Tahoe Day 1 and 2

Kanner and I went for a two night backpacking trek around Desolation Wilderness, which is just to the Southwest of Lake Tahoe.

Starting out at around 5pm at Echo Lakes we made it past the two lakes and all the houses by sundown:


We hiked an hour or so in the dark, finding a dryish, snow free spot for the night. Though we encountered few mammals on this drip we still took some precautions with our food:


The next morning we got up fairly early and made our way to the North end of Lake Aloha where we left our big packs for the day:




We wanted to make our way up to Jack's Peak, but were unsure of where a trail was...so we just went straight up the side of a mountain and made it to this spectacular ridge. It was quite steep, and a little sketchy at times, but it was a good scramble.

Sorry about the wind, put the volume down on this video:


View from the ridge:




Thankfully we had a map of the area (thanks Emma D) and found a route down the other side of the ridge toward Half Moon Lake, where we could find some trail again. The first step of making it down was navigating through some wide snow fields, some of which we successfully slide down, some not so much. We came from the upper middle right ridge area, and if you look closely you can see our tracks and butt-slides:




Then it was down to Half Moon Lake, where we jumped in, ate lunch, napped, and headed back to our stuff at Aloha.


At Aloha we set up camp, struggled to make dinner, and had the windiest night of sleep of our lives. But the sunset was amazing and the food turned out.






The best part of it all was that we only saw a person or two the whole two days.