July 11, 2026

My hike starts to today, but before I begin hiking , I’ll drive around Lake Tahoe and leave two food resupply boxes with local stores that hold boxes for hikers and drop three water caches where the trail meets a road. The resupply boxes break up my food carries into three manageable sections, and the water caches reduce the amount of water I have to carry on the dry east side of the lake. I’ll park at the Echo Lake Sno-Park, eat lunch, and start hiking around noon.

So…I forgot it was Saturday and the traffic around the lake was crazy. I didn’t get to the snow park until 12:30pm and didn’t start hiking until 1:00pm. After hiking for about an hour I realized the navigation app I use, FarOut, wasn’t working. I thought I could wait until my first resupply, where I will have Wi-Fi, to fix it, but after getting confused and getting “off trail” twice, I decided waiting three days wasn’t an option. I found two bars of cell service on a ridge where I could see Lake Tahoe. I deleted the app and downloaded it and the trail information again. The process was slow, but eventually the app was working again.

To celebrate, at the next water source, I filtered a liter of water, made an early dinner, checked my map, and decided on Showers Lake as my final destination for day one. There were quite a few people camped at the lake, but I found a nice campsite, set up my tent, filtered three liters of water for the following day and crawled in tent for the night. It was not the first day on trail I imagined, but tomorrow is going to be a better day!

Thanks for following along!

Loren, AKA Butterfingers