Now that it is March it is time to start heading to higher elevations to hike. I want to be above 4000 ft. in order to avoid poison oak and ticks. I thought about taking Journey up to the snow but when I looked at the weather for that hike it said 23 degrees. Yikes. I would not mind that so much but I did not want to freeze Journey to death. Plus that would mean it would be icy and possibly dangerous for her.
I decided to take her to the Lake Spaulding area. Someone posted a photo of Fuller Lake Falls from last week and it was a very nice one. The waterfall was flowing well but not too strongly. Of course all that could change in an instant since it is dam controlled (and indeed it would). Anyway, I did not have a good photo of this waterfall yet and Journey has not been there so it seemed like a good adventure for us.
We left the house at 5:30AM and drove up the hill. When we got up there I saw that there was snow! I was not expecting this at 4500 ft. elevation. I drove up to Fuller Lake and there was quite a bit of it. We could have started from here as I had planned but I decided to drive back down to the river and hike from there. It would be longer but probably a lot nicer and easier. I am really glad I did that considering what we found when we got to the waterfall (below).
There was only about 1 inch of snow on the ground, up to 4 inches in some places. It was quite a nice hike and Journey was very happy. She loves the snow! We had a lot of fun and saw no one else on the entire hike.
We stopped at Lake Spaulding Falls first which was roaring then continued up to Fuller Lake Falls. It was 2.5 miles one way. There was one creek crossing which Journey would not do. I had to find an easier spot for her to cross it and I had to lift her down one big dropoff. As I did this I slipped and fell hard on a rock, banking up my shin in the process. Journey had a bit of a hard landing but she was ok. She made it across the creek but now I was worried about her crossing Fuller Lake Falls which would be a lot bigger than this little creek. I should not have worried so much.
The Fuller Lake waterfall was ABSOLUTELY UNCROSSABLE. It was ROARING. Much more so than in the photo I saw from a week ago. At least three times as much water or more was coming out of Fuller Lake. It unveiled itself in three large segments, about 150 ft. wide in total. This was the end of the road for us. NONE SHALL PASS.
I took photos of the waterfall and then let Journey have a snack before heading back down. I had wanted to do a longer hike than 5 miles but this was a good one for us and Journey had a lot of fun in the snow. It was a brisk and gorgeous morning in Tahoe National Forest.
