Sep 2 Day 17

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Day 17, and another beautiful weather day in the making, so we are going to take a ride around Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe sits south of Reno, and staying on the back roads give us about a one hour drive to the north end of the lake. 

During our drive to the lake, we encountered a number of other riders, including this red goldwing behind us. He followed us for about 45 minutes, then pulled up next to us at a traffic light. Turns out he is originally from Youngstown (small world).

This is Lennie showing her creative photography side. Pretty artsy eh? If we created a mural size print, and gave it some kind of impressive name like "Wingin-a-mirror" or "Bogey on Your Six, Leader" perhaps we could sell it. We would of course make it a limited print run of something like 1000 copies :) Who wants print #1??

There is a nice little mountain pass to climb over on the way to Lake Tahoe. The pass is fairly steep with a number of nice turns, nothing super challenging, but a lot of fun.

The pass goes over the Mount Rose Summit, which peaks out at 8911 feet. Mount Rose is in the Humboldt-Toiyabe's National Forest. The national forest covers 6.3 million acres in Nevada and Califronia, which makes it the largest national forest in the lower 48 states.

Nevada also seems to be proud of the fact that the Mount Rose Pass is the highest pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range that is open all year round. If they are impressed enough to hang a sign, I'm impressed enough to plop it in our blog.

After an hour or so on the road, we finally got a glimpse of Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe is a freshwater lake with a surface elevation of 6,225 ft. It spans the border of Nevada and California. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America, and the second deepest lake in the United States, with a depth is 1,645 ft (Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest). The lake is about 22 miles long, and 12 miles wide. Tahoe is also known for water clarity, swimmers can typically see clearly from the surface to a depth of about 75 feet.

During the winter months, the Tahoe area is home to at least 12 ski resorts which include: Heavenly, Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows, Northstar, Kirkwood, and others.

During the summer, the lake is popular for boating, beach activities, and camping. There were a large number of boaters out on the lake.

Most of the campgrounds we passed along the way were completely full. There were lines of cars winding down the street being denied entry into the camping and beach areas. I wish we could have visited the lake on a weekday during a non-holiday week.

At the south end of the lake (on the Nevada side only), there are a number of casinos and hotels. Harrah's has a place in south Tahoe, as well as Reno. We chose to stay in Reno assuming there would be less crowds... Oh, and the Reno location comped our rooms, the Tahoe Harrah's said "you gotta pay to stay".

We drove down the east side of the lake to reach South Lake Tahoe. After a little lunch, we started our way up the western side of the lake. This side of the lake has a lot of wooded areas, and road often moves away from the actual lake edge. It is very scenic.

There is a section of the lake known as Emerald Bay. The roadway in this area rises very sharply and sits high above the lake surface. I mentioned earlier in the blog, that any road where you can look left or right and see where you just were, is a great biking road. One issue of concern, is the lack of guard rails, and the very small amount of berm.

Again, the views up here are wonderful, the amount of berm, not so wonderful. Many times I get to see these sights for the first time when looking at Lennie's photos, as I have to focus on the road during the drive.

Climbing higher...

Once at the top, the trees open up and you finally get a good look at Emerald Bay. The little island in the middle is kind of interesting.

If you ever visit this area, make sure you drive up to the overlook of Emerald Bay, it is well worth the drive.

You can see one of the smaller ski areas on the opposite side of the lake.

After spending the day circling the entire lake, eating some lunch, and enjoying the views, we head back toward Reno for the night. Near the bottom of Mount Rose Pass, this caught my eye. Hmmm, he says "Historic", I say "old and falling apart" (it's a fine line).

We arrived back at Harrah's just as the sun was setting for the day. We ate dinner at one of the casino restaurants, gambled (threw away a bunch of money), and finally called it a night around 2 am (might be a record for Lennie).

Tomorrow we leave Reno/Tahoe, and start our journey toward Colorado. We should get across most of northern Nevada tomorrow.

Today, we traveled 150 miles, circling Lake Tahoe. This brings our trip total to 3934 miles. Below is a map of the route from today.