Winter Lizard Trip to Tahoe/Donner Pass area (2/25/04 -2/29/04)

Lots and Lots of snow. Gary drove up Wednesday in his brand new Subaru Forrester.

We encountered rain south of Fresno and then blowing snow on highway 80.

Made it to the Sierra Club Claire Tappin Lodge where we heard from a group of idiots who were lost for two days in the snow storm and had to sleep out without a tent. Sound familiar?

The lodge master took one look at Gary and I and said no way are you two going to be able to make it into Bradley
Hut (our original destination, which is a five mile ski).

He said maybe we could make it to another hut that was only a 3/4 of a mile ski.

Well, the next day it took Gary and I over 2 hours to ski 3/4 of a mile into our hut. It had snowed 3 feet the previous two days and was still snowing hard with near white out conditions when we skied in.

Surprisingly we never made a wrong turn and skied straight into the hut. After getting to the hut we discovered that one of Gary's skies was broken (near the binding) and that there was tons of wood - but no axe! So, we had some lunch and skied back to the Sierra Club Lodge.

It took 20 minutes to ski out (downhill and following our tracks). Gary rented some skies and they gave me a long handled axe to shlep back up to the hut. Although it was still snowing pretty hard we made it back up following our tracks in about 40 minutes. I managed to chop wood for a blazing fire without dismembering myself. The next day was intermittent snow flurries and fabulous skiing.

Only saw two people -
a young crazy dude with a helmet and mountaineering skies who was checking out avalanche conditions (extremely high) and another ski nut named Carl (from Austria), who latter joined us for cocktails. Gary and I proceeded to get way too intoxicated, but only suffered minor injuries. The next day we took our time and skied out near noon (we would have stayed at the hut another night, but Gary thought a group of boy scouts had booked the place. Gary was wrong!! Sound familiar? The lodge master told us it was a group of Coeds from a college who were taking a winter wilderness course that were spending the night at the hut!!!!

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