Nice hike in Lake Tahoe. 5 Lakes is a great 5 mile hike in the in Alpine meadows area.

North Star,
originally uploaded by Gate-Way.

You just cant be a view like this. This picture was taken at the top of NorthStar at Lake Tahoe on the East Ridge run, while this looks cool I would avoid it if your a snowboarder. There seems to be way way to many flat spots along the Ridge to get to the snow park and half pipe.

It’s been a great season so far and while spending a week up in Tahoe over the Xmas Holidays I was able to get in some good days, and I also made it up with some friends a weekend ago. Today im checking the forecast and 3-4 extra feet of snow just dropped in the last few days. This looks like its going to be one hell of a season and if you ski or snowboard at Lake Tahoe this is the year to go.

More info on this sucker.. all I can say this was gooood…

I have always known about the many hiking trails behind the cabin but I did not know that their is a 2 and 1/2 mile hike from the cabin to our one of our favoritate brew pubs, so Thomas and I strapped on our snow shoes and ran down the trail for some beer and believe it or not we did it much faster with in the snow than during our summer trip.

Where Am I,
originally uploaded by Gate-Way.

I was lost for days and I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, luckily my trusty head lamp didn’t give out after being stuck in this coal mine for what seemed like 20 minutes

This picture was taken in the Prospect Tunnel in Somersville, CA a coal mine community back in the 1860′s.

“From the 1860s through the turn of the last century, five coal mining towns thrived in the Black Diamond area: Nortonville, Somersville, Stewartville, West Hartley and Judsonville. As the location of California’s largest coal mining operation, nearly four million tons of coal (“black diamonds”) were removed from the earth. The residents of the mining towns were from all over the world, and their life was characterized by hard work and long hours. Occasional celebrations and a variety of organizations and social activities served to alleviate the drudgery of daily existence.

The coal mines had a significant impact on California’s economy. By the time operations ceased due to rising production costs and the exploitation of new energy sources, much of California’s economy had been transformed from a rural to an industrial base.” – ebparks.com

The Stewartville Hike goes by this section and the whole hike is about 7 miles long. If your in the East Bay I would defiantly recommend this hike but in the fall because it would be way to hot in the summer.  You can download a pdf map from here.

A few weeks back, a few friends and I went up to our regular place in the mountains for some nice R&R, Hiking, Drinking and a game of Mensch argere Dich nicht (The Board game “Sorry” for US folks). While we did our battle of Sorry the guy who never seems to loose that game won again. Oh well we all know he cheated.

We did some really nice Hikes both days in Tahoe. The first one was a 6-7 mile hike to Ellis Peak and the other one Barker Pass into Tahoe city where we ended right up at the bridge tender for a few pints of beer before catching a cab back to the cabin.

If you would like to see the trails we did and pictures taken load these files into the Free Google Earth viewer.

• Ellis Peak Trail Tahoe
• Barker Pass to Tahoe City

If you don’t have Google Earth Installed check out the hikes in Google Maps.

• Barker Pass to Tahoe City
• Ellis Park Trail Tahoe

Enjoy…. Can’t wait till the snow starts falling for some snowboarding.

I took this was a little cool 3.9 mile hike a week ago which is close to Phoenix Lake in Ross, California (Marin). Most of the hike was shaded and only walked about a mile on a fire road before really getting into the Hidden Meadow area. This is a pretty simple hike and takes you around a cool little meadow area, the climb inst to bad either about a 600 foot elevation change.

One thing about this hike is it gave me great views of Mount Tamalpais. If your looking for an easy hike I would recommend this, but be aware the first mile on the fire road can be littered with mountain bikers but you shouldn’t find any on the trail once you get going.

Below are some is a screen cap of the hike, and of course the links below will lead you to the Google Maps and Google Earth viewable options.

These Links below will show my hike path along with photos taken during my hike.

• Hidden Meadow Hike in Google Maps with Photos
• Hidden Meadow Hike In Google Earth
• Free Google Earth Application

I’m just getting around to being able to blog about this new I took last Saturday. So far this is one of my favorites that I have done and gives you a nice degree of difficulty, elevation change and great scenery. The hike is hidden in Larksupr, California (Marin County) and is about 5.3 miles round trip if you take the trail I did. I found a great book of 141 hikes for my local area, which also allows you to download the maps in PDF format and print them so you don’t have to carry the actual book around.

Baltimore Canyon (A15 hike in the book) starts out in a really nice redwood tree area and slowly climbs up to Blithedale Ridge where you can see great views of the bay and Mount Tamalpais. When I went it wasn’t to crowded which is good but I did run into a little friend (Banana Slug) slowly going across my trail. Check out Picture 42 and 43 of my hike to see.

I have exported my photos and GPS coordinates into Google maps which you can see below. You can zoom in or select a red push pin to see a thumb of a photo and clicking on the thumb shows your a full screen image. These Images are taken directly where they found in the map. I usually carry a GPS logger and my camera around to log my hikes.

Click here for a larger view of my hike along Baltimore Canyon.

Another cool thing is if you have the Free Google Earth viewer you can download my trip here for Google Earth.

“Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.”

This weekend I went on a great hike with some friend of mine and decided to put all my gps gadget stuff to use. With my gps, camera, camel pack and hiking shoes I was off to a great hike in Marin, California. Its a small 3 mile hike with various terrain and not to much difficulty. I snapped a few photos, most of them are just of the hills in Deer Park but the cool thing about all this is I now have gps data of the exact locations where I took my photos and as you can see below I placed them in google maps. Clicking on a red push pin pulls up a thumb of the photo and clicking on that image brings up the full images in another window.

I also put together a full sized map of the hike with the photos here.

I plan on doing this on most hikes and hopefully next time ill write a bit more descriptions about the photos and locations.