Alta

My parents and I went up to Alta this weekend (sensing a pattern?!), where we enjoyed the Nanao Rotenburo(it's not really a hot tub) and the cooling Sierra temperatures. Chloe and I went bouldering at Bliss on the western side of lake Tahoe, just above Emerald Bay. There were a lot of very fun boulder problems there, but it was a little hot, and the Tahoe scene on Labor day is a little hectic. The Truckee river was covered with an almost continuous flotilla of rafts... ugh.

We also went on a hike down to the Bear River to a rocky outcrop where my Friend Keith and I had jumped into a deep pool of water in high school and scared the hell out of my mom. It still looks like a pretty stout jump, but not quite as high as some of the jumps we did in France at Le Furon or at La Maglia near nice. Still... it gives you pause:



And now there's a big branch of poison oak to punish any second thoughts.

One things that had been puzzling me for a while is where the water came from which goes down a huge tube to the Dutch Flat powerhouse. I should back up and say that the area around Alta has a large network of hydroelectric power: there are storage bays for water, which divert water through huge tubes called penstocks and then through turbines which generate power, and out to "afterbays" and back into the river. Anyway, I had seen this one particular penstock emerge from the rock, but I couldn't really tell where it was coming from! It turns out that there is an extremely long tunnel (The Dutch Flat Tunnel) which connects the drum afterbay to the Dutch Flat Powerhouse. It looks to be at least 5 kilometers long on the map!

I cant find any information about it other than this account of a big section of the power generating systems failure in 1997 due to a whole lot of water.