There are about a billion different hikes in the Tahoe area, but we only had time for one, so we chose the 3 mile round trip to the Picnic Rock scenic outlook, which also covers a small section of the Tahoe Rim Trail.
There are actually multiple rocks to have your picnic on, and we got to temporarily claim one as our own.
It was the perfect vantage point with a view of nearly the entire lake.
I climbed some of the neighboring rocks and met a chipmunk.
Picnic Rock is a popular trail, and on the way back the trail was getting very crowded, so we decided to try an alternate route back to the road on a mountain bike path with almost no traffic. It added an extra 1.5-2 miles to our total trip, but it was well worth it to enjoy some solitude.
There were SO MANY beautiful wildflowers on this path.
At a certain elevation, we encountered this strange red... thing all by itself in a clearing. We legitimately wondered if we’d stumbled on some rare non-native plant (I wanted to believe it was an alien), until we looked it up with Dad’s plant app and discovered it’s a Snowflower, a relative of heather that has a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that infects trees. Not so far off from the alien thing. As we headed down further, we ended up passing quite a few of them.
...including these buds, which are extra weird and cool.
More wildflowers...
And this lichen that was EVERYWHERE and looks pretty from a distance but up-close has these black eye things that are pure nightmare fuel!
Back at lake-level, we drove into the town of King’s Beach for ice cream cones, then found a public beach to lounge on for a bit.
The water here was actually legit WARM, but the wind made it a little chilly for a long swim. I got in for a bit but we mostly napped in the sand.
We also found this tiny secluded pebble beach around the corner on our way out. We could have stayed in Tahoe exploring for weeks! But this was a beautiful day to end our too-brief visit.
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