A trip report, February 16-17, 2019
My plan was to go backpacking to Mount Tallac for one night. I had arrived to Tahoe on Friday evening, and spent the night in a nice motel. After some breakfast and a short drive I started hiking around 10 AM on Saturday morning. The Tallac trailhead is not accessible during the winter, so I parked on 89 between roads 1306 and 1307.
Soon after getting into woods, there were only single snowshoe footprints ahead of me. Hiking in deep and soft (but luckily not wet) snow was strenuous, I sank 5-10 inches at every step. Progress was quite slow even in gentle uphill.
I had lunch at 1 PM near Floating Island Lake, and then continued to Cathedral Lake, which seemed like a nice and sheltered place. For some reason I still decided to climb a little bit higher, and set up a camp above Cathedral Lake at 3:40 PM.
On Sunday morning I melted water, cooked oatmeal, and started hiking up without all the heavy gear at 7:45 AM. Following the summer trail accurately did not really work, because the steepest section was basically a thick snow wall. I navigated more to the right, trying to find the easiest path.
As I continued to the ridge which leads to the top, the wind become stronger. On the plus side, at the ridge the snow was harder and thus easier to hike.
The wind was so strong that even within 100 feet from the top, I was not sure if I can get there. I did at 10:00 AM, snapped blindly a few photos (the weather was so bad that I could not see the phone screen) and hurried back down.
After getting back to the camp at 11:00 AM, I had a warm lunch, packed up the tent, and headed back down. Snow had already covered much of my tracks, so I was only partly able to follow them. I was back at the car at 2:35 PM.
