Second Annual Tahoe Blogger's Ride

After the very successful Ride With Smudgemo, we decided it would be a good idea to do it again, but with more of us. Brent has been doing some brainstorming, and Smudgemo has some good ideas over on his blog. So start thinking about next June people!

We figured June would be a good month, since the kids will be out of school, Lake Tahoe trails will be thawed out, and it's a little less crowded. We'll probably do a mountain bike ride and a road ride. June is also the month of the Slow Rollers Poker Run.

Post your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

UPDATE! I've added a link on the top of the side bar to the new Tahoe Blogger's Ride Blog, a bulletin board of sorts created by Smudgemo. Check the TBR for the latest updates!

Ride With Smudgemo Report

Now that I've had a day to rest, I'm ready to share the Ride with Smudgemo Report. The day started pretty early. But not too early. It's already down in the 30's in the mountains in the early morning. I loaded up the car and headed for the Tahoe Rim Trail. I had planned to erect a 20 foot tall sign, complete with Christmas lights, that read, "Welcome to Nevada, Smudgemo!"; however, I had difficulty acquiring the materials, and couldn't figure out a way to harness it to my car. Plan B was to bring some hand crafted beer, something that Smudgemo might appreciate far more than a Las Vegas style welcome.

We all met at the Tahoe Rim Trail trailhead located in the Mount Rose Meadows. It was 10:00, and just starting to warm up. The first order of business was to figure out Smudgemo's real name. As it turns out, Smudgemo is the son of immigrants, spleen merchants from northern Romania. His full name is Smudgemore Fidatov Vladimirescu, or just Smudgemo for short. There was no way in hell I was going to be saying that the whole day, so I asked if I could just call him Ryan. He reluctantly, but thankfully agreed. This ended up working out just fine, because coincidentally, the other two riders were also named Jeff and Ryan.

The other Jeff and Ryan were a bit faster than us, so we would see them from time to time throughout the day. We'd finally arrive at an intersection, and they'd be relaxing in the shade talking shop with other riders. We all agreed to have lunch atop Marlette Peak, quite possibly one of the most beautiful locations on planet earth. We had worked pretty hard to get to this spot, but miles of fast, smooth, downhill singletrack lay ahead of us. The decomposed granite was slightly damp from last week's rain, and provided insane traction. My tires didn't break loose once all day! Taking the many bermed corners at high speed kept me grinning to the end.

Lunch Time on Marlette Peak

At Marlette Lake we met a guy name Joe. He talked kind of funny, so I suspected he wasn't from around here. To me the dialect sounded North Reno or maybe even Sparks, but I was way off...Joe was from England. The guys all traded stories of trails in far away lands. I just sat back and enjoyed the tales. It's cool how mountain biking seems to make instant friends out of people. Too bad the beer was 16 miles away in a locked car!

We decided it was time to ride again, and the five of us headed down to the Flume Trail. It was good to ride some flat trail for a while and just enjoy the scenery. But then tragedy struck. The old wooden flume has been gone for decades, but somehow there happened to be an original square nail sitting in the middle of the trail. Thousands of riders a year, and I'm the one who gets it in my tire! The bike started riding really funny, and I thought for sure my derailleur was busted. I had found a crack in the pulley wheel before the ride, and just figured it had finally fallen apart. I was pretty shocked to see this huge nail sticking out of my tire! Remarkably, the hole in the tube was quite small, and will be easily repaired with a simple patch. The tire seemed to close itself up pretty well too. I swapped the tube, gave the new one 2,000 pumps with the mini-pump, and off we rode.

View From The Flume Trail

Once we got to Tunnel Creek, it was just over 9.5 miles of rolling uphill singletrack back to the cars (The trail profile can be viewed HERE). Since the riding was more slow going from here on out, Smudgemo and I got to talking about blogging. We talked about a lot of you that are probably reading this, and how it'd be cool to get more bloggers together for a ride. We also discussed how some outsiders may think it's a bit strange talking about all this stuff on the internet, but what they don't understand, is that most of would probably hang out together if not for the fact that we're spread out all around the country (or even world). It's an online tribe of sorts. We also traded stories of simplifying our lifestyles, eating great food, bicycle commuting, and many other things that are common in our daily writings.

Saying Good-Bye to Lake Tahoe

The other Jeff and Ryan were long gone by this point. From what I understand, they left the parking lot about 15 minutes before we returned. They didn't even get any beer! Smudgemo and I made the final climb to the car, and tore into the ice chest. I had one of the Chocolate Stouts from the Bison Brewing Company in Berkeley, and Ryan had a Sierra Nevada 2007 Anniversary Ale...beers we had brought for each other. Smudgemo carefully hand-picked his beer from his hometown in Berkeley. I got lucky and found my beer at an emergency stop at the Chevron convenience store in Incline Village. The beer distributor was unloading the Sierra Nevada as I was paying for my gas. In the end, the results were the same. Great beer!

We enjoyed our brews, but then it was time to go. Smudgemo headed back to his cabin at Donner Lake, and I headed back to the Carson Valley. Hopefully we'll get to hook up again sometime soon!

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading my tale! If you still need more, the complete photoset of this fantastic journey can be viewed HERE.

Bike Lanes

Bike Lane
Originally uploaded by Facility Bike Club.

Here's a picture of the bike lanes in use up at South Lake Tahoe. The bike lanes on both sides of this road have become the Tahoe Keys Marina overflow parking lot. And from I'm told, since these people bring in a lot of money, nobody cares.

We ended up riding in the road, slowing down traffic. And when I say slowing down traffic, I mean of course that they were exceeding the speed limit and not paying attention to the fact that we were riding with a 6 year old.

Miserable Cars....

Sand and Suds Report

Saturday was the Sand and Suds Bike Ride and Treasure Hunt hosted by the Slow Rollers. This was our first Treasure Hunt themed ride, so we didn't know what to expect. We all met at noon at "The Y" up in South Tahoe. We were given a map and two pages of riddles and questions. The answers were found by following the map and looking for signs and landmarks. Since many of the answers were found by reading historical points of interest type of signs, we ended up learning a lot about the area.

We rode around The Tahoe Keys Marina, Pope Beach, Baldwin Beach, the Tallac Historical Site, and various other places on the southeastern shore of Lake Tahoe. We were out on the bikes for about five hours total, and had only stopped to eat once. One of the answers was found at the the ice cream shop in Camp Richardson. The question was, "How many flavors of ice cream?". We ate about a pint of ice cream each getting to the bottom of the mystery, and that lasted us until the end of the ride.

Since there were so many places to explore, and some of the questions tough, we ended up trading answers with some of our friends. In the end, none of us won anyway. We gathered on the beach for the post ride ceremonies. The winner was announced, beer was drank, and we took turns riding the pedal pontoon boat.

For an event named "Sand and Suds", there wasn't much beer around. At least not compared to the other events we've attended. We were really too busy to stop anywhere for drinks, since there was so much ground to cover. The only beer we had during the ride was at the very end. There was an ice chest full of Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can. Wow. I don't remember my last canned beer, and certainly not my last PBR. Nonetheless, it was pretty refreshing after riding in the hot sun all day.

We ended the day with a trip to the Tahoe Pizza Company for some real food and real beer. It turned out to be a fun day. I think we definitely prefer the group ride feel of the other events though. We barely saw anybody else all day as we zipped around stealth-like, looking for clues!

There are a few other pictures HERE.

Angora Fire

Here's a picture from May of the area that the Angora Fire (the fire currently burning near Lake Tahoe) has already burned. As you can see, there was plenty of fuel for the fire. I'm glad Jeff F. showed us these trails, and that we had a chance to ride them before they were gone. It's funny to think back to May when we were discussing the homeowners vs. the mountain bikers. New homes were encroaching into the existing trails. Mother Nature settled this argument.

This is the fire perimeter map as of last night.

This google maps link shows more detail (although I'm not sure how long the link will work...).

More pictures of the area before the fire HERE.

Some random pictures from Flickr people HERE and HERE.

South Lake Tahoe

Many rides in Tahoe are described on the Internet or in books. You won't find the ride we did today described in either of these places. In fact, I would have a hard time giving someone directions on our route today. Today's ride was partly wandering, and partly a route Jeff F. was leading us on. It was a pleasant ride too, with not a whole lot of climbing, and beautiful scenery everywhere you looked. Who says you have to beat yourself up every ride?

Jeff F., Kathy S., Kristy, and I began our ride at a Natural Foods restaurant called Sprouts. We got some coffees for a pre-ride pick-me-up, and then headed south on the bike path. We found a little single track along the Upper Truckee River that begged to be explored. Jeff F. was trying to lead us by memory on a ride he did a few days ago. He started to get the feeling that we weren't headed in the right direction, but then finally said, "Who cares? The worst that could happen is that we'll end up on the beach at Lake Tahoe!". We all agreed and followed the river.

The river trail terminated when we met other creeks that fed the Upper Truckee. The way forward was impassable (without getting wet), so we turned around and headed around the south most point of Lake Tahoe towards Camp Richardson. We had a nice ride through the woods, along the beach, and by the Tallac historical site. When we reached Taylor Creek, we headed west towards Fallen Leaf Lake.

Jeff F. kept a close eye out for a little trail that left the forest road. He spotted it, to my surprise, and it looked to be nothing more than a rabbit trail. The trail was hidden from the road, but became quite nice once we were on it. As we got closer to the water, we got into the Aspens, and continued heading west along Taylor Creek.

Taylor Creek is full of bright red Kokanee Salmon in the fall, but today it just looked clear and very cold. We followed the creek until we came to the dam at Fallen Leaf Lake. It was a bit breezy today, but we were pretty well sheltered in the woods. The waves were picking up a bit out on the Lake. I was really amazed at all the little trails we just rode. They were barely used. In fact, we were the only mountain bikers we saw all day.

I have a lot of pictures to get through here, so if you don't mind, I'm just going to keep on writing. This picture here is of Fallen Leaf Lake with Mount Tallac in the background. I'd like to climb this mountain someday. It's on my to-do-list. Getting back to the story...we followed the shore line of Fallen Leaf Lake, encountering a few hikers along the way. Once we crossed the main road, the single track became a bit challenging in places with a few technical rocky sections. The final climb of the day was up near the Angora Lakes road. Jeff F. was excited to show us the next section, the best part of the ride he told us.

The trail took off from the end of a driveway on a new house that is being built. I can't imagine this entrance will be accessible once the house is completed. What's sad, is that this trail head is the one that replaced the original trail head. The original trail head was built on too, and the owner did not allow passage through. We did a few little rolling hills through the granite boulders and manzanita bushes. We had great views of Freel Peak, and the Upper Truckee valley to the south.

It was time to get rid of all the elevation we had just gained. The trail was very smooth, and snaked through giant granite boulders. There were trails connecting everywhere, and the thoughts of coming back to explore this place crossed my mind frequently. After a few miles we came out onto the black top again. We took back roads and bike paths all the way back to Sprouts. I enjoyed the energy gels and Clif bars along the trail, but it was time to eat some real food. I had a couple cups of coffee while wolfing down a Hummus Couscous burrito with a side of chili. The rest of the gang followed my lead with other culinary delights. What a nice end to a great ride!

More pictures can be found on our Flickr page HERE.

Flume Trail Opening

Woo Hoo! The Flume Trail will be opening this weekend! Usually the opening weekend isn't until June, so that says a lot about the amount of snow we received this winter.

Trail Conditions and Pictures are HERE.