Closing the Loop

Tahoe City to Brockway Summit · a fast solo morning · closing the loop where it began

A loop has one cruel property: it doesn't count until you return to the exact spot you left. I'd walked more than 140 miles around Lake Tahoe. I'd stood on the highest point of the trail, watched a storm come sweeping across Meiss Meadow, and walked out of Desolation alone. And none of it, strictly speaking, was finished — because my car still sat at Brockway Summit, and between me and it lay the final stretch of the Tahoe Rim Trail.

I slept one more night in Tahoe City — at the Pepper Tree Inn — and set out at 6 a.m., alone, to close the circle while the air was still cool. The guidebook version of this last leg runs 19.2 miles through the pines above the north shore, past Watson Lake to Brockway, and the trailhead sign warns it is "quite hot in summer" and "water is scarce." But a hiker I'd met on the PCT had waved the stretch off — "that part's just trail," he'd said, nothing you haven't already seen ten finer versions of. So I made a call. I'd walked the whole ring of the lake; the loop was honest either way. All that remained was to reach the car, so I took the efficient line north toward Watson and cut about six miles from the day. I carried a liter and a half of water and nothing more, trusting that a light pack and a cool early start would let me move fast enough never to miss the rest. They did.

Out of Tahoe City at first light. The only stretch of the whole loop that starts on asphalt.

The last stretch The efficient line home

Walking a final morning alone, after two weeks, is a strange and lovely thing. There's no one to talk to, so you talk to yourself, and then you stop talking altogether and simply listen to your own feet and the wind moving through the Jeffrey pines. I went fast and light through the cool early miles, ticked off the small climbs, and let the whole trip play back behind my eyes — the blue blaze on the first day, Relay Peak, the cards at Star Lake, the storm, Aloha, the goodbye at Gilmore. Fourteen days will fold themselves into a single morning, if you let them.

Tahoe through the trees, one of the last looks. After 160 miles, that blue still stops you.

Watson Lake one way, Brockway the other. The last junction of the whole loop, and the first one where I already knew exactly how the story ended.

A curious thing kept me company through those last miles: my car, waiting. It runs on electricity, so I could pull up its app and watch it sitting there at the Brockway trailhead — "asleep," parked just off the highway, a couple thousand feet off and closing. There's something absurd and perfect about walking 162 miles through wilderness while a small icon of your car naps patiently at the finish line. A nineteenth-century trail and a twenty-first-century breadcrumb. It felt like the whole loop reaching back to draw me in.

The car, napping at Brockway, watched from a couple of miles out. A very modern kind of finish-line beacon.

Brockway Back where it began

And then, all at once, the trail delivered me to the Brockway Summit trailhead — the same interpretive kiosk I'd passed thirteen days before, the same map of the same lake, the little "You Are Here" dot meaning something now it hadn't then. I'd stood in this exact spot with a heavy pack and clean socks and a whole loop ahead of me. Now I stood in it with a light pack, wrecked feet, and the whole of it behind me. I raised my trekking poles in silent celebration. The loop was closed. 162 miles. It counted.

Brockway Summit, loop closed. "A Trail Like No Other," the sign says. After thirteen days, I was in no position to argue.

Two weeks of trail on my face. Worth every mile.

Nine months ago I walked this loop entirely in my head and built an app from what I imagined. This week I walked the real thing — and the imagined version had gotten it almost exactly right.

Here's the part that still moves me. Long before any of this, I sat at a keyboard and walked this exact loop in my imagination, mile by mile, and built an entire app out of what I pictured going wrong — the scarce water, the exposed ridges, the storms, the navigation, the resupplies. This trip was the field test of that daydream, and the daydream held. The water really was scarce where I'd feared it; the storm really did come; the map in my pocket really was the thing I reached for at every lonely junction. I built Backpackers Friend for the hiker I imagined I'd become out here — and then I walked out and became him.

Home. Feet in the pool, cold one in hand, 162 miles in the bank. This is the last waypoint, and it isn't on any map.

That's the loop — all four legs of it, all 162 miles, from the first blue blaze to the last cold drink. If you read the whole series, thank you for walking it with me. And if it left you wanting to plan a loop of your own: good. That is exactly the feeling the whole thing was built for.