Chasing Spirits on the Path of Ghosts

My cursory glance at the laminated recreation map posted outside the U.S. Forest Service district office in Truckee, California, came from force of habit. It was a nod toward seeing the landscape at a larger scale as I made my yearly visit to purchase a permit to harvest a cord of wood to keep my cabin warm over the winter. I never would have broken stride on my way to the front door if it weren’t for a new line of whiteout running a short transect down the upper quadrant of the map.

The whiteout covered a section of the forest I didn’t typically care about, largely because I rarely found myself mountain biking in the volcanic landscape north of Highway 80, what with the hundreds of miles of singletrack stretching from my wooded backyard to the south shore of Lake Tahoe. The trails to the north were different from the celebrated system of the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, composed of