collective passes.
We got some nice, typical spring skiing conditions: overnight frozen snow, following the sun as the slopes softened up from east to west to north. Plus Mammoth is so high (peaking at 11,000 ft), it was easy to avoid any sticky slush that would develop lower down.
March really came through for snow in Tahoe! We got one storm after another including some nice cold ones for some great light powder days. I also closed on the purchase of a house in Tahoe Vista and with the help of Darlene, Resi, Troy and Aiden, we were able to put it to great use right away! Troy’s brother Rick and his son Grayson also joined us for a few days at the… “Moose Haus”? “Moose Lodge”? Even Pan and Hera came up for a couple of weeks.
Click through for the full gallery of pictures from our five various days of skiing at Homewood over a couple of weeks in mid- to late-March:
Finally got some snow to ski in Tahoe this past week. Chased the storm up with Troy on Thursday night. We had eighteen inches of powder to play with at Homewood, which was nice, but there wasn’t much of a base (like 25″), so still tons of obstacles to watch out for everywhere. Creeks and rocks and trees and those sneaky, ski- and board-eating shrubberies! As a result, lots of terrain wasn’t really accessible and you had to be pretty careful where you went, but there was still plenty of room for fun.
Here’s some pictures and a little video – though I really should’ve recorded some of the obstacle-dodging craziness and the digging of ourselves out of heavy, sun-saturated powder traps!
Darlene and I went down to Pinnacles National Park for dark skies to watch the Geminids meteor shower Wednesday night:
Time-lapse of Geminids meteor shower
That’s a 20-second time-lapse I made looking south towards Orion about midnight, covering about 90 minutes that didn’t include any light trails from passing airplanes. And here’s a still shot.
I had promised Darlene a substitute backpacking trip when we found out she would no longer be able to go on our upcoming backpacking trip in Washington state. We were able to take four days over the Labor Day weekend and I picked out a promising area that I hadn’t been to north of Lake Thomas A. Edison that would give Darlene another taste of the High Sierra.
We took off Saturday afternoon amid some unusual high temps as well as heavy smoke that had blown down from numerous wildfires in Oregon and Northern California. It was a five and a half hour drive to get to the trailhead, including an interesting drive over a very rough, one lane road from Huntington Lake that goes over Kaiser Pass at 9184 feet. We found a spot to camp along the road near the High Sierra Ranger Station on Saturday night and to wait to get a wilderness pass in the morning.
A meadow along Silver Pass Creek
We had our pick of numerous trailheads near Lake Edison but settled on doing a loop up and over part of the Silver Divide by following the John Muir Trail / Pacific Crest Trail over Silver Pass and then returning via Goodale Pass. (View map.) The smoke from the distant fires was still pretty heavy and worrisome on Sunday morning but we managed to just barely catch the backpacker’s ferry boat across Lake Edison and that cut out four miles of hiking our way around the reservoir to get started. From the ferry landing (7643 ft), it’s about nine miles to the top of Silver Pass (10,900 ft).
Our room with a view over Chief Lake at 10,400 ft.
There’s lots of small, alpine lakes scattered along the divide and we found a lovely spot to spend two nights overlooking Chief Lake just below Silver Pass at about 10,400 ft. Thankfully the smoke wasn’t too bad at altitude and it mostly cleared out overnight with the winds and occasional brief showers. Not much to see in the way of stars though with a very bright full moon on display.
Sunset skies over the distant Minarets to the north
In the morning, we were treated to views of the distant Minarets (part of the Ritter Range) up near Mammoth. There were a good deal of mosquitos in the morning and evening but not as much as I had feared given our really wet winter this year. The weather alternated between periods of sunshine and heavy clouds with brief sprinkling while we ventured up a nearby ridge on the Silver Divide to get some more stupendous views of our surroundings.
Enjoying the panorama perched on a ridge above Silver Pass
Monday night was tough to sleep through as we had hours of heavy gusting winds but eventually it quieted down. Our return journey on Tuesday was about 12 miles over Goodale Pass (10,997 ft) down to the Vermillion Resort on Lake Edison. However, it was clear my boots were not going to make it – the soles were completely disintegrating. They’re probably also why I lost my footing and ended up crashing into a creek when I attempted to push off one rock to leap to another. I ended up using my shoelaces to tie the soles to the bottom of my shoes and keep them from coming completely separated before reaching the end of the trail. I might need some new boots now though.
