I Left Desolation Alone

Echo Lake to Tahoe City · ~50 miles · Lake Aloha, Dicks Pass, and the Velma Lakes

Every long trail saves its finest country for the leg that breaks the group up. Ours was Desolation Wilderness — the granite core of the whole loop, all polished rock and glacial water and the jagged Crystal Range cut against the sky. It is the most beautiful stretch of the Tahoe Rim Trail, and we walked the heart of it together. It is also the leg where our little band came apart: at Gilmore, half of us turned for home, and I walked out of Desolation and on to Tahoe City alone.

Echo The chalet, and a boat across the lake

Leg 3 opens with a gift you rarely get on a wilderness trail: a boat. The Echo Lake Chalet stands at the water's edge with cold drinks and a little store, and from its dock a small water taxi runs the length of Echo Lake, sparing you a few miles of shoreline and setting you down at the very threshold of Desolation. We piled in with our packs, the boat threw a long wake across the blue, and for fifteen easy minutes backpacking felt outrageously simple. Then it left us on the far shore, and the granite took over.

Echo Chalet. Cold drinks, a resupply, and the last easy mile before Desolation.

The Echo Lake water taxi. Fifteen minutes of letting a motor do the work — the only time on the trail I didn't earn my mileage.

Aloha The most beautiful lake on the trail

And then, Lake Aloha. If a single photograph of the Tahoe Rim Trail has ever stopped you where you stood, the odds are good it was taken here. Aloha is a broad, shallow sheet of water studded with granite islands and silvered dead snags, set directly beneath the Crystal Range — Pyramid Peak and its neighbors rising raw and grey behind it, still patched with the last of the year's snow. It hardly looks real. We sat on the warm rock at its edge for a long while, and not one of us was in any hurry to leave.

Lake Aloha and the Crystal Range. This is the picture the whole trail is selling, and for once the real thing is better than the postcard.

Desolation earns its name: acres of bare, glacier-polished granite, blue water in every hollow.

Gilmore Where the group split

We camped near Gilmore Lake, and that is where the trip quietly changed shape. Two weeks is a long thing to ask of a pair of feet, and by Gilmore the miles had caught up with my hiking partner — blisters gone from nuisance to real trouble, the kind that turn every downhill step into a negotiation. The honest, grown-up call was to leave the trail here, and there's a good way to do it: Gilmore sits at the foot of Mount Tallac, and a well-worn path drops from the ridge to Fallen Leaf Lake and a ride home. So the plan divided. My partner would walk our other friend out over Tallac; I would carry on and close the loop.

Our last camp together, at a lake near Gilmore. A swim, a good night, and an early goodbye at the trail junction the next morning.

Splitting up in the backcountry is never a small thing, and I'll admit I walked away from that junction with a knot in my chest. As it turned out, their way down held a little more adventure than any of us wanted — a slipped step on a steep pitch of the Tallac descent, a real scare, a scratch and a bruise I wouldn't hear the whole story of until days later, over a beer, when I could see the mark on my friend's face and be grateful all over again that it was only a story to tell. Everyone got down. Everyone got home. On a trail, that's the only number that counts.

Getting off the trail at the right moment isn't quitting. It's the most experienced thing a hiker can do. Everyone got down; everyone got home.

Dicks Pass Leaving the wilderness, alone

So I went on alone. From the Gilmore basin the trail climbs to Dicks Pass — the high back door out of Desolation — and drops the far side past a chain of impossibly blue tarns: Dicks Lake, Fontanillis, and the two Velmas, each cupped in its own granite bowl with the Crystal Range still marching along the western sky. These were my last miles of the wilderness, and the first I walked entirely by myself. Solo is a different thing from walking with company — quieter, more inward, every choice wholly my own. It's also when I leaned hardest on the map in my pocket: no one to confer with at the junctions, so I let the app do the conferring, my planned line always there, my small blue dot always upon it, no signal required.

From near Dicks Pass, the Crystal Range on the skyline. The high point of Desolation, and the last big climb of the leg.

One of the Velma/Dicks lakes below the pass. There's a new one around nearly every corner, each bluer than the last.

North of the Velmas the trail leaves the high granite and softens into forest, past Richardson Lake and out of Desolation, trading big alpine drama for quiet green miles and the occasional PCT thru-hiker bound the other way — a grey-bearded gentleman gave me a thumbs-up and a war story, the trail's version of nodding to someone on the highway. Alone but never lonely: on a path this well loved you're never more than a few hours from a friendly face, even when your own crew has gone home.

Richardson Lake, the gentle far edge of Desolation. The trail breathes out here.

Tahoe City Granite Chief, and a beer at the end of a leg

The last day of the leg climbs into the Granite Chief Wilderness above the Palisades valley, then swings back to the west rim for one more round of Tahoe views before the long drop toward town. Somewhere in there the trail crosses the Ward Creek Bridge — a tidy timber span with a plaque proudly dating it to the summer of 2007 — and threads the wildflower miles of Page Meadows, and then a sign says Tahoe City 3 and you know it is nearly done.

Into the Granite Chief Wilderness on the west rim. The last wild country before Tahoe City.

The west rim hands the lake back to you through the trees, from a wholly new angle to the one you began with.

The Ward Creek Bridge, built by the trail association in 2007. Somebody carried every board of this out here so the rest of us could keep our feet dry.

Tahoe City: 3. On Leg 1 that same town was a rumor 73 miles away. Now it's an hour.

I walked into Tahoe City tired, filthy, and quietly proud, and did the only correct thing: found a bar, sat down, and ordered a cold beer. It tasted like about a hundred miles. The loop wasn't quite closed — the car still waited all the way back at Brockway Summit, one last stretch of trail away — but the hardest, highest, most beautiful country lay behind me now, walked end to end. Some of it in the best company. The best of it, as it turned out, alone.

Tahoe City, Leg 3 in the bag. One stretch of trail left between me and the car.