Donner, Castle Peak & Truckee

What is this … A post that ISN’T a week late! Yeah that’s how I roll (well from now on). Now the only challenge is to try to keep it short and to the point (don’t count on it). As always, you can see my whole gallery of pictures here.
This weekend I joined Jessica, Elpida; Becca and Cody on a trip up to the Hoffman cabin at Donner Lake. We left early Saturday morning to head up. Cody, Becca and I drove up in one car, Jessica and Elpida in another.

Once we got up the cabin I meet Cody’s dad, Kyle, who was at the cabin taking care of a few things around the place. The girls all sat down and picked out a hike for us to do, and probably an hour after getting to the cabin we were off again, headed to Boreal ski resort to get to the Pacific Crest Trailhead that is there.

Before I start though, I have to admit, I’m somewhat disappointed in my pictures from this trip. Not that the pictures I took were bad, just that because of the running that Becca and I have been doing, my knees are what they used to be and I had to borrow Nicks trekking poles to take some weight off of them so I couldn’t keep my camera out. So my solution is going to be to hijack pictures from other people’s websites. So basically if you see snow in the pictures, I probably didn’t take it. There is also a great little bit of info about the hike/ski conditions from SummitPost.org.

The hike starts off as a very nice trail, and as such was fairly popular. We passed quite a few day-hikers from all ages. The trail was well marked and even had a few signs pointing out things of interest. Starting at around 7200’, the trail was very gradual until it came up to Castle Pass (~4 miles) where the trail heads up steeply for the last hundred yards or so to the pass which is at 7660’. After that it got a bit crazy for a group who hadn’t hiked in a long time (with the exception of Jessica, who is an animal). From the pass to the peak, is maybe a mile and a half, but probably closer to a mile and rises from 7660’ to 9103’. Obviously there is no easy way to do this, you just go up.

I was able to find Castle Peak on Yahoo Maps, so if you wanted a satalite picture of the peak, you can see it here.

We went up some of the way, and stopped for lunch. I think we probably took a 45 min lunch, which was really nice. I actually nodded off a little after I ate and it did a great job to rest me and my knees before the steepest part of the climb. It was almost a scramble to get up the rest of the way, and defiantly was for the last 30 feet or so. But the views from up top always make it worth it.

A quick thanks to Jessica for pushing the rest of us to summit!

The hike back was fairly un-eventful, the trekking poles came in extremely handy to keep me from slamming all my weight down on my knees, but I wasted a lot of energy trying to make a delicate decent and I got a little dehydrated by the end. I pounded a Nalgene of water when I got back to the cabin and tried to drink more throughout the weekend and all was well.

When we got back to the cabin, we all took showers and had some beers. We played a game of Yatzee which included tequila shots whenever you got a Yatzee, as well as one before we started for good measure. Cody won the game, but we all had a fun time of it. After that we watched the movie “Sideways” which was pretty funny. The guy getting married reminded me of one of the guys I work with so it was fun to watch.

I’m not sure what time we all crashed, but I’m fairly certain it was before midnight. We were all dead tired and I know I personally passed out only a few seconds after my head hit the pillow.

Sunday (today, can you believe it) we got up and Becca made banana and peanut butter pancakes. We headed over to Cody’s Aunt’s cabin which is on the water, and we chilled (almost literally) on their doc for a while. After an hour or two of that, we got back to the cabin, got everything packed up and headed over to Truckee, parked the car and walked around the town poking our head into the shops.

One shop in particular held our attention for quite some time. I forget the name of the place, but it was your typical outdoor sports place. But they had a ton of stuff on sale. Jessica picked up a really nice pair of Solomon’s for $40; I picked up two Dutch Ovens (a 2Q and 8Q) for $35 and Cody and Becca grabbed some Cast Iron pans for dirt cheap as well.

We ate an early dinner at the Truckee Diner, and then parted ways to head home.

In all it was a great trip, my legs are a little tight at the moment, but surprisingly my knees are doing great, better than that have been in a few days actually. Makes me want to start pushing hard to get other people involved in backpacking/hiking so I can get back out there and start doing it again, reminds me of some of the things I miss.

Picture Sources:
KevinGong.com
SummitPost.org