The First Days Were a Gift
Long before I stood at this trailhead, I'd walked the whole Tahoe Rim Trail in my head — nine months of imagined miles, built into an app against the day I'd finally come. Now, boots on and pack heavy, the first blue blaze bright on a Jeffrey pine, the lake lay below in a blue so deep and still it stopped me where I stood. It was the strangest feeling: arriving, at last, somewhere I already knew by heart — except this time the water was real, the climb was real, and every mile of it would have to be walked one honest step at a time.
The blaze that starts everything. You learn to love this little blue triangle — 165 miles of them, and they never once let us down.
Day 1 Clockwise from the top
We started at Brockway Summit on the north shore and went clockwise — the shrewd way around this loop. It front-loads the big Carson Range climbs while your legs are fresh and your food bag heaviest, and it saves Desolation Wilderness, the loveliest miles on the trail, for the very end, a reward you have to earn. Almost at once the trail set a choice before us at a signed junction: Mt. Rose one way, Brockway behind, the open rim ahead. We'd made that choice weeks earlier from the couch — every turn and campsite already dropped as a waypoint, the route between them snapped to the real trail. A route you've built yourself is one you truly understand when you're standing in front of the sign; it felt less like reading a map than greeting an old plan made good.
Early on the first day. Every one of these junctions was already a waypoint on my phone — but it's still a good feeling to have the sign agree with you.
And then the lake rose into view and never truly left us. You climb out of the trees onto open, sage-scented benches, and there it is below you — Tahoe, impossibly blue, the whole vast thing laid out like a map of itself. We spent that first day grinning like fools and taking the same photograph forty times over, because every hundred feet of climbing rearranged the light and somehow made it finer. This is the honeymoon of a thru-hike, before the feet complain and the food turns dull, and we knew it for what it was, and let it be exactly as good as it was.
Both of us, still fresh, the whole lake at our backs. Harder days were coming. This was not one of them.
Relay Peak The high point, on day two
The trail's high point comes early on this route: Relay Peak, just past 10,300 feet, the loftiest ground the TRT ever climbs. You earn it through the Mt. Rose Wilderness on a long, exposed grade, and the summit hands you the whole basin at once — Tahoe gleaming on one side, the Nevada desert falling away brown and endless on the other, and the trail's entire future drawn as a single thin line threading south along the rim. We lingered up there far longer than we'd meant to. When the highest ground of a two-week walk arrives on the second morning, you take the hint the mountains are offering and savor the long ride down.
Near Relay Peak, the roof of the trail. Lake on one side, the whole state of Nevada on the other.
Snowmelt still singing through the Mt. Rose Wilderness. On the west side water like this is everywhere; we didn't yet know how dearly we'd miss it on the dry ridges ahead.
That first stretch also gave us the thing that turns a long walk into something more: people. We came into a resupply to find friends waiting with real food, camp chairs, and a golden retriever who regarded the whole gathering as a personal triumph. A trail family assembles itself out of whoever turns up at the road crossings with a cooler, and Tahoe — stitched with paved roads that brush the trail every couple of days — makes that kind of small magic unusually easy to come by.
The unofficial trail-family mascot at our first resupply. Eleven out of ten, would be greeted by again.
The east rim Marlette, and the bluest water on the trail
From the Mt. Rose high country the trail eases onto the east rim, and this is where Tahoe truly shows off. You cross a broad timber bridge, share the tread with mountain bikers on the old Flume grades, and climb at last to the Marlette overlooks — a run of viewpoints where Marlette Lake rests in the foreground and the great blue bowl of Tahoe fills all the world behind it. If a single image comes to mind when people picture this trail, it is this one. We simply kept stopping, unable to help ourselves.
One of the big timber bridges on the east rim. The Nevada State Park section is beautifully built.
The Marlette overlook. Photos flatten it; standing there, the blue is almost too much to believe.
Dropping toward Spooner Summit and the Highway 50 crossing — the midpoint of the east rim, and a place to top off water before the dry ridge south.
The east rim is also where the trail first revealed its double nature. West side: water everywhere. East side: hot, open, and dry, with long, thirsty gaps between reliable sources. We crossed Highway 50 at Spooner, found a hiker's water cache someone had kindly left at the road, and spent a slow afternoon in a trailhead picnic shelter doing the honest work of thru-hiking — everything out of the pack, socks steaming on the concrete, one of us laid flat on a bench recovering from the heat while the other rationed the last of the trail mix. Glamorous it is not. But those road-crossing shelters, arriving every couple of days like small acts of mercy, are exactly what let us break 165 hard miles into legs that felt survivable.
The Spooner shelter. Half of thru-hiking is walking; the other half is lying very still with your feet up.
Kingsbury A bed, and 73 miles behind us
South of Spooner the trail climbs the long ridge toward South Camp Peak, and the signs begin their slow countdown to Tahoe City — still 73 miles off, the kind of number best not dwelt upon. We didn't dwell. We were aimed at Kingsbury South, where the trail meets the Heavenly ski area and Kingsbury Grade, and where a resupply, a real market, and — luxury of luxuries — a roof were waiting for us.
Tahoe City: 73. On day four, that number is a rumor. You walk to the next sign instead.
The Tramway Market at Kingsbury — the end of Leg 1. Clean water, cold drinks, a resupply box, and a horizontal surface with our names on it.
The first four days were a pure gift. We spent them the only right way — grateful, unhurried, and slightly unable to believe our luck.
Fifty miles down. We rolled into Kingsbury sunburned and happy, sorted a resupply box across a borrowed floor, and slept under a roof for the last time in a while. Ahead lay the high, wild heart of the trail — Star Lake, the Freel Peak country, and a sky that had been flawlessly, deceptively blue for four straight days and was about to change its mind.
Plan it the way we did
Every junction, campsite, and water stop on this leg was a waypoint I'd saved before we left, with the route between them snapped to the real trail and downloaded for offline use. Backpackers Friend lets you build a multi-day route on a topo map, carry it with no signal, and track each day as you walk it. Free to get started, no account required.
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