Gold Lakes Basin, Calif - Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 4:30pm.

One of the challenges with appreciating nature's beauty is that nature has its own timetable. Come at the wrong time and it may be too hot, too cold, cloudy, smoky, snowed under, or dried out. Thus it was when we visited Frazier Falls in the Gold Lakes Basin today, after already doing a twofer ( Read more... )

Sardine Lakes, Calif - Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 3:30pm.

Once you've been to the top of a mountain, what do you do next? Would you believe, look up at it from the bottom again? After driving most of the way up Sierra Buttes, hiking the last bit including 150 or so stairs stairs to the Sierra Buttes fire lookout and coming back down, we decided we hadn' ( Read more... )

Sierra Buttes, Calif - Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 1:15pm.

I've mentioned before that when coming back from an out-and-back hike there's a tendency to stop looking around; to feel you've "Been there, done that" and pay less attention or, perhaps in a stage of fatigue, focus just on putting one foot in front of the other. I try not to fall into that trap ( Read more... )

Sierra Buttes, Calif - Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 1pm.

After climbing the metal catwalks and stairways anchored into the rock atop Sierra Buttes I made one final climb: up the stairs of the fire lookout tower itself. The lookout hasn't been staffed for quite some time AFAIK- which is kind of ironic given a) the number of fires burning in California the ( Read more... )

Sierra Buttes, Calif - Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 12:45pm.

It was a short but strenuous hike from where we parked near the top of Sierra Buttes to the actual top. But reaching the actual top would require another change of modality. Ascending the tallest spire involves climbing about 150 stairs on a series of metal catwalks anchored to the quartzite ( Read more... )

Saturday, 25 Sep 2021. 12:15pm.

On our trip to Sierra Buttes today we drove most of the way. ...No, I don't mean just the fact that we drove about 50 miles from Truckee to the base of Sierra Buttes this morning. We actually drove most of the way up the buttes, too. Since our first visit here almost 25 years ago, when we hoofed it up a climb of ( Read more... )

Bassets, Calif - Sat, 25 Sep 2021, 11am

The first day of our weekend trip to the Sierra Nevada began when I awoke to my usual Saturday alarm at 8am. Well, so much for getting an early start on the day, as I hoped when we arrived before 11pm last night. But hey, being able to sleep in a bit was the main reason we stretched the driving (and the hotel ( Read more... )

This weekend is our anniversary. Hawk and I have been together for 27 years, officially married for 15 of them. We're celebrating with a quick weekend trip. Tonight we'll drive up to Truckee, California.

"WTF is Truckee?" you might ask. "Do you drive there in your caree on the roadee?" Well, the town's name is derived from that of a  native Paiute ( Read more... )

Truckee, CA - Saturday, 28 July 2018, 10:30pmThis evening we're staying in Truckee, a town near I-80 about 12 miles north of Lake Tahoe. It's good that we were staying up here, north of Lake Tahoe, rather than on the south shore (in South Lake Tahoe, CA or Stateline, NV) as we've often done in the past when staying at Lake Tahoe, because it allowed ( Read more... )

Saturday, 28 July 2018, 4pm

After visiting the lookout atop Sierra Buttes (previous blog) we hiked back down to our car and drove back down the rockiest, most narrow leg of the 4x4 trail to the shoulder of the Sierra Buttes. On a previous visit this is as high as we were able to get, the rest of the trail being blocked by deep snow drifts!


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