Mt Price Backpack

This weekend I, along with my usual hiking friends, made a backpack trip into the Desolation Wilderness (on the east side of Lake Tahoe) with the intent of climbing to the top of Mt Price and scattering the ashes of Paul’s dog Millie from the summit. Millie was a great hiking dog (here are some photos of her in her prime) and had made it to the top of Mt Price a few years earlier so the honor seemed fitting.

It had been a while since I had backpacked and I had forgotten how uncomfortable and exhausting it is schlepping all that gear around on your back. I think it is time to spend more money on new gear that is even lighter than the perfectly good stuff I have now. Nevertheless the rewards of the effort were significant and, that evening, camping at Twin Lakes with a near full moon was quite wonderful. It was a shame about the wind flapping the tent mercilessly all night though.


The hike up to the summit of Mt Price (9,975 ft) on the next day was quite challenging, there being no real trail just a lot of steep accent over boulder strewn slopes with some nasty loose scree at the top. What is more the summit approach is not very spectacular, the view from the summit is amazing, but the actual summit itself is unremarkable, it is just one heap of rock that is a bit higher than the others around it. It’s always better to hike to something significant and obvious I think.

Anyway, Paul got to scatter some of Millie’s ashes, as you can see below, and it wasn't even the anticipated Big Lebowski moment where we all got to ingest the ashes. Paul tells us that he has a lot more ashes back at home, but there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in the group for scattering them over any other peaks. At least not right now, we are too tired.



Here are some more photos from the trip on my SmugMug site.