This is another post in the series about our visit to see our friends Kelley and Mark in Truckee, CA, our first time to the Lake Tahoe area. Today, Sunday, was all about taking it easy after our long drive down from Central Oregon yesterday. Today would see us laze about, then get a delicious breakfast with Mark and Kelley, take a short walk at 9000 feet with some fine feathered friends, dip our toes in Lake Tahoe for the first time, and while all this was going on, have our crockpot produce some really fine ragù to share with Mark and Kelley. In short, it was a delightful day.
On this vacation, after our recent whirlwind of visits to neighboring states of Idaho and Washington, we were hell bent on relaxing and staying in more of our normal routine in California. Since my retirement, our morning routine each day at our home, barring some highly unusual event, is to make a pot of coffee and do several NY Times crossword puzzles while enjoying our coffee. It's our thing. Make of it what you will. We take comfort in the ritual.
After a so-so night's sleep, the two of us jammed into a tiny, soft bed, I was pretty violently kicked awake and assaulted by my life partner. What on earth, I wondered. It turns out that Ann was attacked by a Komodo Dragon in her sleep and she was fighting it off! Rudely awakened, I got up to ease my aching back and set about figuring out how to make coffee.
To facilitate relaxing and staying in more of our normal routine, we brought beans, a grinder, and all the adulterants that Ann adds to her perfectly good coffee to contaminate it, but we depended on our hosts to provide a coffee maker. I found what I call a single-serving coffee maker in the kitchen and ultimately a tiny filter to fit it and a few minutes later, Ann and I were ensconced on the sofa with our puzzle books in hand. Really, the coffee wasn't bad even though I had to guess how many beans were appropriate for this tiny pot. The second pot was spot on!
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| How Cute! A Single-Serving Coffee Pot! |
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| Our Normal Morning Routine |
We were up, thanks to a very early bed time, no doubt for several hours before Mark and Kelley who were at the restaurant until close. But we were in no hurry to do anything and were content with a lazy morning with no agenda. At some point, Ann and Kelley decided that we would drive into town about 11-ish and that the four of us would get some brunch before taking a quick hike up above Lake Tahoe.
I confirmed that Mark and Kelly would come over for dinner and made a mental note to start the crockpot of meat sauce before we left. While I was waiting to go into town, I poked around a bit outside the condo we were staying in and came across a large bird's nest on top of a large outdoor light on the back porch. I'm guessing that it was the home of some baby Steller's Jays.
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| Steller's Jay Perhaps? |
Ann and I did not have a chance to look about the Truckee-Tahoe area yesterday. We merely got off I-80 at CA 89 and then drove to our condo at twilight. Today, after rendezvousing with Mark and Kelley at their house, Mark would drive us down CA 267 to Kings Beach where we would see Lake Tahoe for the first time as we navigated east to Incline City on the Nevada side of the lake. If you're ever wondering if you're in CA or NV, just look for the casinos.
As we entered the west end of Incline Village, Mark detoured off the ring road around the lake to take Lakeshore Blvd right down on the water, where we could see the mansions of the ultra-wealthy all along the shore. Incline Village is super spendy, no doubt thanks in large part to its location just across the border in Nevada whose favorable tax rates attract California money. There's a ton of Bay Area tech money, Hollywood film money, and old school old money in the area.
At the end of Lakeshore Blvd, we backtracked into Incline Village to have brunch at Sage Leaf restaurant. In a stroke of good fortune, Mark was able to find an open parking space just opposite the restaurant. I have to say that we had a really great breakfast. I wasn't going to have anything to drink with my meal, but then when Ann (always the instigator) ordered a Bloody Mary, I followed suit. I ordered it spicy and, unusually in my experience, it was spicy, a good omen for our forthcoming food.
It was noon and I was torn between a traditional breakfast or a lunch entrée. I decided to roll the dice on a lamb burger (because I love lamb) and was rewarded with a delicious burger that actually tasted of lamb. My fries were a bit old, but the duck fat fries accompanying Ann's burger were hot and delicious. Mark got a traditional old school breakfast plate and Kelley got biscuits and gravy; both plates looked good. Ann and I, we're so used to sub-par food that this was a very pleasant meal indeed.
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| Sage Leaf: Delicious Lamb Burger |
After breakfast, we had to wait on several confused drivers jockeying for position in the cramped parking lot before we could pull out to head up the Mt. Rose Highway. On the way up to Chickadee Ridge, we stopped at an overlook for our first real views of the lake, of Crystal Bay more specifically. It is almost impossible to take in the entire lake as it runs 22 miles north-south along the NV-CA border and 12-miles east-west. At this point in the day, the water was still capped with a mist, a mist that would burn off by the time we would return to the shore line.
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| Misty Crystal Bay from Mt. Rose Highway |
We continued up towards the Mt. Rose ski area and parked on the side of the road just shy of Ophir Creek. We started walking on an access trail to the Tahoe Rim Trail, our goal being to see if we could see any of the local Mountain Chickadees. Mark and Kelley had heard that the tiny little birds were used to landing on people's hands to eat birdseed. I think we were all a bit skeptical and we did not bring any birdseed; I'm not down with feeding wild animals. Your mileage may vary.
We were 50 or so yards down the trail when our skepticism vanished, as the following pictures will attest. It was a very cool experience having a tiny little bird land on my hand, one so close that I could barely get my camera far enough away from it to focus! Try framing, focusing, and shooting a traditional non-point-and-shoot camera with one hand some time! As the tiny creatures buzzed noisily in the trees about us, at one point, I had four of them vying to land on my hand at once.
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| Priceless! A Skeptic No Longer! |
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| So Close I Could Barely Focus, Especially with One Hand |
From the access trail, we joined and continued on the Tahoe Rim Trail for a mile or so, maybe two, as we explored the landscape, ultimately turning around after having sat up on a granite outcrop looking down on the lake.
The woods along the TRT are full of Western White Pines, a closely related species that is easy to confuse with Whitebarks. While the trees are very similar in appearance, the cones are diagnostic for they do not look anything alike. It was not until I came upon this grouping of young Whitebarks, likely from a forgotten Clark's Nutcracker seed cache, that I found a diagnostic purplish Whitebark cone. I would finally see a Clark's Nutcracker a half mile or so down the trail.
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Group of Young Endangered Whitebark Pines, Pinus albicaulis
Likely a Sprouted Seed Cache |
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| Clark's Nutcracker |
This trip to the Tahoe area would provide my first encounter with the Jeffrey Pine, a pine that is very similar to our local Ponderosas, but whose range is largely restricted to the Sierra Nevada. I probably have seen them before in Yosemite, but I was much younger then and not really focused on my surroundings. I first spied two of them right off Mark and Kelley's back porch on Saturday. On Sunday, we saw many huge specimens along the TRT. They are notable for their huge cones of which I have a photograph in a later post.
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| Jeffrey Pine, Pinus jeffreyi |
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| Salt and Pepper Sierra Nevada Granite and Pinemat Manzanita, Arctostaphylos nevadensis |
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| Looking at Sand Harbor |
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| Huge Western White Pine, Pinus monticola |
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| Hillside Full of Granite Glacial Erratics |
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| Lodgepole (aka Tahoe) Chipmunk |
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| Late Blooming Tufted Phlox, Phlox caespitosa |
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| Mountain Coyote Mint, Monardella odoratissima |
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| It's Sagebrush, but Tiny! Low Sagebrush, Artemisia arbuscula |
After sitting up on a large granite outcrop staring out at the distance, we wandered back to the truck via a different path, completing a circuit. From there, we headed back down to the lake to Sand Harbor on the undeveloped east side of the lake which is primarily park land. We scrambled down a bank to the crystal clear water that was quite chilly to the touch. As we were scrambling through the manzanita scrub, the experience reminded me of the shore of Paulina Lake back home.
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| Clear Tahoe Water |
I think that perhaps Mark and Kelley wanted to do more in the afternoon, but Ann and I had had plenty of exploration for one day and were residually tired from our long drive the day before. Plus I had a pot of meat sauce cooking back at the condo and I did not want it to dry out or scorch. As we made our way back to Truckee from the lake, Kelley mentioned to Ann that it might be possible for us to change to a much nicer house for the remainder of our stay. From Mark and Kelley's, Ann and I headed back to the condo where we were staying while Mark and Kelley went to check out the condition of the other property.
When we arrived back at the condo, the glorious aroma of meat sauce greeted us. Soon enough, we got a text telling us to pack our stuff and head to the new location. So we packed our stuff and grabbed the hot crockpot full of meat sauce and headed up the hill to a gorgeous house in the Tahoe Donner neighborhood high above Truckee and Donner Lake. We proceeded to open some wine and we got busy in the large, well appointed kitchen. Dinner was a quite simple affair of meat sauce over casarecce pasta with some asparagus.
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| Casarecce with Ragù, Asparagus |
This meat sauce, I prepped on Friday so that it could cook autonomously while we were out and about in the Truckee area. I started by rendering a fair amount of chopped bacon. The bacon went into the crockpot, while I browned cubed beef chuck in the bacon grease. After three batches of beef cubes browned, I poured off most of the grease and added three huge leeks, cut finely, to the pan. Once they were cooked, they too went into the crockpot along with a big bunch of dried porcini mushrooms that I had rehydrated the night before.
While all this was browning, I was making a braising sauce from a quart of half and half, a pint of red wine, a quart of beef broth, and a pint of porcini rehydrating liquid. This three quarts of liquid cooked down to a single quart, that when cooled, I added to the bacon, beef, leeks, and mushrooms. When the contents of the crockpot liner were cool, I put them into the refrigerator to get cold for the trip in the ice chest all the way to California.
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| Start of a Great Meat Sauce |
After a leisurely dinner and wine at the dining room table, we moved to the large glassed-in great room with its vaulted 25-foot ceiling and stone fireplace to watch some comedy on Netflix. Late in the evening, Mark and Kelley headed back down the hill into town and Ann and I headed to bed, opening the windows a bit on either side of the bed to bring in some cool mountain air. At home in the desert, we always have the windows open to let in the cool night air.
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