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Darlene and I met up with Nanci and Mike on Labor Day to take our kayaks out for a sunset paddle and dinner from Sand Harbor on the east shore of Lake Tahoe. Being late in the day, the water was pretty choppy but we successfully navigated around from the beach side to the more protected cove. And fried duck chicken for dinner!
Mark and Eve came up to the Tahoe house ahead of the extended Labor Day weekend, joined by their friends Matt & Lindsay for some excellent Tahoe area mountain biking. Mike and Nanci then joined us on Sunday.
Here’s the video montage I put together for all four days of riding:
On Thursday, Mark, Eve, Matt, Darlene and I hit up the Incline Flume trail starting from highway 431. We continued with an out-and-back on the classic Marlette Flume trail before Eve and Darlene opted to take Tunnel Creek Road down to lake level and the rest of us climbed the Incline Flume trail back to the cars.
On Friday, Darlene opted out and Lindsay joined us for a one-way ride from Watson Lake (above Tahoe City) on the newly completed Big Chief trail down to Sawtooth Ridge, outside of Truckee. The upper section of Big Chief is rated expert/”black diamond” and is filled with lots of big drops – much more than what I’m comfortable with but the lower, intermediate section was fun and includes a long flow trail section too. We finished up with Matt and Mark taking the west ridge, rocky portion of the Sawtooth Loop while Eve, Lindsay and I took the fast, flowy eastern side of the loop.
Matt left on Saturday, but the rest of us ended up trying a loop climbing up and around Incline Lake from the Incline Flume trailhead. This was a mixed bag of very steep unrideable portions of trail to get up there but with some fun singletrack once we did. Might be better to take the Old Mt. Rose Highway dirt road to get up there. (Mike has a suggestion for another route that he uses that we’ll try sometime.) For our return, Mark took the Tyrolean Downhill trail while he sent us to try a new trail through some recently logged terrain.
On Sunday, Mike and Nanci joined me and Darlene on part of the Emigrant Trail between highway 89 and Stampede Reservoir. This trail turned out to be a lot of flowy fun through varying scenery with some nice long ascents that turned into great descents on the return. Unfortunately, Nanci wasn’t feeling well and so she and Darlene bailed out early. We’ll be trying this one again soon though!
Video from my front camera at the Tahoe house early yesterday morning catches a bear checking the car doors of both Mark and Lindsay’s cars in the driveway. Unfortunately my video stops short of showing how they try to pull on the door handles. Lindsay noticed somebody’s car down the street appeared to have been opened up and searched by a bear that morning. Matt went out the previous morning to find both of his passenger side doors wide open but nothing ransacked. Last year, Troy found all four doors of his extended cab pickup truck open in the driveway with dirty paw prints over everything. Looks like even if you don’t leave any food or trash in your car, this bear goes around checking for unlocked doors!
And on a related note, the Placer County Sheriff recently helped this crying cub bear get out of a trash dumpster:
Darlene and I headed into Desolation Wilderness from the Meeks Bay trailhead on Lake Tahoe this Monday for three days, two nights of backpacking. This turned out to be a pretty easy going climb and less than five miles to the first lake (Genevieve) and a few more miles to where we camped at Stony Ridge Lake for both nights.
On our layover day, we continued on up to Rubicon Lake and then set off cross-country to reach the saddle to the southeast in hopes of a nice view overlooking Emerald Bay. Unfortunately, thunderclouds started coming in and we had to bail out before we could get to the overlook. On our way back down, we were caught in a surprisingly heavy hail storm and then had to dash down off the heights in the rain as the thunder and lightning approached. We returned to camp pretty soaked and moved everything a few hundred feet to a better location to wait out the storm. Happily the rain let up before the sun set for the day.
Fantastic night skies too, with no moon!
Click through for the full gallery:
There’s a massive eruption of butterflies in Tahoe this week – there are swarms of them all over the place, including on the highways and the trails around Tahoe. According to this news report, they’re the California Tortoiseshell Butterfly and there may be millions of them around the lake right now.
“It is pretty phenomenal,” said Tahoe Institute of Natural Science (TINS) Executive Director Will Richardson, Ph.D. “It’s exceptional. I have not seen a flight quite like this before.”
Here’s some video I recorded in slow motion while mountain biking the Sawtooth Trail near Truckee yesterday:
Bunches of pictures from a week in Tahoe with Darlene: hiking with Glenn and Michele along the old railroad bed from Donner Summit and through some of the tunnels, mountain biking with Mike up to the fire lookout at Martis Peak, kayaking from Sand Harbor to Secret Cove on the east shore of the lake, riding the Truckee River trail to Squaw Valley, watching the fireworks from the water’s edge at Kings Beach and, posted separately, soaring over Tahoe in a glider and saving the world from total ruin in Pandemic Legacy.
Click through for the full gallery of pictures and video:
For my birthday, Darlene bought me a glider ride with the Truckee Tahoe Soaring Association based out of the Truckee airport and we were able to squeeze in together for a 40-minute flight over the mountains between Truckee and Lake Tahoe. It was, of course, a wonderful experience and we got to learn a bit from our pilot Pablo about the capabilities of gliders – like the ability for them to sustain 1000-mile flights up and down the Sierra Nevada range, riding the thermals. Both Darlene and I did get a little motion sick (no doubt partly due to trying to take pictures and video) but not too serious. It was a little noisier in the cockpit than I expected from all of the air rushing over and around the canopy but we were easily able to talk to each other.
While we were aloft we were joined by two other gliders coming in from more distant locations. One of them was just coming across Lake Tahoe fairly low from the direction of Carson City and we watched as they searched out some thermals to get themselves back up again to a more comfortable 11,000 ft elevation over the 8000+ ft mountain ridges around the lake.
Click through for the gallery of pictures:
Darlene and I got a little taste of the Tahoe Rim Trail exploring west from the Tahoe house as far as Burton Creek State Park this past weekend. I was surprised to find that there’s also a paved road that runs from Brockway Summit around to Burton Creek State Park, called the “Fiberboard Freeway” on some maps and apparently popular as a cross-country ski route. We also wandered into the cross-country ski area that’s part of Northstar that I’d never seen before – including the “Caboose Hut”.
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