3-Day Plumas/Tahoe Expedition (Day 3)
Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 12:08 pm
I wrote about days 1 & 2 here. On day 3 we woke up, broke camp, dumped the camping gear in the Hummer and headed out Hwy 49 to FS 93 (across the highway from Union Flat Campground between Sierra City and Downieville). I wanted to check out the southern routes into Gold Valley and also have a look at Sierra Buttes Lookout.
FS 93 was a nice fast dirt road, but I didn't realize that it turns into pavement up on top before you get to Packer Lake Saddle:
No worries, having watched a lot of Soul Train as a kid I knew how to approach this dilemma.
With that song stuck in my head and about a half mile of pavement being nothing but a memory, we hung a right back onto dirt and headed for the Sierra Buttes Lookout:
The road was easy until we got to my C551SBLA waypoint where it turned into a nice narrow and somewhat steep 4x4 road. We ran into a stock Chevy Suburban bumping and bottoming-out it's way down this thing so pulled off into the only wide spot at PULLOFF to let him by. At SBPark it turned back into a nice road leading to the top, but the forest service plopped a locked gate not far past that, so we had to hike up the remaining switchbacks and a long stairway to get to the top:
There was still quite a bit of snow hanging around in this area and the views were awesome:
Flying boy on the lookout deck exaggerating about something or other:
We hiked back down to the Grizzlies, started down, and found a disabled jeep alongside the trail that hadn't been there on the way up. Bummer. The driver was MIA so we assumed he was hiking out for help. Anyhoo...
Another quick run further down the pavement brought us to Packer Lake Saddle. We turned north onto the dirt heading toward Deer Lake and Gold Valley. Lots of familiar place names on the intersection signs (I'd ridden to all those places in the past via the northern route into the valley from Plumas NF):
I'd never been on the Little Deer Lake Trail so we headed down it:
It started getting rougher, Flyin Boy mis-navigated on a snow drift and slid about 10 feet off the trail (
) so we decided to turn around at the top of a tough looking section not far from Little Deer Lake:
All in all a successful mission!
FS 93 was a nice fast dirt road, but I didn't realize that it turns into pavement up on top before you get to Packer Lake Saddle:
No worries, having watched a lot of Soul Train as a kid I knew how to approach this dilemma.
With that song stuck in my head and about a half mile of pavement being nothing but a memory, we hung a right back onto dirt and headed for the Sierra Buttes Lookout:
The road was easy until we got to my C551SBLA waypoint where it turned into a nice narrow and somewhat steep 4x4 road. We ran into a stock Chevy Suburban bumping and bottoming-out it's way down this thing so pulled off into the only wide spot at PULLOFF to let him by. At SBPark it turned back into a nice road leading to the top, but the forest service plopped a locked gate not far past that, so we had to hike up the remaining switchbacks and a long stairway to get to the top:
There was still quite a bit of snow hanging around in this area and the views were awesome:
Flying boy on the lookout deck exaggerating about something or other:
We hiked back down to the Grizzlies, started down, and found a disabled jeep alongside the trail that hadn't been there on the way up. Bummer. The driver was MIA so we assumed he was hiking out for help. Anyhoo...
Another quick run further down the pavement brought us to Packer Lake Saddle. We turned north onto the dirt heading toward Deer Lake and Gold Valley. Lots of familiar place names on the intersection signs (I'd ridden to all those places in the past via the northern route into the valley from Plumas NF):
I'd never been on the Little Deer Lake Trail so we headed down it:
It started getting rougher, Flyin Boy mis-navigated on a snow drift and slid about 10 feet off the trail (
) so we decided to turn around at the top of a tough looking section not far from Little Deer Lake:All in all a successful mission!
