The Storm We Saw Coming

Kingsbury South to Echo · ~40 miles · Star Lake, the Freel high country, and Meiss Meadow

For four days the sky over Tahoe had been a flat, perfect blue — the kind of weather that lets you forget weather is something that happens to you. Leg 2 is where the trail climbs into its high, wild heart: Star Lake, the Freel Peak country, the wide meadows of Meiss. It is the most beautiful stretch of the whole loop. It is also where, one afternoon, the sky stopped being scenery and became a decision.

Kingsbury South, resupplied and back on trail. From here the route climbs straight up into the Carson Range.

The climb Up through Heavenly to Star Lake

Leaving Kingsbury, the trail wastes no time going up. It threads through the top of the Heavenly ski area — chairlifts hanging silent over summer wildflowers, an odd, hushed reminder of the crowds that own this ridge come winter — and then keeps climbing into true alpine country. The trees shrink and gnarl, the granite takes over, and the world cracks open south toward the spine of the Sierra. Our aim was Star Lake, tucked into a cirque beneath Freel Peak, one of the highest and loveliest camps on the entire trail.

Heavenly in the off-season. Walking under a chairlift with a full pack is a strange, good feeling.

The climb toward Star Lake. This is the trail earning back everything the honeymoon miles gave away.

We reached camp with light to spare, dropped the packs, and did the finest thing you can do at 9,000 feet on tired legs: nothing at all. Star Lake went glassy in the evening, the granite gave back the last of the day's warmth, and we sat at the water's edge and played cards until it was too dark to tell the suits apart. Nights like that are the whole reason to shoulder the pack. You spend all day paying for them, and they are always, always worth it.

Camp at Star Lake. Freel Peak above, still water below, and nowhere else to be.

Cards on the rocks until dark. The most important gear on a long trail weighs almost nothing.

Freel The roof of the Carson Range

Morning carried us up and around the Freel Peak massif, the high shoulder of the Carson Range, where a few stubborn snow patches still clung to the north faces in mid-July. Up here the trail is all sky and long horizon — the Carson Valley falling away to the east, the Sierra crest stacking up to the south, and everywhere the improbable summer wildflowers of the high country, lupine running purple right to the edge of the path. It is exposed, and it is magnificent, and there is nowhere at all to hide. I filed that last part away without quite knowing why.

The Freel massif. Look closely at the sky over the ridge — that's the first hint of what the afternoon had in mind.

Lupine at nine thousand feet. The high country puts on a show for about three weeks a year, and we hit it.

Meiss Country The afternoon the sky turned

Then came Meiss Country, and the day I'll remember longest from this whole leg. Meiss is a wide, soft basin of golden meadows and slow creeks — the headwaters of the Upper Truckee River — ringed by dark forest. We walked into it under a sky that had begun the morning bright and was now stacking up grey and heavy, faster than seemed fair. I checked the forecast on my phone. It read, with the flat honesty of a weather app, 60 degrees, thunderstorm. No hedging. The storm was not a maybe; it was an appointment.

Meiss Meadow, early afternoon. A shaft of sun on the grass, and a wall of slate coming in behind the trees. You do not want to be crossing a high open ridge into this.

This is the whole reason a weather forecast belongs in a backpacking app. Knowing the storm was coming — and roughly when — turned what could have been a bad decision into a simple one. Rather than push up onto the next exposed climb late in the day and make myself the tallest thing on a ridge in a lightning storm, we timed it: crossed the open meadow while the light held, layered up, and let the weather find us where it was safe to be found. The rain came. We had our jackets on and the ridge at our backs.

Hood up, still smiling. A storm you saw coming is an adventure; a storm that surprises you on an exposed ridge is something else.

The forecast said 60 degrees and thunderstorm. It was right. Knowing that an hour early is the difference between a good story and a bad one.

Not long after, the Tahoe Rim Trail joins hands with the Pacific Crest Trail, and the two run together through this country — the familiar blue TRT triangle and the PCT's own emblem sharing a single post. There's a quiet thrill in that junction, a reminder that the modest loop under your boots is briefly stitched into the 2,650-mile giant that runs from Mexico to Canada. We followed the shared path south, the storm grumbling off behind us, toward camp at a high lake that lay dead still and grey beneath the last of the weather.

Where the TRT joins the PCT. For a while, our little loop and the big trail are the same footpath.

Camp under the tail end of the storm. The lake didn't move all evening.

To Echo Sunrise, and the halfway feeling

The storm blew through in the night and left the world scrubbed and gold. We woke to sunrise setting fire to the ridge above Showers Lake — the kind of morning that erases the previous afternoon's tension whole — and walked the last miles of the leg toward Echo Summit, crossing a patch of the Caldor Fire burn where the shade falls away and the standing snags remind you what a dry Sierra summer can do. Echo Lake and its little chalet waited on the far side, and with them the strange arithmetic of a thru-hike: we were now, more or less, halfway.

Sunrise above Showers Lake, the morning after. The trail gives these back to you as if to apologize.

The sign for Echo Summit — the end of Leg 2, and the doorway to Desolation Wilderness. From here, the trip would change in a way I didn't expect.

At Echo we regrouped, resupplied, and looked ahead to Desolation Wilderness — Lake Aloha, Dicks Pass, the granite core of the whole route. It was going to be the most beautiful leg of all. It was also the leg where our little group would come apart, and where I'd leave the wilderness and finish the walk to Tahoe City on my own.