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.