We are still anxiously awaiting some decent snow in Tahoe, but the lack of snow didn’t stop us from having a good time hiking up to Loch Leven last Monday, as we took advantage of the lack of hearty adventurers willing to hike on ice-covered rock to go up to Loch Leven with momma on New Year’s Day.
This trail starts out and is almost impossible to stay on because it goes all over the rock faces and is completely covered in ice right now. We were a mess sliding all over, but I was a good little lead billy goat and showed momma the BEST ways to get up, even if it wasn’t exactly on the trail!
Luckily, it was only about 3/4 of heinous ice before it became patchy-ish ice for the rest of the hike.
At about the one mile mark you cross some train tracks, which momma always makes us take pictures on. I am not sure why she’s so into pictures here (because she like NEVER posts them on our Insty accounts!!) but that’s what we do.
After about 3 miles of hiking uphill you reach the first Loch Leven lake, which was completely frozen over. We hung around for a little bit but were hearing really weird groaning noises. Momma said it was just the ice on the lake making the noise, but I was a little freaked out and tried to block her path from continuing up because I wasn’t sure what it was! I mean it could have been a bear or something!!
Lolo decided it wasn’t so scary as he was scouting ahead, so I agreed to continue.
The middle Loch Leven lake is always the prettiest. This is the lake where we SUP-ed this summer with the inflatable that momma carried on her back. However, when we hiked in we came from a different trail head, so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds!
We took lots of pictures at the middle lake because the sky was amazing and the granite is so pretty. It is so different in the winter here when it is totally quiet and there are NO other people around! In the summer there were always people up here, and lots of nudists too (which I know we also have blogged about here!!) 😝
Since we had gotten an early start and had lots of time we decided to continue on to the high lake, which is a lake we’ve only been to one other time. It’s actually a GREAT swimming lake in the summertime, but the trail is super tricky to find! We were able to stay on trail all the way up there, despite some incredibly difficult (for momma) ice-covered sections. She said she practically needed crampons and ice tools, but I think she was exaggerating because Lolo and I were JUST fine.
At this lake we had our snacks and took more pictures and played around on the frozen lake before heading back down. We didn’t see anyone until we got really close to the trail head, and there were lots of cars there and people playing on the rocks just outside the parking area.
Someone left a box of trash sitting on the hood of our car, which momma found to be very rude. There are no trash services in the area, it is strictly a ‘pack-it-in’ and ‘pack-it-out but apparently someone was just too important to deal with their own trash. So momma carted it home in the back of the car.
However, when we were driving home there were noises coming from the box of trash and momma was like WTF is that?!?! Turns out there were some pop rocks candy that were making exploding noises practically giving momma a heart attack thinking she’d picked up someone’s bomb or something!
Hopefully we don’t have any other lazy jerks leaving their trash on our car anytime soon. On all our trips we’ve NEVER had that happen before! Daddy assured us that it was not a mean-spirited thing to do, and maybe the person just set it there for a minute and got distracted or something because that is something we would definitely NEVER do to someone else!!!
Anyways, the forecast for the next week looks promising for some legit SNOW in the Tahoe area, which you know we will go crazy in so fingers crossed it happens AND momma takes us to it!!
Olaf 