July Powder Haus Week

Nothing on the docket this last week so the kids and I grabbed Ben Taylor from Petaluma on our way up to the mountains again and spent another summer week in Soda Springs. Magic weather for riding, hiking and swimming in the Sierras, time seems to fly by so quickly when we’re at Powder Haus…

Ben had a new bike in tow so we took him up to the trails above Serene Lakes one morning to give it a whirl. He did an excellent job grinding up more than 1000 vertical feet of singletrack at 6500+ feet of elevation, lungs burning and cheeks beet red. Lots of high fives when we summited below Lola’s Lookout, the three kids happy the climbing was behind them and eager to descend back to the car. Such good trails up there, I think we hit them four times over the span of a week, so nice to be able to get above the dust of Truckee and Auburn into the high alpine where everything was still green.

We took a rest from the bikes one day and tackled what turned out to be a pretty grueling hike up to the lakes of Loch Leven. Since purchasing Powder Haus last summer, every time we’d driven down Hampshire Rocks Road we’d noticed a bunch of cars along one section of the road, an area that turned out to be the Loch Leven trailhead up the granite and into the high alpine above the interstate. It was a solid climb up the switchbacks through almost 1500 feet of vertical, crossing the main rail line across the Sierras and eventually topping out with some incredible views of the mountains and Interstate 80 below. The lakes were very picturesque, the first was quite small but the second afforded us an excellent spot for a rewarding swim with plenty of big granite boulders from which to jump. Awesome to be up there and have the entire lake to ourselves!

One the way down we heard the distant rumble of a freight train, after which all of us literally ran down the switchbacks in an attempt to get up close and personal with the freight locomotive as it crossed the mountains. An isolated thunderstorm caught us by surprise and gave us a bit of a cool down as we finally made it to the tracks, arriving just in time to see the front of the train pass. The whole thing was at least a mile or two of carriages, we lost count of the number of railcars but it was fun to see such a behemoth piece of engineering up so close. The kids requested lunch on the Yuba River post-hike, followed by hot tubbing pre-dinner. What a day! All our legs were jelly after seven miles through the mountains…

We bid Ben goodbye on the morning of day four and Lisa joined us that evening. Her request for day five was a ride on the trails behind Serene Lakes followed by an afternoon dip in Long Lake. No complaints from me! The clips below are of the kids descending from Lola’s Lookout on a couple of their favorite trails. I think I could ride up there every day of summer and not get tired of it, such good dirt at this time of year.

The Munselle girls joined us for our last couple of days at Powder Haus, great to finally get them up to stay. Our adventures on Saturday took us to Tahoe City to float the Truckee River, something all three adults had had on their bucket list for quite some time. The whole week at Powder Haus was great, but I think the river float was probably the highlight for me: such a fun atmosphere with throngs of booze cruisers and families enjoying the great outdoors. The kids had a blast chatting to people along the way and the handful of small rapids gave us all a bit of a thrill. Amy framed it well: there’s not much better than cold beer while floating on water in the California summer! A friend of mine was nice enough to lend us his bulletproof float tubes for the day, I think we might have to put them on the list for Santa for the Valtenbergs family so we can make the Truckee River float a (more than) annual event.

For our final day in the mountains we hiked through the Donner Summit train tunnels, something we did with Uncle Al and Gramps over spring break but couldn’t go further than the first tunnel with snow on the ground. The graffiti in the almost two miles of tunnels was pretty impressive, as was the engineering that went into constructing them all those years ago in 1867. We made it through to a lookout on the eastern side of Donner Peak, climbing up for some incredible views of Highway 40 and the tunnels back to the west. Another visit to Long Lake capped off a very fun week in the mountains, great to have so many guests up there with us this summer!