Watson Lake from Tahoe City High School

Introduction

The ride from Watson Lake out to the "Lava Rocks" is a fun, single-track ride, and the view of Lake Tahoe from the Lava Rocks is spectacular. However, there are many ways to get to Watson Lake and the "lava rocks." This ride describes a loop from Tahoe City, which includes a lot of climbing on dirt roads to get to the top, and some technical single-track downhill to get to back.

Figure 1: The view of Lake Tahoe from the "lava rocks" ( waypoint 067 )

Trail Description Info

There are many rides that go to Watson Lake, as it is in part of the North Star Trail System. These notes were taken on 8/29/97 (Friday before Labor Day). This ride up is based on the "Ride #3 - Watson Lake Loop," p. 81 of Mountain Biking The High Sierra, Guide 3B: Lake Tahoe - North 1 (1992 edition, I believe a newer edition is now available) by Carol Bonser. The route we took back down is not described in any book I have come across.

Note that linear mileages are recorded from my bike trip computer. The coordinates come from a hand-held GPS, and accuracy should be considered to around ±400 ft. The elevations (in feet) are taken from USGS topo maps with 40' contour lines. The "~" symbol means approximately. The "+" symbol means it was a bit above this contour line elevation, and the "-" symbol means it was a bit below this contour line elevation.

Trail Type

This route covers both dirt roads and single track. Difficulty covers a wide range, including good dirt roads, very rocky dirt roads, fairly easy single track, and very challenging single track.

Length/Time

This is about a 13 mile loop. Due to some technical walking parts (not helped by the fact we rode late in the season which made for very loose dirt in the steep parts), our elapsed time was 5 hours 10 minutes (including a quick lunch, but not a lot of sight seeing). Trip computer riding time was 2 hours 23 minutes, with an average speed of 5.4 MPH.

Difficulty

This ride has about 1300' of elevation gain with lots of granny gear riding, but not too many "killer hills". Thus this is a fairly strenuous ride, but many rides in the Tahoe area are much more severe.

In terms of difficulty, I would classify the majority of the ride in (and up) as advanced beginner. However, there are several sections that are at least intermediate, and a little bit that you will walk up (unless you are an advanced rider in great shape). Much of the ride out (and down), however, qualifies as intermediate with a lot of walking or advanced due to steep downhill single-track with loose dirt and rock. However, this ride could be done as an in-and-out, which would avoid most of the real technical stuff.

Most of this ride should be pretty easy to follow with these directions. However, the last little part of getting back to the high school can get confusing, as there are many junctions. To further make things difficult, my notes for the last little bit are very sketchy, largely because we were following another rider out who knew the trails and I didn't have a chance to take waypoints.

Traffic/Crowds

This is typical Tahoe mountain biking: you'll probably see quite of mountain bikes and tracks on the route in. You may also see some motorized vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc.) on some of the roads in.

Trailhead

I'll quote from the book for this. The book assumes you might want to ride to here. We drove.

In Tahoe City, start from the intersection of Highway 89 and Highway 28. Ride or drive northeast on Highway 28 through the main part of town. Turn left (northwest) on Old Mill Road, and after about a half mile, turn left again on Polaris at the top of the hill. Continue 0.4 mile farther to the end of the pavement just past North lake Tahoe High School. If you drove to this point, park here out of the way of the school traffic.

Figure 2 : Tracklog and Waypoints

Figure 2 shows the tracklog and waypoints for this ride. As with all the GPS data in this document, the points are fairly accurate, but there are times (especially when the GPS temporarily lost lock on the satellites) when jogs and such appear in the track log that weren't actually on the route.