This month Holly and I completed a thru-hike of the Tahoe Rim Trail with our family members. It was a wonderful experience, and doing the hike as a thru-hike and a family excursion provided us with some great memories. I suppose that I've been interested in thru-hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail ever since I moved to Reno. I've always been envious of the people who take an entire summer off and thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail, however, the reality is that hiking a long trail requires a significant investment of time, as well as lots of planning. The Tahoe Rim Trail, on the other hand, is right in our backyard and makes a perfect two week trip (or less for some folks).
The plan was set in motion during the spring of 2008. Holly and I decided to do this hike, and that it should be done as a family hike. Holly's dad, Carl, and my sister, Cara, were immediately interested and committed two weeks of their summer to the hike. Later my other sister, Colleen, came back from a year and half of working in China, and she too wanted to do the hike. To round out the mix we had Holly's cousine, Corrinne Hasenau, join us. Holly's uncle, John, joined us for the Desolation Wilderness portion of the hike, and Holly's mom, Chris, joined us for the Lake Aloha portion of the hike. In total we had six people who hiked the entire trail and up to eight people at Lake Aloha.
The plan was to start at Tahoe Meadows, which is located off of Mt. Rose Highway. We would hike three days to Kingsbury Summit where I arranged to rent a house from Larry Suter for one night http://tahoeskihouse.com/. This would give us the much-needed opportunity to re-stock on food, catch showers, and take care of any medical emergencies. Plus the place provided us access to a hot tub! From there we would travel four days to Echo Summit and stay at the city of Berkeley's Echo Lake Camp. From there it was five days to Tahoe City, three of which would be through Desolation Wilderness. Finally there would be four days in which we hiked back up to Tahoe Meadows along the northern part of the TRT. This strategy was designed to break the hike into manageable chunks of 3 to 5 days.
For gear we ended up bringing two stoves and two water filters for the entire group. For the most part Holly and I shared a tent, Cara and Colleen shared a tent, Corrinne slept in a bivouac sack (kind of like a small one-person tent that covers a sleeping bag). Carl started out with a full two-person tent, but eventually decided to switch to a tarp with a bug net rather than carrying the entire tent. For dinners we took mostly Mountain House and Backpacker's Pantry freeze-dried meals, which, I felt were sufficiently tasty and high in calories for us. By mixing things up we were able to provide some variety, although I have to admit, that we always looked forward to the drop days where we got to pig out on something really good. For lunchs we had trail mix, Cliff bars, peperonni sticks and jerky, although we did get tired of these foods pretty quickly (except the peperonni sticks which were a favorite). Breakfasts were coffee (made from liquid extract) or tea with a Cliff bar.
Please follow with me as I take you through our entire journey with these next couple of posts. (Image courtesy of the Tahoe Rim Trail Association - http://www.tahoerimtrail.org/)
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