Friday morning I woke my momma up early to go to the bathroom. I am very particular about not going #2 in my own yard, so when I have to go we have to go on a walk to a park. But not the park that is really close to our house, the park that is like a mile away. That’s where I will go #2. So Friday morning I had to go #2 at about 5:15 a.m. I’m normally not awake at that time, but my daddy had to get up to go to work early and my belly was like “Olllllaaaafffff gurgle, gurgle!!”
Since we had an early start we were up at the trailhead in the Mt. Rose meadows shortly after 8:30 a.m., which was awesome because we had a lot of space to explore. Momma wore her snowshoes because last time we were up there she did not have them and was surprised at how much snow there was because there hasn’t been much snow in Tahoe this year, and it seemed like it was all HERE. So today we were much better prepared.
Momma let me pick the trail and we climbed up to a ridge and walked down toward the Washoe Valley taking pictures and exploring the crunchy snow. With rain in Tahoe we haven’t been up as often as we were in the summer, so starting at 8,500 feet and climbing momma was gasping for air! We eventually got to a point where it was too steep to continue so momma said we should drop down into the meadow. We searched for a place to drop down but it took us a while to backtrack to find a place that was safe enough. Although Lolo and I would have tried to drop in anywhere!
We dropped into the meadow and crossed over to the trails on the other side and picked our way up the mountain – sometimes stumbling on the trail, sometimes not. That’s the fun part about when momma has snowshoes on, we can go wherever we want! There were some places where even with the snowshoes momma was sinking in quite a bit with the crunchy snow – and sometimes even I was totally post holing! I started to get a bit annoyed with it after a while, actually.
Momma, seeing my annoyance at the persistent post holing told me we would start making our way back to the car when she suddenly noticed a bunch of snowshoe tracks heading uphill. She tricked us into following this very steep path of tracks, which she said was fresh and meant we might bump into people, so to not be surprised!
Eventually we started to hear voices as we popped out of the woods to a vista all the way down to Lake Tahoe. It was beautiful! And that was clearly why we’d seen tracks up there, all the people who were up there were also there for the vista.
Momma doesn’t want us to go meet people on our own, so she kept us next to her. She can’t deal with leashes with trekking poles and snowshoes so she had to keep reminding us to stay with her because a group of people was whistling at us and wanted us to come over to them! Momma was proud of us for staying with her. She doesn’t mind us meeting other people if they have dogs with them, but when they don’t have dogs sometimes Lolo thinks they are weird and scary so she tries to be in strict control of those situations, which she couldn’t do huffing and puffing like that on snowshoes in deep powder!
We took lots of pictures up at the top before we headed back down into the woods, across the meadow and back to the car. A little cattle dog made friends with us on the way to the car and almost wanted to come home with us, but momma said he needed to stay with his own family!
We loaded up and I thought we were just going to go home but about 20 minutes later momma stopped and got us out for another hike! What a surprise!
The trail was pretty familiar because we had been in the area last month, and we made our way down to Lake Tahoe’s Chimney Beach to eat our lunch. Lolo did some swimming and fetching but it was a lovely, calm and sunny day for just hanging out by the lake.
We spent some time playing in the sand before heading back to the car and finally going home, which was even before the bad rush hour traffic in Sacramento. What a day! It was actually a good thing I got momma up so early, even if she didn’t want to because it gave us enough time to mountain and lake adventure – a true Tahoe kind of day!!
Olaf 