Tahoe Virgin No Longer

The last time I had been on this partcular stretch of Interstate Eighty I was heading West towards a terrifying number of unknows. The job. The living space. The city itself. All of these things were anything but settled and loomed so large over the crest of these craggy mountains that they damn near blotted out the stunning beauty of the Sierras. With a clearer mind, I stomped the pedal to the floor to force my truck up the steeps leading to Donner Pass, then Truckee, then Tahoe City. I'd heard about the forceful beauty of Lake Tahoe first from ALV over beers and sweet potato fries at the Church Street Tavern in Burlington. Sure, it was either there or taking a break from the terrors of graduate school in some other locale. Like so many places that she's been, she went because she could. I listened and even saw some photographs of the place in a well turned album but didn't get the punch to the gut that divides passive from active. This kind of reaction, visceral and undeniable, came as I drove South on Route 89 towards Emerald Bay. The road twisted and turned through woodsy hamlets and leapt out onto switchbacked ridges that showcased an impossibly huge horizon brushed at it's borders with the sharp peaks of the Sierras.
"Focus on the road, you idiot!" I said to no one in particular and jerked things back from the brink. There are no pictures of this part of the episode due to some kind of inexplicable oversight. Not that I should have been taking pictures out the sunroof at speed. Poor idea. I did that later in the weekend when the camera all of sudden appeared out of the ether.
Perhaps that new cloaking technology reported recently in Science was being brought to bear in a controlled experiment focused on the Granlibakken resort... But that is a different story for a very different time. A knot of scientists cum outdoor enthusiasts fell groggy out of the cars and gathered looking down at the green waters of the cove immediately below.
Someone said "Emerald Bay" and I wondered about their grasp of the obvious, deciding to keep the comments under wraps. There was a whole lot of picture taking and I was chomping at the bit.
"So who's in?" I said, interrupting the disjointed discussion about tourism in modern America. I wanted to feel the earth pushing back up under my hiking shoes. Step. Step. Step. I needed to get down to the rocks and the river that you could not see from this height, only sense.
The rally worked and we headed down. Always down in this state. Shortly though it became clear that two of the girls in the group would be pausing every few yards to take pictures of culverts from which run-off issued. Or trees that looked askew. And then the pictures stopped when we came to a break in the trees. Gigantic spires of rock on a ridge above us drew all the attention and breath. Lake Tahoe is unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was only a matter of time before I felt the strong desire to ditch the group and jump the fence. The remnants of a waterfall were streaming over a wide expanse of ledge and there was a tangle of washout and scree at it's base forming a border between me and some attractive boulders. Jump, slide, dodge.

Summit Rocks Off

This past weekend found me traveling South in search of new terrain and some manner of escape from the curiously frigid humidity of SF that dragged my core temperature down to dangerous levels. This decision made itself after a solid night of shivering under multiple covers. The tales of sunny California are patent fabrications, at least in my neighborhood. Santa Cruz would be a far better place to spend my Saturday. I had friends to see & hills to climb.
Rolling down along Route 1 is a vivid experience and a personal preference even though it takes a good amount of time longer than the freeways that run parallel. This was the first real test of my new rig, a 1994, dark green 4Runner with a huge sunroof that forces the magnitude of the Pacific coast on even the most fuzzy, hungover observer. Apart from some finnicky starter issues that I can't quite elucidate, the truck performed like a champ. And there were tests, to be sure.
I got there sometime around 2pm and my friend Karen and her silent boyfriend eventually loaded themselves and their scant amount of gear into the car. If her aparement were not located about 300 yards from the beach it would be a downer, or at least that's what I thought looking at the outside. The building was a large, mint green relic of a 50's or 60's building effort that focused more on packing in the number of living spaces than on any real sense of architecture or style. The fence surrounding it, with it's steel finish and sharp points conjured only a correctional facility. But you could hear the crashing surf and the yodelling of sealions and that silenced the harsh, immediate view.
I started up the rig, which roared to life in a pleasing way that I had missed with my previous car, a VW Golf that you always wondered if the engine was on, even going 60 miles an hour. There was a time for that kind of car. But that time is not now. After the inevitable confusion over roadways born of a car full of out-of-state transplants we arrived at the dusty trailhead in a dark canopy of evergreens. No one could decide if they were redwoods and somehow I had misplaced my boy scout field book...
As it turned out, the hike lasted no more than a couple hours, over in the blink of an eye. I had been worried about darkness and the prospect of fending off hungry bears for no good reason, apparently. Would a bear really want an energy bar, or a skinny New Englander for that matter? We hiked DOWN from the start of the trailhead, a concept that until this moment I had only associated with canyon adventures. More inversion in this State that seems to specialize in the unexpected. We did start heading back up at some point and all of sudden were confronted with a sign banning all forms of alcohol and then a collection of weather smoothed and shaped ledges that you needed to climb in order to get at the view. The Summit Rock(s).
This was clearly a place of hard drinking and the warning sign, out of place only moments ago, started to make sense once I got a load of the copious amount of graffiti that garnished every available surface of these summit boulders. Proximity to the road made this place accessible to one and all and they clearly brought cans of Krylon along for the ride.
After badly disturbing a couple hidden behind an outcropping we got our fill of this place and headed back to the beginning.
Taking a different way home than the way we came, my truck was put through it's paces. This was a vicious twisting road, barely wide enough for a single car and yet it became clear immediately that this was meant to be a two-way once I was almost forced off the right side by a speeding VW bug that was packed with mean looking teenagers. It would be dusk soon & I think I know where they were headed...
And then it was like a safari the next moment with deer running off into fields to the left and squirrels failing at suicide on their way back and forth and back and forth across the road. We passed through a region of gigantic redwoods & towns that time had left to their own devices. In one village the prominent waving flag was not the stars and stripes but the stars and bars. Here there be rednecks... Push the pedal down. Look straight ahead. Try not to cause a stir or raise the ire.
We eventually got back to that surfing town they call Santa Cruz and we knew it because of the blondes and the burnouts that were making their way along the thoroughfare. I kicked the quiet ones out of the car and headed back to SF. My bones were warm once again and there was science to think about.