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Mount Tallac. We
started skinning up Mt. Tallac Saturday morning.
Already the skies were grey and snow was falling.
About a foot of fresh snow from the prior evening's
storm lay on the ground. Not surprisingly given
the conditions, someone had laid a nice skin track up
the ridge for us. Here, Chris and Sierra begin
the climb up the ridge above the NE bowl. |
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Lower bowl. As we climbed higher, the
clouds crept lower and the winds picked up. In
this shot, you can barely make out Tallac's summit,
shrouded in the clouds. By the time we made it
to the summit ridge, the winds were absolutely
howling. Without any realistic chance of safely
dropping down to Gilmore Lake, we wisely decided to
bag our planned traverse. |
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Digging in. Although conditions were
dismal and we could've bailed out, we thought we would
hunker down and ride out the storm. We descended
about 100 feet below the ridgeline and found a nice
windbreak formed by a small clump of trees. We
dug down, leveled off a tent site and built up the
windbreak. As the weather worsened, we staked
out the tent and dove inside. |
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Shelter.
Hunkered down in our tent, we watched the storm's fury
unfold -- it snowed sideways, upwards and in furious
whirlwinds. Like a sandstorm in the desert,
spindrift was everywhere. In a word, brutal.
Huge trees that had stood for centuries were getting
absolutely throttled on the ridge above us.
Safely
inside the tent, Chris and Sierra thaw themselves out.
I
put in earplugs and hoped the tent poles would hold.
We slept, sort of. |
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Snorkel anyone?
The next morning, the wind crapped out and we had
Tallac all to ourselves, coated with a couple of feet
of steep and deep. Definitely snorkel snow. Low temps
made this very atypical Tahoe powder. It was as light
and dry as that stuff they rave about in Utah, where
they brag about the snow on their license plates. We
bombed down hooting and hollering all the way to the
car. |
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