Alpine climbing in Tahoe

This past weekend Newton and I decided to do an alpine climb that wasn't so far from home. We returned to the Emerald Bay area at Tahoe to climb a route called Section 20 that is purported to be the longest rock route in the Tahoe Basin. We started the approach around 6:30 or 7 am as is tradition. This time around it was especially important to get an early start as the weather was calling for late afternoon thunderstorms. The route that we chose was called Section 20 in the Falcon Guidebook and ascends the face northwest of 90 foot wall. We knew that the challenge would be routefinding on this route, which proved to be true. In fact, we never really found the Section 20 route at all and instead followed our own route the entire way. I think that it totalled about 7 or 8 pitches, however in typical alpine fashion some of the pitches had to be cut short and others we could do a running belay. There was even a section near the top that we could unrope and hike about a quarter mile. The real challenge proved to be the rock quality, which was poor, especially in the middle of the route. However, despite getting off route and despite the poor rock quality we were able to put together a good climb without any hangups. We were cut a little short by storm clouds that were brewing over the lake, so upon reaching the summit ridge we decided to head down rather than to become lightning fodder. We also didn't have good information on the descent which proved to be extremely brushy. All in all the climb proved to be a good one. Hopefully I can get a photo or two from Newton to post on this blog.