Lake Tahoe
Desolation Wilderness
Eagle Lake Buttress via Eagle Route (Trad, Alpine, 3 pitches)
I recently made a trip to see my childhood best friend who lives in Reno, Nevada. Pretty much every time I go to visit him, we head out to Lake Tahoe and try to suffer a little bit. This time we decided to center that adventure around climbing. Being that my friend doesn’t have any real experience in climbing and having taught him rope systems two days prior, we needed to find something that would be a challenge but at the same time technically comfortable. With this criteria in mind we set our eyes on an alpine crag in Desolation Wilderness. We pick to go up a 3 pitch, 5.6, trad route named Eagle Route.
We reviewed systems late into the night and woke up ready to tackle the day, inevitably stepping off later than we wanted. The approach takes off near Emerald Bay then hits the beautiful Eagle lake approximately 1 mile in. The terrain was very moderate to easy up until this point. As we worked to the far side of the lake, we were met with a boulder field that ascends up a gully; This is where the work started.
We slowly began crawling over and around boulders, around an intermediate peak, across some more boulders until we found ourselves at the bottom of the face. 2 miles in and 2.5 hours later, not quite a walk in the park. Strenuous terrain but absolutely beautiful and engaging.
The climbing went smooth as I block led up the quality rock. Hand sized cracks with scattered chicken heads. We ended up breaking the third pitch into two pitches, allowing for a more technical finish to the summit; Well worth it for a quality headwall crack.
Following through the short final pitch, my friend tops out his first multipitch climb with pride. We were met with probably the best view you can get of Emerald Bay and Lake Tahoe. A memory with my best friend that I will never forget.
Although we summited, the day obviously was not done. We made a short rappel and did some scrambling back to the base of the climb. Now knowing where we were, we put our heads down and began our descent knowing that we still had some work to do.
Finally making it back to the lake with tired legs, we were met with the satisfaction of looking at the buttress from a distance. We shared words about how amazing it is that we were able to have just been atop the feature just an hour ago.
The final push to the car was smooth and stoked by the memories of what we had just done. Looking back on the trip, I find myself incredibly grateful to be able to not only be able to share this adventure with such a close friend, but to be able to physically accomplish this task. These outings are a main reason I work so hard to maintain physical activity and strive for health. I can not think of a better way to experience life, than expressing yourself through exploration out in the wild with people you care about.
