LAST GASP ?

I took Monday off work and headed up into the mountains.This particular place was not where I wanted to go on this Monday morning, but it is where I ended up. There was more snow on the ground than I expected from the “small” storm. Well, it’s not like more snow fell than they were forecasting. There was only a couple inches, and that is not a problem for driving in, except the road I was going on was very steep, and as I drove higher and higher, it got steeper and steeper, and icier and icier, and that would mean it would be more and more harrowing to drive back down it later. So I gave up and went to Plan B.

Plan B was the Upper Truckee River, which of course I have been to before. This time, however, I would go much further than I had ever been before. Where no one has gone before. Not even Jean Luc Picard.

Well of course the weather forecasters were wrong again. It was supposed to snow more in the morning, and not break until the afternoon. That would give me all morning for hiking to multiple waterfalls in good light. Yeah right. The sun was already breaking before I even started my hike. I barely made it to this waterfall in time, and when I got to the upper falls, it was in full sun. I only took this one photo all day long.

From the upper falls, it would be another 1.5 miles of hiking to get to my planned destination. That should be easy. But it took forever! It seemed like I was in a time warp and not making any progress. My legs were moving, my body was getting tired, but I was not going anywhere. There was some brush, there was a marshy area I had to go around, and there was a decent sized lake I found that was not marked anywhere on my map, but it wasn’t really all that difficult and it should not have taken so long. I thought of turning back plenty of times before I finally got to the spot where I would need to cross the river. There were plenty (actually hundreds) of fallen logs in this area, and on some of them perhaps I could have crossed, but they all seemed to be either far too slippery or far too unstable, or both. I eventually decided to just get on my water shoes and wade across. On the other side I kept my water shoes on and continued trudging through the snow. You might think that I would get frostbite very quickly by doing that, but I had on my neoprene wet socks, and they kept my little toes quite warm. It was not too far up to the falls from there. Except that there was no waterfall! I was so certain there would be another waterfall up here on this river, but it was not to be, not even a small one. C’est la vie, as Jean Luc would say. You win some and you lose some. It was still a very fun hike through the fresh snow in the mountains, and exploring new places. Time to go down, cross the river, and back to the car. It was much quicker going back down, following my tracks in the snow. The big question is, will we get any more of it? Or was this the last gasp of winter? I sure hope not.

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