South Lake Tahoe Forest Fire Damage, Rock Climbing, and maybe trespassing….???

I met up with a climber from Mexico in my local gym and made plans to climb the Bears Reach at Lovers Leap in Tahoe. I knew the area had just been through a massive burn but Diego was down to climb and had seen the infamous video of Dean Potter free soloing it in like 3 minutes so we left town early and go to Tahoe ready to climb.

The fire really burned everything that used to be alive in the region. I have climbed here before but there used to be so much life and noise from birds and squirrels. To experience the silence was sad.

The rock is undamaged, however, so we had a blast on the easy 5.7 climbing. It was Diegos first time on a multi pitch and he didn’t know the english words for the rope or carabiner or commands like “take” or “off belay” or anything important like that. I’m not blaming him though, I don’t know the Spanish words for those either, but the climbing was easy enough I wasn’t super worried and I told him if I started screaming to just do something and we just rolled with it. Great day out, perfect late autumn weather, couldn’t have asked for a better day.

A note on trespassing, it turns out the National Forest was shut down to all recreation due to the fires. Whoops, I apologize and will be more careful next time, but getting lovers leap all to yourself was awesome. (EDIT: My attorney has advised the following disclaimer: I did not trespass and will never trespass on federal land. The above is a fictitious account of what the day would have been like if I had trespassed on national forest land.)

The last time I was at the leap I dislocated my shoulder in a rattlesnake incident so this was a good switch up from that experience.