Category: Hiking

The Sierra Canyon Hiking Group hike today was the 7.5 mile round trip to the Loch Leven Lakes. It was an absolutely beautiful day – warm with a cool breeze. According to all my hiking books this is a very popular hike. The trail head is right of of Highway 80 at the Rainbow Road exit. The three lakes were absolutely stunning. We sat on a rock in the sun by the lake to eat our lunch.

Afterward we stopped at the Rainbow Lodge for beer. This group of people is so much fun to hike with.

If you would like to see all the pictures of the hike you can see them here.

I haven’t hiked for two weeks so today’s hike was hard but beautiful. There was lots of snow which made the hiking hard. Especially going up.

To get to the Coldstream Trail trailhead we took the Donner pass Road exit off of I80. We followed a gravel road to the east of the Donner State Park Camp ground. We went quite a ways on this road until we came to a horseshoe bend in the railway tracks where we parked, crossed the tracks and headed up. In about half a mile we passed Lost Trail Lodge which looks like a wonderful place to stay.

From there we headed through forest for several miles. The trail was covered in snow. it was fun to see all the animal tracks. There were coyote, deer and rabbits tracks and several others we weren’t sure about. Hiking in the snow was hard work but we had the trail to ourselves and the temperature was around 40 so it wasn’t too cold.

We were heading south towards Tinker’s Knob. We made it to 8250 feet at the ridge before the final climb to Tinker’s Knob. It was drizzling and gray so there was no view. the snow kept getting deeper so we decided to turn back. I think we did about 6 miles total.

Here we are near the top. I am  the one with the white pants.  If you want to see all the pictures of this hike they are here.

Yesterday the Sierra Canyon hiking group was just four of us (Dave, Sherry, Merle and me). We did a very strenuous hike to Hobart Reservoir from the east. To get to the trail head from Carson City we went west on Ash Canyon Road turned left on Winnie then right on Wellington. The jeep road which head up the mountain is an unmarked left turn between the beautiful houses along Wellington.

We headed up the very narrow dirt road for two or three miles.  I was glad that Dave was a good driver. He went very slowly and his Jeep Cherokee did fine. When we found a wide part of the road we decided to stop and walk. We were at 6000 ft. We hiked up the road for a couple of miles and finally reached the crest at 7,904 feet. The climb was steep and hard. It turned out that we could have driven all the way up. We would have had to move this tree off the road

but otherwise the road was passable. As you can see the road up goes through a lot of trees that were burned by a forest fire a few years ago. Here is the parking area at the top.

From here we hikes down a mile or two and dropped 400 feet to Hobart Reservoir where we had lunch.

We hiked further down the creek that goes out of the reservoir and then headed back to the car. All of my pictures are here on Flickr.

It was REALLY hard to get up today for hiking after our Mount Rose hike yesterday. I was very glad that we decided to to do an easy local hike. We hiked around Anderson Park and Bartley Ranch Park both in South Reno. The sky was full of interesting clouds. It was threatening rain but it held off. The views from the bluff overlooking Reno were punctuated with rain in the distance. I enjoyed myself and we probably walked a mile or two with a few hills to get the heart pumping. We stopped at Starbucks for coffee on the way home and we still got home in time for lunch. Another great hike.