Hiking Around Reno with the Sierra Club

It isn’t always easy to arrange hikes with friends and family that suit everyone’s schedules and capabilities, so many of us avid hikers end up doing a lot of solo-hiking, which is fine and good but also has some drawbacks. For starters, there’s the lack of conversation and social connection, and on remote hikes, it can be a safety risk as well. And sometimes, you need other people to introduce you to new places and paths you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

There’s no substitute for real people who have knowledge of the local geography, climate, flora and fauna not to mention stories about the region’s history.

Photo: The beauty of the Anderson Trail in south central Reno. Photo by Dan Bablinskas

For these reasons, I often hike with the Reno-based Great Basin Sierra Club which I discovered through their Meetup.com profile. (You don’t need to be a Sierra Club member to join the hikes, though it is only a small fee and is encouraged.) The Sierra Club, for those unaware, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1892 by the renowned conservationist (and lover of the Sierras, hence the name) John Muir. For anyone living in or near the Sierras who loves the area’s natural beauty and wants to preserve it, being a part of the Sierra Club is a great first step.

The Reno Sierra Club, via their Meetup page, hosts hikes nearly every week – some mornings, some evenings, some intense, some light. Different members attend different hikes. Sometimes, the meetups are more than just hiking; for example, they may go to a museum, visit a piece of public infrastructure important to the environment (such as a water treatment plant, which I’ll talk about more later) or, via their broader Facebook page, take part in pro-environmental political activities. The Meetup.com hiking group, however, is apolitical and just about hiking and enjoying nature.

Photo: A Sierra Club guided hike gives you an opportunity to walk with new people and see new places. Photo: Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter Facebook

To give you an idea of some of the things the Meetup group does, here’s a quick sampling of three recent hikes that I attended.

In the spring I went to my first event, and it was quite a bit different than the typical Meetups. I met a group to tour Reno’s water purification plant (not to be confused with wastewater treatment, which would have been much smellier). The event started out with a presentation of the history of the Truckee Meadow Water Authority (TMWA) and an overview of the water purification process and an explanation of the capacity being currently adequate to support Reno’s growth. At 90,000 gallons a day, and with most climate models predicting a warmer yet wetter High Sierra climate where the water originates, they assured us that they were planning ahead to tackle the problems of the future.

Then, we toured the water purification facility. We got to enter giant industrial spaces to see where the bleach and ash are added to the water coming off the Truckee River to start the purification process. The treatment facility also requires extra filters and UV light to kill Cryptosporidium, a hard-shelled parasite that makes it hard for backpackers to rely on anything other than amply boiling to be able to drink remote mountain water. Having worked in water treatment at one time, I recollected on my past life and enjoyed getting quite a bit of walking in as we made our throughout the infrastructure’s large grounds.

My next Sierra Club meetup took place on a sunny, early afternoon during spring when we took a leisurely hike down the Anderson Trail in south central Reno. It was flat, traversed manmade parks and wetlands and eventually entered into the Bartley Ranch Regional Park, where we walked through a mix of wetland shrubs and desert hillsides before ending at the park’s museum. It was a small group, and conversation was relaxed and casual. While I’d been to this park many times before, during this hike I learned of a new entrance through a public park that I was able to take my kids to on another day.

Photo: An image from a hike along the Tahoe Rim Trail. Photo by Dan Bablinskas

My most recent Sierra Club meetup was a much more conventional hike. On a summer weekend morning, I drove up the Mount Rose Highway, just past the Mount Rose summit, to the high alpine meadow known for the popular Chickadee Ridge hike along the Tahoe Rim Trail. It occurred to me then, that in all my time in Reno, I’d never come to the meadow for a summer hike – it’d been exclusively snowshoe hikes that I’d done to see the chickadees.

On this hike, we were going far beyond Chickadee Ridge, so it would be nice to conquer the terrain at a much quicker pace on foot. On the side of the road, we quickly slathered on some sunscreen, being well over 8,000 feet up in summertime, and set off into the mountain groves. It was a good mix of ages, mostly middle-aged, some older folks, even a teenager child of one of the hikers. On a hike of this sort, we moved at a gingerly pace. The host for this particular hike was knowledgeable about the wide variety of pines and pointed out the number of needles on a pine (among other attributes) can help you determine the type of pine, though I failed to remember much beyond that.

There were breaks where we drank water and talked about other aspects of the flora and fauna before reaching our first main stopping point, a hidden part of Chickadee Ridge, full of chickadees atop a mountain of rocks, that made our lunch there a bit difficult to eat since they have grown so accustomed to humans providing food. Then we continued onward, into terrain new to me, with views of Tahoe far below us as we moved deeper into the high alpine forest. We took breaks at ridges overlooking the lake to take in the supreme views. Not having expected such a long hike, at this point I had to turn back to return to work, but I thoroughly enjoyed this uphill, strenuous hike and all the conversation and new knowledge that came with it.

The Sierra Club is full of great people, and with every hike you get something different: a new group of hiking companions with anecdotes to share, a different pace, a new piece of terrain.

If you’ve been doing the same solo hikes for years now or if you’re a recent arrival and want to get to know the region, I recommend giving the Sierra Club hiking group a try. No, it won’t always be on your convenient schedule or move exactly at the speed that you want to, but that’s all part of doing things with people. And you just might find that you enjoy the camaraderie and learn some interesting things along the way.