North Shore Three Pass Ride

Tahoe is still delivering perfect weather, although a bit cooler yesterday. We stayed at Squaw in the morning playing tennis and just generally being lazy. For lunch we went up to the village and while sitting there saw a group of four cyclists roll in with full High Road team kits and some very nice bikes. A closer inspection revealed that one of them was Bob Stapleton, owner of the Columbia-HTC team and the man who delivered some impressive stage victories in this year's Tour de France.

One of the guys in his group was riding on Bert Grabsch's old T-Mobile Giant. I guess you get some pretty sweet hand-me-downs when you run a pro tour team.

This morning I had time to go on one last ride. I was meeting the family at Sand Harbor on the Nevada side so I left the house thinking that I would ride around the south end of the lake and up to Sand Harbor. I have actually never ridden around the lake and at first I thought this would be a good opportunity. But then I realized that if I rode to Sand Harbor, that's only riding 3/4 of the lake and I would still have to come back to ride it "for real" in order to say I have done it. So in the end I chose a different route. Turns out that Levi Leipheimer was in town and rode around the lake today, and it would have been awesome to bump into him out there.

I rode to Truckee down the very cold canyon at 6:30am and stopped at Tahoe's best coffee shop -- Wild Cherries. From there I rode what I'll call the "Three Pass Ride" -- up and down Old Donner Pass, over Brockway Summit to Kings Beach, and then up to Mount Rose Summit and down. Then a nice easy spin along the beautiful east shore of the lake to Sand Harbor. A very hilly 65 miles. There's some traffic along this route generally, but this is a fantastic ride with some varied and spectacular scenery. Highly recommended, especially the beach finish for a post-ride swim (and jump off of the huge granite boulders).