Dookey

Drunken Facebooking led to an 11th hour rally to hit Mt. Lola with my flatlander homey Dan B. and his buddy Gavin. After a Friday night spent at the local pub drinking craft brewed gluten free beer (Brewing Lair) and supporting North Tahoe SUP, I found myself doing the tipsy FB posting and stumbled upon a message from my buddy Dan, who was looking for beta on The Patches. Between the hours of 11:37 pm and 2 am I managed to convince him and his compadre to head to Mt. Lola instead. An 8 am wake-up call informing me that the duo were headed my way sealed the deal. After a morning meet-n-greet and the requisite vehicle loading shuffle, we headed out on the highway. The journey found us tailgating a Prius, 4x4ing with immaculate (and bouncy) precision, maneuvering the "Danger Brigdge", and eventually geared up and hiking by noon. I led Dan and Gavin on the basic ridge trek, as neither had ever been to the area before. On our hike I pointed out various local landmarks and we were blessed with a midday view of Lassen in the distance (by the late afternoon it was virtually invisible due to "mountain haze"). We also discovered that the backside (north facing aspect) was still holding a sweet swatch of seemingly skiable (or rideable in Dan and Gavin's case) snow. We made a group decision to keep that line in our back pocket for a potential on-the-way-back-to-the-truck-end-of-the-day-lap and headed for the main ridge instead. Seeing as how it was the guys' first jaunt to the area, we breached the summit and took the obligatory photo at the Mt. Lola sign (the snapshot was actually taken by Mike and his pooch Minda, the only souls we ran into all day; they were flabbergasted and stoked that 1. we had hiked all that way to ski/ride and 2. that we had driven Dan's Forerunner over the "Danger Bridge"). From there we bopped the short distance down to the snow and banged out 5 laps on the longest pitch of the ridge (my laps were 8/10/5/5/5, fwiw. Dan gave me ishit about counting my turns; I pulled the OCD card in my defense). Then, without any prompting on my part, the guys decided that we needed to hit the backside. The strip, while fairly long, was about halfway down the back, the top most part having severely melted out. Once there, I logged about 22 turns on the strip; iit was smoother and less rollercoasty than when I'd skied it almost a month earlier. The slog out was no less grueling, but only about half as long this time around since as the snow didn't go as far down the backside. The conditions, on both slopes, were nothing short of smooth summer corn. We were back at the truck around 6ish, over the "Danger Bridge" by 7 and mowing on Mexi by 8:30. Boo. Yaa.