Taster Spoon: Tahoe A-Go-Go

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28

Last year, Ace raced in the Xterra National Championship, held every year on the north end of Lake Tahoe. I went along, not knowing much about Xterra events, and was blown away by the challenge of just the 3 mile run course. How people are expected to run under logs, over boulders and through creeks boggled my mind. As he competed, I was again blown away by the beauty of the venue as I rode the 70 miles around Lake Tahoe.

Ace swore off mountain bike races after the world championship last year, because he could never seem to complete a training ride - much less a race - in one piece.

But this year I caught him sneaking out three or four times in the last couple of months to ride mountain bikes with our friend Dr. Phil, and he confessed that he was "thinking" of competing in Tahoe again. I was kind of excited to ride around the lake, because of how beautiful I remembered it was last year, so I asked if I could come along.

We left Friday at ~~the height of rush hour~~ a totally reasonable time, and spent four or five hours getting to Auburn, perhaps an hour of which was me trying to guide us to Ikeda's when in fact I had no idea where it was. (I wanted to get something local; the sands in my Eat Local Challenge hourglass were running out.) Their raspberry pie was excellent; their pumpkin bread was the best I've ever had. And their home-grown peaches were slurpy and sweet and the size of softballs.

As we approached the Donner Pass, traffic stopped. I don't mean it slowed, I don't mean it was creeping. I mean people were getting out and walking around, and riding their bicycles up and down the highway. For an hour and twenty minutes we sat there. One clever driver thought to turn his headlights off, and lights up and down the road extinguished like dominos. It was eleven o'clock at night.

I finally walked up and rapped on the door of a truck in front of us. I asked whether he'd heard any news of what was going on over his C.B.

"Depends which report you believe," he said. "Could be an accident, could be weather. They say it's whiteout conditions over the Donner Pass so the police are stopping people to check for chains."

Chains! We'd left the Peninsula and its 80-degree weather that afternoon, and now we were talking about needing chains!

There wasn't much we could do, so we waited until traffic moved again, and as we crested the Donner Pass, we passed through a tunnel of semis a mile long, a hundred trucks parked on both sides of the highway who had been refused passage for the night. The wait was apparently caused by all those trucks being pulled from the road and having to find a slot in the gauntlet in which to bunk. As a by-the-way, Ace informed me that trucks don't have bathrooms on board. (Yellow snow.)

As traffic surged over the hill, I tried to imagine what the original Donner Party would have thought of the thousands of us all cheesed off by a two hour delay in our journey.

So we got into Tahoe at about 2 in the morning, and stayed at the cutest little cabin-type motel on the beach. Everything about it, every decoration, painting, lightswitch plate, lamp and blanket was bear-related! The air was bracing as we unloaded three bikes and all our gear, but we heaped the spare blankets on the bed and fell asleep immediately.

When Ace's alarm went off for the race, he went outside and took this picture.

Then he climbed back under the blankets.

We spent Saturday having a leisurely breakfast in Tahoe City; he rode the bike course of the race, and I ran some of it. If last year I was blown away by the run course, this year I was staggered by the bike course. I ran along a narrow ridge (1-2 feet wide) with a sheer drop down to the lake on one side and was in terror of stumbling and slipping to my death. "The Flume Trail."

I was thinking, "I can't believe anyone would attempt to traverse this path on a bicycle, never mind RACE it." And then I stood aside, gripping the limestone boulder between me and a steep cliff face, to let pass a young man on a unicycle.

Ace later said, "that's the easy part." He also sent me this picture of what he had avoided on race morning.

Don't forget that this ride was after a dip in the 58 degree lake. The weather had had hit a record low of 23 degrees. A friend of his said afterwards that she had the hardest time getting her shoe clipped into her pedal, and discovered it had completely iced over.

We rode around the lake Sunday, and it was still beautiful but I didn't enjoy it as much as last year. One, I'm out of shape, so it felt that much harder and longer. Two, we got a late start, and traffic was substantially heavier - stressful when there's so little shoulder. Three, about a third of the way through the wind picked up and demoralized me for a good hour as I rode into it down by Stateline, before terrifying me as I was creeping up precarious climbs with the wind gusting me alternately into traffic and towards the edge of the precipice.

I finally got back in time to fill up on Xterra leftovers (which were awesome, btw) and Ace began the long drive home.

It was different from staying home in every possible way - the weather, the leisurely mornings, the stars close enough to touch - and I couldn't have asked for a better way to kick off Autumn.