Another weekend, more high places. It was just a week ago we were hanging by ropes on the side of a very tall building in San Francisco and now we were hiking up Mt. Tallec, overlooking Lake Tahoe. This was our first attempt at high altitude hiking, even though the summit would “only” be 9,875′ above sea level. Our first experiment at hiking in thinner air was successful, although it was humbling when we realized that the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro is exactly twice as high. Wow.
Because of the record snowfall this winter, a portion of the trail was impassable and we found ourselves scrambling up and down treacherous scree and large jagged rocks. Other stretches of the trail required hiking through the snow. Note that we were hiking on JULY 30th.
The hike was only 9 miles round trip but it was moderately strenuous and took us 6.5 hours, including time for photographs along the way and eating lunch at the top. It was a long day with 7 hours of driving and nearly that much in hiking, but it was worth the effort. We couldn’t have asked for a better day and the photographs tell the story better than anything we could describe here.
Check out our photo gallery.
And our pal Tom took this video on the summit!