Eldorado National Forest
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Echo Lakes Traverse Eldorado National Forest |
July 10, 2020
A visit to the off-trail heartland of Desolation Valley has been on our gang's calendar for several years. Even though it is going to be rather hot, this is the day.
THe trailhead is virtually full at 9 a.m.
Managing to squeeze the car into the last little available space, the four of us head down to the Echo Lakes Resort to grab a convenient boat ride that will save six miles of redundant walking.
The dock looks inviting
Oops! The Boat Taxi is inoperative due to the current coronavirus pandemic. Horrors! I must have read instructions from the wrong website. In any case, this is most embarrassing, because as group leader I am supposed to be on top of this sort of thing.
The ticket office is boarded up
This means that we will not be able to loop through Desolation Valley after all,
because the overall distance would be too great for us old people. I lamely
suggest that we could seek our fortune on another trail, but Cindy, Eileen, and
Lori are in favor of walking here anyway; so we head out on the Pacific
Crest-Tahoe Rim Trail.
Lake Tahoe is a bit smoggy today
Laurie, a newcomer to the group, is a generation behind the rest of us and is quite fit. When hearing the words "Echo Lakes" from Eileen, she expressed an interest in going with us, because at one time she had had aspirations of becoming a forest ranger and working around here.
Lower Echo Lake is nearly 1½ miles long
As soon as I find a convenient spot, I stash my walking stick in the manzanita beside a recognizable boulder. Perhaps today I will recover it without waiting for two years as I did over on the Ralston Peak Trail.
A lone kayaker below Becker Peak, 8320'
Scaling that one is on my bucket list as well.
The cabin owners here have a pretty nice gig
Presently we are overtake by a handsome twenty-something ranger, who is off to do some trail maintenance work at the northern end of Lake Aloha.
We wish him a pleasant mission
Life is tough for the residents here
This upper lake is only about half as long as the other one; but it is much more interesting, because it sports about ten islands of various sizes.
Upper Echo Lake
At the far end of the lake is the boat taxi dock. Ignoring the trail down to it, we press on up the PCT.
Plugging away
I always have disliked this section of trail, because it is loaded with gruss for maintenance reasons, which makes the trekking less than fun. I appreciate the need for the stuff on this highly popular route, but that doesn't make the walking any easier.
The Echo Lakes are well behind us now
At this point we need a plan. We could continue up a mile or so to the nearby
Ralston and Cagwin Lakes and call it a day; but someone suggests that we return to the
car and head over to the alternate trail that I had suggested earlier. The others
are in agreement, so we start back. At the boat-taxi spur, a posting
details the story of our day thus far:
Now they tell me
Some of the route is shady
Back at the lower lake
Hikers atop Ralston Peak, 9239'
Slogging back
Somebody worked hard to install that rope
I wait around here for a while, hoping to catch a video of the woman swinging out and dropping into the water; but when she finally does get up the nerve, she doesn't take the big plunge after all. Pshaw.
Photogenic formation
The end is in sight
I do remember to retrieve my walking stick just a short distance from the trailhead.
End of the line
§: Well, that was a nice outing, albeit not the planned one.
In retrospect, we could have continued up just another mile or so to Triangle
Lake and Lost Lake, which I never have seen; I wish that I had thought of it.
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