Snowmobiles Over The Continental Divide

Finally, the big day!!
We had made a reservation with Good Times Adventures for a two hour tour, and luckily this day featured the very best weather of our entire vacation.
Cold as hell (10 below zero?) but sunny and clear with lots of fresh snow to make everything pretty.

I decided that their loaner boots were better than mine, but all the rest of my gear was fine. Turned out that the heated footwells on our machines made it a moot point.

Now for some contrast:

 This is what the pair of us rode in March 2013 on our Lake Tahoe trip. Terrific fun, but...

 For 2016 we each had our own one of these.
Won't bore you with the specs, but wow! And they were brand new.
Also, because this was Colorado and not California, the throttle didn't have a difficult to operate weasel-lawyer "safety" device that sucked all the fun out of it and sapped your concentration. California sucks, by the way.


One early favorite part of this tour was that after a familiarization cruise through the woods, we got to a big open field with what can only be described as an oval track. Some of the others didn't quite get it, but me and Lisa sure did. I wound that sucker up and flew, passing on the inside and outside a few times and grinning ear to eel. Pretty sure that had the track been bigger I could have hit 60mph or more.
What a rush!
Time for a quick selfie.

Then it was time to get into the meat of the tour--onward and upward to the Continental Divide!

Single file up, sometimes on impossibly narrow trails through the pines, and God was it beautiful!
The sections on roads or across fields were also fun, because you could gawk without getting croaked.
(BTW, our guide was Ivan from Argentina, and he knows almost as much about Ginobili as we do, being their national hero and all).



Up, up, up we went, until the trail spit us out into another world, at around 12,500 feet above sea level .
This is Mt. Guyot, and the slope to the left drains springtime snowmelt waters to the west, while a few meters to the right etc etc. (When I peed behind a tree, I made sure to be on OUR side. California got enough of my whiz on the Tahoe trip).

To me, the divide was more moving than some invisible thing like a border or the equator. After climbing a mountain range, it's very stirring to see and know that everything really does change. Much like the Mississippi River which I've crossed MANY times, or reaching another continent separated by an ocean.
It was a big event in my life--thinking about how it must have felt to all the pioneers hundreds of years ago.


We got to spend a decent amount of time up there--enough for my aforementioned whiz, where I sank into the snow up to my junk and had a vision of needing help to get out--and for pictures and videos.

Remembering photo tips from many years ago, I was glad I had set my phone's camera to +1.5 EV overexposure, because this is almost exactly how I remember it looked up there.


Our trip down was every bit as much fun as the way up.



The scenery was beautiful and my heart was soaring.
One of the very best days of my entire life.

Snowmobiles Rock!

Up early on our first morning in South Lake Tahoe California, we drove just a few miles to Lake Tahoe Adventures and paid money, signed forms, fitted helmets, and grabbed goggles for our snowmobile tour.
Other groups soon arrived, and before long we loaded up the bus and hit the road for Hope Valley in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, which is the biggest in the USA outside Alaska.

I only brought my phone for pics because I didn't want to deal with anything bigger--my cameras are very large and heavy. In hindsight, adding Sylvia's Sony T70 would have been the smartest move, giving me a zoom lens and more pixels for printing. Oh well...what I got certainly tells the story, and the quality is better than I expected.

The bus stopped here while the gate to Hope Valley is opened:


So far sightings of snow are confined to small patches in the shade, with almost none at lower elevations. I'm a little concerned at this point as we've been driving uphill for awhile.
Then we drove uphill a bunch more, and conditions start to look better.

We meet Danny, our instructor/guide, and learn about our machines.
He proves to be funny, quick-witted, and super nice.
All four of my girls have a crush on him already, and to be honest I'm a bit smitten myself since he's one of the few men I've ever met who might actually be cooler and more interesting than me.
After about five minutes of instruction we're ready for a quick run up the road so Danny can get a feel for our abilities and establish a logical order so we'd have the best chance of staying together without anyone running up someone else's rear.
At this point we've stopped for a quick shuffle of the lineup, a peptalk, and a little more instruction:

After running on some recently added snow and a few bare patches of asphalt the trail ahead is looking much better.

Time to open them up and start having fun!
Wish I had some action shots.

This first leg of the tour was a blur for me due to extreme concentration on mastering the snowmobile, but the beauty of our surroundings still gets through as we blast up steep mountain roads covered in snow. After I don't know how long, we finally come to the first break in a most scenic location:


Danny gets the photo credit on both of these, with style points for dropping onto his side and shooting this next one from the ground like some kind of pro-with-a-phonecam:

(I had to rotate them 180* in Photoshop cuz he had my phone upside-down--not so cool now, are ya?)

We've reached a pretty serious elevation by now, and this is the view ahead:

I made yellow snow behind the trees on the right. Been over 30 years since I've done that.

Looking back from here, this caught my eye:

Obviously the snow is freaking DEEP up here!
And these signs are 3 feet taller than the ones here in Texas.



From the next rest stop:








Sylvia and I have agreed that we want to play like this again.
Texas being what it is, probably jet-skies and ATVs are next.

Day 2: Fun In The Sun

Today started early, but luckily we're in the Pacific Time Zone so it wasn't as bad as it sounded at first.

The five of us went to Lake Tahoe Adventures to get outfitted with helmets and goggles and sign lots of release forms, then a bunch of other folks joined us on a shuttle bus for a long trip into the mountains.
Ending up in Hope Valley, we got introduced to our machines by our most excellent guide Danny and took off up into the snowy wilderness:

At the first stop, Danny took this pic with my phone--I didn't want to deal with bringing the big cameras and in full sun my Samsung does okay.

Over two hours on roads and trails, sometimes hauling serious quantities of ass, this was quite an adventure. Lots of historical places--Sylvia made a snow angel on the site where Kit Carson's party got stranded for a month.
We lucked into the best group and guide. The ones who left right after us got bogged down when a whole family just couldn't get the hang of operating snowmobiles--they eventually quit and the rest of that group carried on behind schedule only to have another family roll one machine and put some damage on another at the same spot. Weak!


While the ladies napped afterwards I took my infrared camera across the street to the stream and got a bunch of shots like this:



After naps we went down to Tahoe and split up--casinos for some, touristy shopping for others.
On our return I tried some night shots of tall pines and stars:



The full moon just now came over the mountains and eventually some good clouds joined the pachanga, so after some bloggus interruptus to shoot long exposures I bring you this:



Other than Facebooking pics from my phone, this is as close as it gets to instant blogging, and is why I bought a laptop for this trip.
Having a lot of fun both doing stuff and sharing it.
Tomorrow we're going up to the top of Heavenly Mountain, which is the kingdaddy around here.
Some will ski, some will sled, some will take pictures.
I'll be in at least one category...