My training for the past few weeks has been limited to long walks at lunch time or on the weekends, and a “hike” up the trash hills along the South Bay trail. Good for fitness, but not quite enough to get me up and back on an 18 mile round-trip, up a 8800’ peak. Lucky for me, my wife (aka the saint) wanted to go to Lake Tahoe for her birthday - lots of trails, and lots of 8-9000 foot peaks to hike. We had three full days, not a lot, but I reserved one morning (not on her birthday of course) to get some miles and elevation in.
We stayed at a hotel situated at 6800” - not a bad start to get used to elevation again. Plus the hotel (Ritz-Carleton) is at the base of a ski area (Northstar), just out the back door, with lot’s of trails open for hiking. I tried my luck on an easy trail first - really boring, and I found myself huffing and puffing at the onset. I was really concerned with that, until I realized that we had made a critical mistake when checking into the hotel. We upgraded to the club level - free drinks. Really good drinks, and after sitting in traffic for 6 hours on Friday, having a few really good drinks seemed like a really good idea. It was, but not for hiking the next day. Chalk that one up as something not to do again.
After chatting with some of the wonderful staff at the hotel, I decided to take one of trails a short drive from the Ritz, which go along the Tahoe Rim Trail. The hike starts on Brockway Pass, and runs up to the rim trail with a number of relatively high peaks along the way. I had limited time, and did not want to push it too far, so settled on Martis Peak - a nice 10 mile (round-trip) hike, up to almost 8700’.
Once again though, the Club Level and my wife’s birthday dinner forced me to imbibe a bit more than I had planned on. You absolutely need to have a good bottle of wine with a good steak (really good wine of course). And if the restaurant offers free champagne for the celebration, you cannot turn it down. And as the evening winds down, you of course need to have an after dinner drink (I really do not do this very often). At any rate, I still managed to get out early, and hit the trail at 8:30 with only a slight head-ache.
The hike was really excellent - not too steep, nice long stretches with easy elevation gain, and just a few points with elevation loss. Plus, when you hit the open areas, the views of the lake are awesome.
The view from the top, looking back at Northstar was not too shabby either.
The odd thing about hiking in this area, is that there are roads criss-crossing through just about everywhere. For this hike, there was a road that runs up to the fire tower on top of the peak, which branches off to another road that parallels the rim trail for quite a ways. When I had finally trudged up to the top, there were a number of pickup trucks and SUV’s there. Slackers! I did think about hitching a ride back down but only for a moment since that would have been cheating - this was a training hike. The other fun part about hiking around Tahoe, is sharing the trails with mountain bikers. Not a problem going up (they were passing me of course) since they are going slow, and the biker can call out a warning. Going down was another thing, since most of them were careening down at high speed - not much warning. Listening to music could be a fatal mistake.
Overall, I was pleased with the results - I did not have any issues with the altitude, and I managed to avoid tripping on anything this time. No falls. My pace was not great though, over four hours is pretty slow, but then again, I had a lengthy interrupt from a couple of ladies who were arguing about which trail they were on, and must have thought I knew where I was going. That, and I did stop for quite a few photo opportunities. I’ll be doing that in Yosemite as well, so need to work on walking at a faster pace.
I’m hoping to get a few more hikes in next month, but it will be impossible to get to the Sierra again, so I’ll be working on distance and steep inclines instead of elevation. I think I can handle the altitude now. Maybe I still have a few extra red blood cells from my decades in Colorado.Next Post >
