First Half of July

July was a very busy month for the Miller household, so it is being broken into two parts.  Chase and I went to Genoa Nevada with his parents for the fourth of July.  We went up on Monday night and came back on Thursday night because I had EMT class on Monday and Friday.  On Tuesday, we went to Silver City Nevada, which is an old mining town.  We rode the steam train from Silver City to Gold City (Chase and his dad love trains)

Chase's dad taking pictures on the train.

Chase and I in front of the steam engine.

We also walked around the town and Chase bought me a beautiful pair of earrings and a bracelet.  They have a nice boardwalk and it feels like a really old town.

The next day (Independence Day) we walked up to the big meadow that Chase and the scouts walked through to get to their lake.  It was gorgeous and peaceful.  

This small pond had many little fish in it.  That day, we were going to swim in Lake Tahoe, but we couldn't find a parking spot anywhere so we walked around Spooner Lake.  We watched the fireworks from our usual spot by one of the schools and went back to the timeshare.  The next day we floated in a raft down the Truckee river with hundreds of other people.  It was a very warm day and it was the highlight of the trip.  Chase and I drove home through Truckee and looked at houses.

We got home from Tahoe on Thursday night and went backpacking on Friday night.  I had to trust Chase to buy the backpacking food and pack for the trip because I had EMT class.  We backpacked into lower Lady Lake during the night.  We hiked six miles into the lake and hiked three of the miles in the dark.  It was kind of scary, but very exhilarating.  There were only two other groups camping around the lake.  The next day, we hiked Madera and Sing peaks.  The picture above is looking down on our lake.  It is the lake next to the forest.

I had a hard time hiking up to the ridge, one reason was because we went straight up a couloir (a snow shoot) that had a minimal amount of snow and I was having difficulties.  Once we got to the top of the ridge and I ate a bunch of jerky, I did better.  The tops of both Madera and Sing Peak were very chossy.  This is me coming down from Madera peak. 

We hiked the ridge line to Sing Peak (Madera is in the background) and ate lunch under a twisted small lodgepole pine that had giant red ants all over it.  We watched a big group hike up the side of Sing Peak while we ate lunch.

When we got to the top of Sing Peak (we had to do some minor rock climbing, Chase was behind me all the time), the large group was still on the top.  It was a group of six older men and six younger men that looked like they were from the ghetto.  They told us they were from Oakland. 

Chase wanted to climb Gale Peak and then go back to camp, but I talked him out of it because it was 2 and we had many miles to go.  We took a circuitous route back to our camp, which meant that we slid down a couloir that actually had snow in it and ended up by this beauty, Chittenden Lake (picture above).  We had to follow a severly unmarked trail back to our camp, it was a good thing that we had the iPad or we would have never made it back.

The next day we packed up and walked the six miles back to our car.  The picture above is the view from our campsite.

The rest of July is on its way!