For the past two weeks, we have had some flooring and painting work going on at home. Which meant that for two weeks, my house was no longer quite my house.

There were workers coming and going, tools everywhere, furniture moved out of place, music playing loudly, and conversations happening at a volume that suggested everyone needed to be heard over everyone else. At times, I wondered whether we were renovating the house or hosting a music festival…. aI found myself actually enjoying the whole production.

The camaraderie among the workers…They talked constantly. They laughed. They teased one another. The music kept playing. And through it all, the work got done. There was a rhythm to it, a kind of choreography that comes from people who know their craft and know how to work together.

This Saturday marked the end of the two weeks, the floors looked beautiful, the walls were freshly painted, and the house was finally back in order.

And then the workers left.

The tools disappeared. The music stopped. The conversations faded. The house became quiet again.

I enjoyed the quiet.

But I have to admit, I missed the noise and chaos a little.

It was the sound of people enjoying their work. And what a lovely sound that is.

– brij

Mt. Tallac

Lake Tahoe, California, October 2026

Mt. Tallac is Baj’s stomping ground. Baj is my medical school buddy and an eminent cardiologist in Northern California. He’s hiked it multiple times, including once in winter, when snow piles required crampons. On one of those outings, he had to escort a sunbathing rattler off the trail. I have no fascination with the exotic; the mundane works fine.

Still, I got sucker-punched into hiking Mt. Tallac.

And the day I chose was a doozy. The morning temperature plummeted to 18 F, cradled by early-fall Lake winds. Chronically underpacked, I managed to assemble enough layers to weather the day in relative warmth.

The hike would be reasonable except for mile four, which features a boulder climb of more than a thousand feet. The trail tends to go anonymous without the courtesy of a notice and blends seamlessly into the neighborhood of look-alike boulders. The unsteady rocks and talus do little to reassure the foot. It took me more than 50 minutes to get up and down the boulder challenge, fortunately, in one piece.

The stony path was littered with rocks of all shapes and sizes, contorting my ankles and stress-testing my ligament resilience. I leaned heavily on the hiking poles to sidestep the sprains.

Another interesting feature of the trail is its multiple unsigned forks. Some lead to nature lookouts. Others honor Yogi Berra’s timeless wisdom: when you come to a fork in the road, take it and keep you on the trail whichever way you go. Still others test your GPS skills. I took several of those to sharpen mine, sadly to no avail.

The 10-mile round trip, with 3,300 feet of climbing, took me nearly six and a half hours.

An exhausting and rewarding day.

Thanks, Baj.

Notes on the Mountain

The peak. Mt. Tallac rises to about 9,735 feet above the southwest shore of Lake Tahoe, inside the Desolation Wilderness of the Eldorado National Forest. It is the most recognizable summit on the Tahoe skyline.

The name. Early Whitney Survey maps labeled it Crystal Peak. In 1877, the Wheeler Survey renamed it Tallac, after the Washoe word dal’?ak, meaning big mountain. The Washoe, the basin’s original people, also named Tahoe.

The cross of snow. Snow lodged in intersecting gullies on the mountain’s face forms a giant cross, visible from across the lake through winter, spring, and into early summer.

The rock. Tallac is a metamorphic roof pendant: roughly 200-million-year-old rock that once sat atop the molten granite that became the Sierra Nevada and survived as a dark cap. That is why it looks so much darker than the pale granite around it.

The route. The standard trail climbs past Floating Island Lake and Cathedral Lake, which sits about 1,400 feet below the summit. Above Cathedral Lake, the trail steepens into the cirque and the talus; the final push is a scramble over loose stone. Some 10,000 people make the climb each year.

Lucky Baldwin. In 1880, the mountain lent its name to E. J. ?Lucky? Baldwin’s lakeshore resort below today the Tallac Historic Site.

Permits. Day hikers can self-issue a free wilderness permit at the trailhead; overnight trips are quota-based.

The Numbers

Distance: about 10 miles round trip

Elevation gain: about 3,300 feet

Summit: about 9,735 feet

Time: nearly 6 hours, including 50+ minutes on the boulder field

– brij

Jackson Hole

October 7– 13, 2026

The Seventh Annual Fly-Fishing Reunion

The anglers converged on Jackson Hole from various corners of the country to celebrate the seventh anniversary of our fly-fishing trip. Bill, our spiritual guide and fly-fishing leader, was sidelined by urgent cervical spine surgery. Fortunately, it went well, and he should be roaring to go in 2027. His grandson, Mason, joined us in his stead. Distracted by his studies, Nikhil had to skip this annual pilgrimage.

AJ and I left Bakersfield in the Balbir-Mobile on Wednesday, October 7, ahead of an early-morning flight on the 8th. The obligatory travails of a multi-pronged journey began early: water dripped onto the toilet seat in my hotel room, forcing an unnecessary back-and-forth with the front desk before they produced an alternate room.

John and Mason, Manoj and Jacob, AJ and I, and Baj arrived as planned; Dinesh, Rohan, and Mukul arrived a day later. After some persuasion, the Four Seasons credited us for the night our tardy anglers’ rooms sat empty, which was much-needed relief for AJ. The rumor that Bill Gates owns the place is, as it turns out, mostly true: his Cascade Investment has held a controlling 71 percent stake in Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts since 2022. One trusts the credit did not unduly burden him.

The valley takes its name from David Jackson, a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who is said to have wintered on the shores of Jackson Lake in 1829. To the mountain men, a hole was a high valley ringed by mountains, and Jackson’s partner, William Sublette, began calling this one Jackson’s Hole. The possessive has since been politely dropped.

We spent the first day hiking and sightseeing, and we outfitted ourselves with waders and other fishing gear. The Tetons have a naughty French name. French-Canadian trappers, evidently long in the field, christened the three most prominent peaks Les Trois T’tons, the three breasts. Regardless of the name, the Tetons have a formidable, majestic appearance, further accentuated by fresh snow a day or two later. The Grand Teton tops out at 13,775 feet. Geologically, the range is a teenager, among the youngest in the Rockies at less than ten million years old, and because it rises along an active fault with no foothills to soften the approach, it soars some 7,000 feet straight up from the valley floor. Grand Teton National Park was established in 1929 and expanded in 1950 to include the Jackson Hole National Monument, much of whose land John D. Rockefeller Jr. quietly bought through a front company and then donated to the nation.

A walk along Jenny Lake is heavenly. The lake fills a basin gouged by a glacier that once poured out of Cascade Canyon, and it is more than 200 feet deep. It is named for Jenny Leigh, a Shoshone woman who, with her husband, the British-born trapper Richard Beaver Dick Leigh, assisted the Hayden survey of 1872; the grateful surveyors named the couple Jenny and Leigh Lakes. Their story ends sadly: Jenny and all six of their children died of smallpox in 1876.

We gathered for breakfast and dinner daily at Westbank Grill, the Four Seasons mountain steakhouse. The kids ventured out for dinner once to break the monotony, and the whole gang dined at the Snake River Lodge on Monday night before leaving the next day.

The fishing was average but fun. We floated four segments of the Snake River in Idaho, on its South Fork, which runs 66 miles from Palisades Dam through Swan Valley to its confluence with the Henrys Fork. The first segment, with its canyon walls and waterfalls, was easily the prettiest; Fall Creek Falls spills straight into the river just above the Swan Valley Bridge. The scenery was stunning, and the weather leaned cold, which I preferred. The South Fork is regarded as one of the nation’s premier blue-ribbon trout fisheries. It hosted the 1997 World Fly-Fishing Championship, supports the largest native cutthroat fishery outside Yellowstone, and is lined by the largest riparian cottonwood forest in the West.

Fortunately, Mukul, Rohan, and Jacob landed rainbow and brown trout measuring 20-plus inches. Autumn is brown-trout season on the South Fork, when the big browns turn aggressive ahead of spawning and chase streamers with abandon.

The camaraderie, the banter, and the unexpressed love are the magnet that tugs us back to this annual reunion, and, as usual, there was no dearth of any of them.

We missed Bill and Nik, but we were delighted to FaceTime them during our last dinner at the Snake River Lodge. Next year, we will need them in person.

Great memories, decent fishing, stunning scenery, and a wonderful reunion- till next year.

Lest we forget: no bugs, no heat, and no bears, except the one we spotted from the car in Grand Teton National Park.