Gold Country and Lake Tahoe

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2 April 2010

We left Yosemite by its northern edge which led us to part of the area where the 1849 Californian gold rush took place. There are several authentic towns along route 49 (I don’t know if this is a coincidence in numbering) and we stopped at two, Jamestown and Columbia which preserves many building from the era and is a State Park.

Our day’s destination was Lake Tahoe, situated at 6,225ft it, is the largest alpine lake in the USA and has many ski resorts surrounding it. However just after lunch it started to rain heavily and as we ascended this soon started to snow. So we had difficult driving conditions for the last 50 miles and saw several bad accidents, but the Jeep behaved admirably and we arrived successfully. We had hoped to take a cable car ride but you could hardly see the lake for the mist so the weather put paid to that.

As we are preparing for bed there is a howling gale and horizontal snow outside which may make getting away from here difficult tomorrow. Someone we spoke to summed it up with ‘great spring conditions’!

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