Goodbye Nevada - Hello California!
A shower. Deb needs a shower. We drive across the second half of Nevada (which is more like we expect - desert, salt flats, etc.) with a plan to stay in a state park with showers just west of Carson City, but still a little shy of California. The trip was dry and dusty - read the book out loud again.
Carson City shocked our system - we’d not seen a metro area in a while, but we gathered our wits and used the occasion to do a little business. We had been limping on a jerry-rigged cook stove made from borrowed parts of our heater (ergo, no heater), so we stopped in a propane place and found just the stuff we needed to fix the stove right and recover our heater parts! Yeah!
The guy at the propane place was our best tour guide yet - he advised away from the state park and toward Tahoe. “You’re not that far away so why would you not stay at Tahoe? Go to Camp Richardson at South Lake Tahoe - I used to deliver propane there and they have showers!” Well, Deb didn’t need to hear that twice so off we went to Camp Richardson.
Probably like thousands before us, the ride up and over the mountains to the east side of Tahoe was pretty, but normal mountain pass stuff until we caught our first glimpse of the lake. From there on it was just breathtaking.
Here’s are some facts:
The lake is big, 22 miles long, 12 miles wide and covers 191 square miles.
It’s the second deepest lake in the US - 1,645 feet deep!
The water is so clear, you can see things clearly down to 100 feet!
But, as big as it is, it still feels beautiful, and tucked in, and even intimate, with the huge snow capped peaks all the way around - their slopes dressed in monster spruce, red fir and ponderosa pine, sliding a blanket of green right down to the sandy beaches and boulder strewn shores.
We moved into old Camp Richardson, an age-old concessionaire of the US Forest Service, and soon found ourselves strolling on a beach with water lifted from the Caribbean and set right down in this high-mountain bowl. In that regard, its beauty is truly surreal.
Deb was showered, we had a great fire going, we were feeling no pain when, out of the dark comes one of those ball caps with lights in the bill, and a young voice saying, “Hi, I’m just going to set up right over here next to you. Okay?” That was Joe, a wandering college student (or so he sez) who was reluctant to pay for a site when it was just him, a tarp and his bed roll.
Catching us at a yummy moment, we nodded in agreement and soon inherited him for the next two nights. It seemed okay the first night as he regaled us with wandering stories of his own while drinking our wine. Fairly early in the night after we all went to bed, we heard him make a kind of forceful, low yell, only to learn the next morning that a bear had stepped on his head! No kidding, it put the padded part of its paw right on his face - hence the other-worldly yell, and then the bear moved on. We heard lots more bear sightings from other campers, but never saw one ourselves. By the second night, a little polish had worn from Joe’s apple as they say, and we began to weary a bit..
But, Joe or no Joe, Lake Tahoe blew us away. There were a lot of amenities so we got a little civilized - laundry, wifi, etc. We headed out after the second night (Joe did not come with), we drove north along the west side of the lake meaning to go on as close to the California Coast as we could. But, then we went up a steep grade and came to the Emerald Bay Overlook and noticed a beautiful Forest Service Camp just across. We just had to stay two more nights. It’s that cool.
From our new camp we took a great hike to Cascade falls above the little Cascade Lake which is another beautiful mountain lake, on a step just above Lake Tahoe.
Our special visitor at this camp was Raymond, a pretty blue Steller’s Jay. He was social, and hungry and chirped at us urgently, til we got the message that he, like Joe, would appreciate a little hand-out. When first we saw one of these birds, we felt lucky to catch a glimpse through the dense woods. Now, here was Raymond, barely a foot away and chatting us up like we were family.
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