Incline to Kings Beach

The route along the ridge between Rose Knob (the peak behind Incline) and Mt. Baldy (the peak behind Kings Beach) provides several miles of views from high above Lake Tahoe and, if you are a Kings Beach resident, the chance to ski back to your house.

We started our trip at the end of Jennifer off highway 431 in Incline Village. After parking the car, we skinned up the track to Rose Knob for about 1.5 hours until just above the cornice area, where we diverted towards the ridge to the west of the peak. The corn on the west face of Rose Knob was tempting, but we decided to keep skinning up to the ridge line high above Lake Tahoe. We reached the ridge in about an hour and continued our trek along it towards Rifle Peak, 9480'.

This is a long ridge and it took several more hours to get there, but the views were nice, so we hung out near Rifle Rock for a while, and then continued skinning towards Mt. Baldy, 9270' behind Kings Beach. At our modest pace, it took a little over an hour to reach the Baldy summit, where we took off the skins and skied down.

The very top had some exposed rocks, so we carefully picked our lines in this area. The snow just below the summit was untouched, deep corn for around 1500 vertical feet of great turns. The trees get dense and it is less steep towards the bottom, where the skiing was a little less fun. Eventually we just cruised down the fire/snowmobile road that leads to Beaver Street to get back to town. The entire trip took us a little over 6 hours at a modest pace.

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