TRT Mile 0 to 14

The night is a battle royale over room temperature. Brian and Kevin, from Sacramento CA and College Station TX, are used to heat, and want the air conditioning off. Daniel and I are melting, and keep turning it on. The back and forth satisfies no one.

We wake early and make horrible hotel pot-in-the-room coffee. We use it to chase down the left over rotisserie chicken. Next down is the left over chocolate milk and orange juice. We are now ready to hit the road. We have a short 14 miles grind up to Watson Lake. We want to beat some of the heat, so we are strolling through town before 6:00am. At this hour, the town is more dead than our legs.

Overlooking Truckee River

We climb up and out of Tahoe City, and into great views of the Truckee River. We can see the ski resorts of both Alpine and Squaw Valley.

As we ascend, the views back of the lake do not match the pictures in my Tahoe Rim Trail smartphone application. The smoke leaves us sorta seeing the water, but unclear where it turns into the sky.

The number of mountain bikers continues to grow at an annoying rate. We tire of shouting “bike back” or “bike front” to warn each other. Hikers have the legal right of way, but most bikers seem legislatively illiterate. We did notice one encouraging trend, a few are actually attempting to use their brakes.

We break for a quick lunch. The bagel thins, coated with crunchy peanut butter and topped with banana chips, are surprisingly delicious.

Watson Lake

We had been warned that the water at Watson Lake was wanting, but we didn’t realize how much. Even after filtering, it is quite foul. We are trying to get by on as little as possible.

The evening entertainment ends up being a car show. A guy attempting to park his SUV, plows it hood first into a giant rock. Undaunted, our hero backs around to tilt at this windmill again. This time he backs into a completely different and quite massive boulder. His experiment creates impressive kinetic and sound energy, which curls our spines, but seems not to phase our hero. His buddy shouts out words of encouragement – “That one got me too!”

Tomorrow we will head for Mud Lake, unless of course we get run over by our Mario Cart neighbor.