15-March-2024 Heading East!

Today I headed about 5 hours east from Marina, California to Reno, Nevada.

My purpose in heading east was to get to Reno as I'm staying with Randy's college friend Paul for the weekend and will be doing some skiing at Palisades. The drive over got gorgeous when I hit the Sierra Nevada range – I thought it would be a simple up and over but once I got up into the mountains it kept going through the peaks and was so incredibly scenic. I left 75° temperatures in California only to find several feet of snow when I got into the mountain passes.

I had warned Paul that I needed to do a 1 mile walk when I arrived and I thought he was joking when he said we could do a 6 mile round-trip hike to a waterfall. But as soon as I arrived he said "hurry up and get changed so we can get out and hike before it gets dark" – and we were on our way! About 10 minutes from his house is a beautiful mountain side and we hiked up about 1100 feet to a waterfall. We encountered snow about halfway up and I was so glad I had my ice spikes with me for the hike down. We only made it about a third of the way down before darkness came and thankfully we both had headlamps - eventually it got totally dark and we still had about a half hour to go. Thankfully Paul has hiked this trail a number of times and knew his way around – I would've been lost on the mountain for the night! It was 6 miles from our starting point to when we finished – didn't get off the trail until around 8:30 PM; then we went back to his house and got cleaned up and headed out for a late dinner. Looking forward to some skiing this weekend!