Weekend Round-Up: Lake Tahoe

I know, I always say it…but what a fantastic weekend this was! Rob and I left the city at 5:30 to drive up to Tahoe for a visit with our friends Bill and Leslie. For the first time, the traffic wasn’t terrible. We made it up to their house on the Truckee River exactly at 10 and spent a while catching up before bedtime.

We all woke up pretty early the next morning for our volunteer project with the water quality board. We were assigned to Pole Creek and the Truckee River below Big Chief. Armed with a GPS unit, camera, water sample containers, ph testers, oxygen saturation kits and worksheets, we graded each of our locations. You can see all the photos online here. I was in charge of drawing and photography, natch:

We returned to the water quality office at 11:00 to turn in our results and get a free lunch. Back to their house for a short break. What a great find! Bill and Leslie are renting this old cabin from a family that is off sailing around the world. It has a perfect location right on the Truckee River and they’ve loved staying there, aside from the tribulations of an all-wood-stove-heating-system during a very cold winter:

We picked up our gear and drove out to a climbing spot on a ridge later that afternoon. We all climbed a few routes and practiced the ukulele (Rob’s already getting pretty good!):

Back home at 6:00 for a barbecue dinner followed by an hour in the hot tub and a few games of Yatzee by the fire. Ah cabin life!

A nice bit of sleeping in the next morning followed by a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, apple pie and cranberry mimosas. We all motivated around 11 to drive to Tahoe City for some kayaking on the lake. The weather was perfect and the lake was as famously clear as ever (they say you can see a dinner plate a 100 feet down).

Back on terra firma, we stopped at a cafe for a snack and a game of battleship. At 3:00, Rob and I loaded up the car and drove back to the city for a quiet night of unpacking and calling our mothers.