A few weeks ago momma started pining around about Desolation Wilderness. We had not done a lot of adventuring into Desolation last summer with my toe issues, and she was relieved that I had recovered well from my amputation.
[For what it’s worth, at the time of this writing I have another toe that is not doing very well, so our dreams of backpacking adventures this summer in Desolation may never come true either, but that is not something we are going to worry about now anyway!]
So our original plan for the day was to go up to see if we could snowshoe around the Echo Lake area. There is a Sno-Park up in the area, but we had never been there before so we didn’t know it wasn’t actually NEXT to Echo Lake, but rather in a very close area.
There was a TON of snow at the Sno-Park, which was a great starting point for several marked snowshoe trails. We spent a couple of hours back in the woods going on all the trails, but we never got to where we could see Echo Lake (and whether the road to it was even something we could travel on!).
So after we finished up momma wasn’t quite ready to leave the Tahoe area, and drove down to the lake. She saw there was some side of the road parking available by Emerald Bay, so we decided to put the snowshoes back on and explore some more!
We went back through Bayview campground and saw some folks coming out from hiking around the Cascade Lake side, but momma wanted to head into Desolation Wilderness (which is really not too far up the hill if you go the opposite way of Cascade Lake).
So up and up we went, knowing this trail relatively well we probably missed a lot of switchbacks because we were climbing steeply up, but there was SO much snow that it really didn’t matter, and we knew we’d hit these views before too long.
The sun came out for a few minutes to give us some photo ops up high.
There was a lot of snow and we were relatively slow moving, but it was springtime and there was plenty of light, and daddy had a work thing so we didn’t have to be home by any certain time anyways so momma decided we would keep climbing up to Granite Lake.
And let me re-iterate that during non-snow conditions, it’s not much of anything to get to Granite Lake, but it felt like a good accomplishment to us after we’d already been snowshoeing for several hours because of our earlier adventures at the Echo Lake Sno-Park. There were a few other skiers and snowshoers out, you can see the ski tracks in the snow on the hill behind me!
On the way down we had a much more fun time playing, but momma worried we’d start an avalanche over the highway, so she didn’t let us do too much.
On the way down, momma decided to go see if we could find Cascade Falls, so we headed around the backside of Cascade Lake. However, we saw the route wasn’t really safe after a while, because there was evidence of a fresh slide that went completely over the tracks. So we just settled for taking a couple of pics over the lake, which was really getting ready to melt!
We had quite a fun day, especially considering we dilly dallied around in Davis all morning before deciding to head up the hill. That’s what makes springtime in Tahoe so great, the sun is out forever, there are so few people you can get parking and you never quite know what you are going to find!
Olaf 