24 Hours in Lake Tahoe
About a few weeks prior to the mandatory Covid-19 shut down, I went to Tahoe with a group of friends.
The last time I was in Tahoe was… 2013. That was the first time I’ve ever rented a car! And now — 7 years passed by, just like that. Holy crap.
This was an impromptu trip — my friends got ski passes for the season, so they’ve been going every other weekend, at least. When they extended the invite to me, I couldn’t pass it up!
I don’t ski or snowboard, but I still wanted to be outdoors for the weekend. I looked up a couple trails on Alltrails, ordered some KBBQ meat from Gen BBQ, and off we went!
While the rest of the group was off skiing and snowboarding, we went hiking at Van Sickle Bi-State Park. You’ll get to cross from California into Nevada on this trail. The park is closed to cars off season (outside of May to Oct) but you can park nearby and hike your way in. This trail passes by a waterfall, which was sort of one reason why we chose to hike this (and that it was close to our AirBnB)
We brought along Yak Trax just in case it was snowy. I almost regret bringing it, since the first mile of the hike was surprisingly hot and dry — I hated that I chose to wear black Helly Hansen long sleeve baselayers. It was almost t-shirt weather, and for those who know me, they know it’d have to be pretty warm for me to say that.
Luckily, a bit further up we started to run into some packed snow. I kept stopping to look back because man, those mountains in the distance are just beautiful:
About 100 feet away from the waterfall was… a lot of ice. We saw a lot of people in tennis shoes slipping and sliding around, trying to get to the waterfall. Some of the more determined people made it, but man turned back when they started falling on their butt on the ice. At first we attempted to walk through it, but of course we were slipping everywhere too. Time to put on the Yak Trax…
And it worked like a charm! We were charging through the trail.
The rest of the hike up past the waterfall was even more snow packed. It was fun, but the trail was also narrow… and sometimes that meant falling knee deep into soft snow on an incline.
Past the waterfall, and further past this point, the view didn’t change much. So, after taking a short break around mile 3 or 4, we turned back about half a mile from the end. We were on a timeline to get back to the Airbnb on time to check in and prep for dinner.
Dinner prep (the first round of korean bbq already on the table):
Hard at work outside in the cold grilling the meats, which I took this picture from inside the toasty AirBnb:
Everyone else preparing the side dishes:
Got the fireplace started up and the food ready (missing some soup here):
And let the fun times commence. Good food, good times, good company. I won’t bore you with the details of the rest of the night. I fell asleep on the floor next to the fireplace, as I do often — and the guys took turns in the massage chair while playing mobile games.
The next morning, we woke up to a winter wonderland. It had snowed overnight.
I’ve never experienced fresh snow, so this was very exciting for me! We went outside to take a few photos. Whilst we were making a fool of ourselves outside, our Airbnb host (who happens to live next door) came by to shovel off the driveway and told us that there was a sled in the closet that we could also use. We did end up going sledding down the hill (but those were mostly all videos)
Cue more shots.
After spending an immensely amount of time taking pictures of the same grove of trees — our group fired up a nice morning breakfast at the Airbnb.
Following the morning food coma breakfast, the rest of the group went out for 2nd day of skiing/snowboarding, and we decided to go hang out at the nearby resort to do some touristy shopping and head out early to pick up the dog from daycare.
We stopped by a beach too, just for kicks.
Will bring the dog next time!