I went snow camping with  my buddy Blaine and his pal Kevin near South Lake Tahoe, CA at Mt. Tallac. This was my first adventure going snow camping and it was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

We drove up to the snow at 4:30 in the a.m. on Saturday and caravanned up and arrived at the trail head at about 9:45 and were snowshoeing and hiking by 10:15. Kona was all set with her gear in her pack, but the snow was really crunchy and she was post-holing really bad so i took off her pack and carried her food in my pack, which was already getting a little heavy. Kevin brought port and didn’t want to carry that, so I started to feel like a sherpa. Anyhow, off we went into the mountains and snow. The hike in was about 3 hours i would guess breaking trail a lot of the way. The last 1/8 mile was the steepest and hardest going. We finally found the ridge we were going to camp on. Blaine and Kevin decided to make snow caves so they got busy on their caves. See the photo of kevin with his cave from the inside.

I was the only one who brought a tent up and the guys were giving me a hard time telling me how cold I was going to be at night. I stuck to my guns that my gear would be sufficient and Kona and I would help keep each other warm.

In the tent I was fine. Kona seemed a bit cold and i covered her with a fleece blanket i brought and by the time morning was here, we had survived!

In the morning we packed up and headed out along a slightly different line down, but we were cruising and we made it back to the parking lot by 11. Kevin cruised down and Blaine and I went out to breakfast before beating traffic back down to SF.

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