Nee's Journeys

Tahoe National Forest - Penner Lake - June 16 & 17, 2006 We had hoped to get out earlier and backpack this season but with all of the late winter snow and our amateur route finding skills we waited until mid-June. Our plan had been to hike the Grouse Ridge trail which is suppose to be really great...however. We started out our hike and about a half an hour into the hike we started to run into a lot of snow. The snow level was sitting at around 8000 feet and the ridge trail was around 9000 feet so we quickly determined that we weren't going to be doing our originally anticipated route. We were determined though to get some hiking in so we decided we would try to off trail it to the nothern end of the ridge trail. About 5 frustrating hours later (frustrating for me) we knew that we weren't going to make it to the end destination and the off trail route we were taking was pretty rough. We sat down with the map and decided to go to Penner Lake which was off of a trail t...

2005/2006 Snowboarding Season I'm finally getting around to loading pictures from 2006. This is the 4th year that I've had a ski lease up in Lake Tahoe, North Lake Tahoe. Lucky me, I was the adminstrator this year since Curtis handed over the reings to me. We had 9 people who are a part of this lease year and it was a good group. Since Curtis and I have season passes to Northstar we spent about half of our season there otherwise we primarily went to Alpine Meadows or Squaw Valley. We also did one day at Mt. Rose this year which was a pretty good place and definitely some challenging terrain in the Chutes. Our ski trip this year was to Mammoth Mountain where we got a huge dump of snow...it's a great mountain and a must visit. Check out the 2006 snow photos .

On Friday the 25th Mike, Steve and I headed out of the Bay Area and up to one of my favorite easy-to-get-to hiking areas...Emigrant Wilderness. From door to door I think the drive took about 3 1/2 hours, of course Steve was at the wheel which was definitely a factor :) Our plan was to an overnight loop from Gianelli to Crabtree Meadow staying at Deer Lake. In order to make that happen we called the ranger station in advance and had them fill out a permit. They were suppose to leave the permit in a pick up box so we could get it after hours but we got no love and no permit was there when we arrived. So we made a couple of slight adjustmens and camped out at one of the campgrounds in Pinecrest. Also instead of doing the loop from Gianelli we did a semi-loop from Crabtree. We started out at Crabtree and then went down a secondary trail to Pine Valley. I had done a trip through Pine Valley a few years ago to get to Chain Lakes and nicknamed the trip Mordor...it was all burnt out, ashes eve...