Lake Tahoe 🌄

My third trip to Lake Tahoe and I would be happy to return again. So beautiful if you love nature. It’s a popular place to ski and I hear summers are great for boating and water activities, but my favorite time is late spring and early fall. It’s not that crowded and since one of my favorite things to do is hike it’s pretty perfect. A BIG thank you to my friend Liz for hosting Peggy and I again at her beautiful home on the lake. She’s our built in tour guide as she has been going there for many years and she even makes us delicious meals! My view for the days I was there 😊

You may recall that Tahoe got an unusually large amount of snow this past winter. Huge in fact, so even though it was the middle of May lots of snow still covering trails. But Liz had planned for lots of alternate trails if one we had wanted to hike was closed. On the days we hiked we would get up and just head out to hike close to where we were staying. Lots of great hikes right outside her door so here’s a picture of Liz and I doing that one morning. Thanks for being our photographer Peggy!

Then head back to the house for lunch and out for another hike in the afternoon - this time using the car to get further away. One of our favorite hikes is at Emerald Bay. You see waterfalls and hike all the way to the bottom where there is this cool old estate you can tour. We headed there but upon arrival discovered due to an avalanche the trail would be closed for at least another month. So this year just views from the top. There is actually a little island in Emerald Bay so you can see it in this picture.

The waterfalls at Emerald Bay were really fantastic - much larger then I’ve seen them in the past due to the melting of all that extra snow.

Another day we headed to Van Sickle Bi-State Park to hike and saw breathtaking views as we climbed as high as possible with all the snow covering the trails. Luckily Liz had the All Trails APP to help us navigate as we did lose the trail often. We didn’t make it to see the waterfall as there was just too much snow but the views were worth the hike.

It’s called Van Sickle Bi-State Park because it’s in Nevada and California and here’s the proof.

Liz suggested taking a drive to Virginia City, Nevada to experience a real western town, and also supposedly one of the most haunted cities in the US. Why not? We even did some googling to find out where the most haunted places to visit were and put possible ghost tour on our agenda. Virginia City was a huge town for silver and gold mining in the 19th century due to the Comstock Lode discovered in 1859. It was the most important industrial city between Denver and San Francisco and had a population of 25,000 people. Well now the population is just 900 people and it appears their main source of revenue is tourism. We talked to a number of the locals first of all to get their opinion on the best place for lunch, and second to ask about all the ghost activity we read about. The consensus was the Red Dog Saloon for lunch and yes lots of spirits around due to all the mining accidents that happened due to the poor mining conditions at that time. If you’re familiar with the TV show Ghost Hunters then you probably know they frequently film from Virginia City. We did eat lunch at the Red Dog Saloon and it was pretty good. Browsed some of the shops downtown and took a walk through the Silver Dollar Saloon. I was so taken back in the saloon that I forgot to take a picture but evidently women who enter take off their bra and leave it behind, and maybe men are required to leave a dollar bill? The walls and ceiling are covered in dollar bills and their are bra’s hanging everywhere! Plus my nose told me immediately that smoking is not only allowed but encouraged. I’m out! But worth a walk through😂

We decided to take the ghost tour that was most frequently featured on Ghost Hunters at the Old Washoe Club. It was totally worth the $10 even though (thankfully) we didn’t see or hear a ghost. Zach our tour guide did a great job of sharing the history of the town and of the club. In it’s prime it was I’m sure a beautiful building, but time has not been kind so while the first floor is still an active saloon, the upper two levels are uninhabitable - except of course for the ghosts. Zach took us into each of the rooms and told us about some of the people that had lived there that they believe are the ghosts still present. Most of the people had met untimely deaths and one by suicide - so kind of grim. But to his credit he was super matter of fact as everyone in town was about the fact that they just accept the spirits as part of their town. There is a crypt that I did get the chills in because when typhoid was an issue the morgue ran out of space so they stacked the bodies of about 100 people in this shaft - most of them children and then showed us a picture someone supposedly took of a child ghost floating around. Ok I’m out.

One of the rooms on the 2nd floor had this poker table set up and Zach said back in the day Ulysses S Grant, Mark Twain and a couple of other famous people I can’t remember used to meet there and play poker nonstop for days!

There is also a cemetery that is very haunted and weird things have been seen especially around Halloween so we made a stop there too. Actually I have always wanted to see wild horses and thought I would have to go to Wyoming to check that off my list - but the locals told me that wild horses are often seen in the cemetery so that was my major motivation for going. Plus I really kind of like old cemeteries- seeing the dates and how many people died so young. A reminder to enjoy every day because you don’t know how much time you have. Well not to keep you in suspense but we didn’t see any wild horses. Well not in the cemetery but we did see them on our drive home! And also the next day on the drive to the airport. So that was awesome.

Normally I post a lot of food. Well Liz cooked and we ate most of our meals at her home, so it wasn’t really a focus of this trip. We did go to the cute town of Truckee, CA for lunch after Liz picked us up at the airport. We ate at the American Bar and the food was great. I had delicious fish tacos but was too hungry to take a picture. Our flight left early and we had a quick plane change in Phoenix so no time for food. I did take this picture right outside the restaurant. I thought it was so funny because we were starving and I was hoping we wouldn’t have to resort to extreme measures for food.😂 Truckee also has cute shops we browsed after eating before heading to Liz’s and taking our first hike.

We did force Liz to let us take her out one night for dinner as a thank you - so went to the Bistro at the Edgewater Resort. We had been there before and it’s a really lovely very fancy hotel with spa and I think golf and a couple of nice restaurants. Our food was good but you really go for the spectacular views. The lobby has this very cool staircase and our tradition is that we take a photo on the stairs. So no food pics but at least the staircase happened.

Liz took this pic of Peggy and I and her daughter Maddie who stopped for one night on her way driving through Tahoe of our favorite place to have an adult beverage at the end of the day. These benches are right on the water and it’s a spectacular view of Lake Tahoe. It never gets old.

Sunset at the Edgewater Resort. I’ll be back! Thanks for a great trip Liz and thanks Peggy for being a great travel companion. Jump while you can💕