MAR-B-6
TAHOE
TRANSITION:
FROM SKI
CHALET IN
AND TRANSFER
TO
IN AT THE
SURGICAL MEETING FOR MY FIRST PRESENTATION TO THE GROUP
The bags
arrived at last; about sun set over the mountains on Tahoe, forty eight hours
after they had been sue to arrive along with me. I had been so tuned in by plans for a run, that I took off immediately after opening them up and
getting out the shoes and shorts and taking off along the steep hill roads of
this area above
I ran along the tall snow banks on either side of the road,
marked by the high snow poles with reflective strips marking the edges of the
roads. I returned, and according to my
pre-programmed plans, got into the hot tub, and soaked for at least long enough
to feel like I had done what I had set out to do. I watched the swimsuit issue of Sports
illustrated on a TV special, now having quadrupled the total Boob Tube viewing
of my last year—not something I would want to do on a semi-regular basis. I packed up to drive over to the Squaw Valley
to register in at the conference that is scheduled on an early morning and late
afternoon “ski schedule” to leave the middle of the day open for the committed
skiers. I have one presentation today,
which starts off the afternoon program at
THE
What a
beautiful day—and in the right setting with good friends! I drove down the
We left the cross country skiing and got into my rental car and drove toward the Tahoe City I had just left, and stopped at the Tahoe City dam on the Truckee, the only outlet of Lake Tahoe. How an enormous lake like this one could have but one outlet and that be the trickle of the Truckee, and how a bright warm day like this could produce so little volume of snow runoff must mean that the snow is a rather good insulating layer for the innocent gurgling of the shallow streams that seem to be draining the enormous size of the snowpack. I was told that it was a month since the last snow, but that there is snow predicted for the day I leave.
We sat on a
deck over the dock on Lake Tahoe looking West over the lake at Heavenly Valley,
one of the ski resort possibilities for next year’s Frontiers in Surgery
conference that Alden is considering scouting for a future conference
site. Now that they are Californian,
they are going to look around the areas nearer them. Secondary to my summer trek through this area
by rental car after flying Alaska Air down from Vancouver following Whistlers
Wilderness Medical Society meeting, I had come all around this area, up the
Russian River, and into the Eastern Sierras to go from Bishop to the John Muir
Trail through the spectacular Evolution canyon and coming out the trail to
Mount Emerson (John Muir brought Ralph Aldo Emerson out here and got him into
the mountains naming one of them after him.)
I had explored all of this area to see Mono Lake, and the climbing on
the extinct volcanoes and the desert side of the Sierras, and had come up to
the Nevada side before going around the national forests of the Lake Tahoe Rim
Trail. I had seen some of these areas,
and tried to recite from those memories what I had seen then and they might try
to do a vacation trip in this area of
We were
eating a good lunch and teasing our waitress, who, despite an oriental
appearance, had come from
We came back to the hotel in time for me to give the lead off lecture in the afternoon set of talks. Alden was very laudatory of course, and it was well received, with many people coming to speak with me afterwards, a number of them asking questions about how they could get involved in the kind of work I do abroad—although that was hardly mentioned in this talk. I will give another tomorrow, before packing up tomorrow night to leave early on Wednesday morning for my very long onward trip west to get East.
After the lecture, we all had a get-acquainted dinner. Two people were here that had heard my last set of lectures at Breckenridge in Colorado five years ago---Robert Toumajian, a thoracic surgeon at Long Beach California, a UMMC classmate, and Edward Nathan, now an HMO administrator in Las Vegas, who was a surgery resident with me in GWU, before returning to his home base in Syracuse.
It has been
a wonderful day with respect to the weather, transition to