Heading to Truckee in the near future?

If so, take a couple of side trips. First, go visit Serene Lakes if you've never done so (behind Soda Springs on the way to Royal Gorge). We try and cruise through it every couple of years just to see if our memory is still accurate with how shocking the snow levels are. I just posted in the snow thread in the 2nd Gen Taco forum, but this is an area where a lot of the houses have tunnels going from the garage near the street back to their houses. Take a look at the berm behind my truck in the pic below. That's one of the smaller berms! Go toward the back end of the subdivision and you'll find tunnels to people's garages with the sides a good 10 feet tall! All the houses in here are two stories...for a very good reason as the first story is buried under snow for the duration of winter.


A second side trip is to check out the icicles in the train tunnel (pic attached). Directly across from Donner Ski Ranch is the road to Sugar Bowl (Judah Mountain entrance). You cross over the bridge and there's a snow covered road down to the right. Go down that road 100 feet and hang a right over the snow berm into another snow-covered road down to a big parking lot like area (not sure what it's used for but it was empty). From there, climb up on the snow and take a look under the bridge. Hard to tell from the pic without zooming in, but the little light in the tunnel is the other end with 5 people standing there (they're tiny in the pic). The icicles in the tunnel are probably 10-15 feet tall! Pretty fun day and got to do some playing around in the snow.