Some more random images from Lake Tahoe last weekend.  The October weather is unbelievably nice,  with days in the 70's and nights just above freezing.

Here the aspens at the cabin watch as wispy summer style clouds drift by high above.  They will see some different, more menacing clouds shortly.

Pyramid Peak glimpsed from the lake, but at the same time visible from anywhere in the central valley on a clear day.

I didn't take this one, but if you are on top of Pyramid Peak early in the morning, it casts an awesome shadow out to the west, pointing across the central valley toward the distant sea.

The water of Lake Tahoe is still as gin-clear as when Mark Twain saw it in the 1800's, or at least the shallow parts I saw were.

A view out the window of the cabin at the fall colors currently at their peak in the Tahoe basin.  Pretty nice to wake up to something like this, and then roust out of bed and get some coffee going in the pot.

A story that has to be told.  The cabin we stay in is a home owners association that was the first of it's kind to be established west of the Mississippi, and they have preserved a nice patch of open space (with cabins of course) in the midst of busy South Lake Tahoe and only minutes from Stateline.

Given this location, we were surprised one night when a black bear came by and raided the supposedly bear proof garbage can.  He was just as surprised when all of us boiled out of the cabin door five feet from where he had his head buried in the can.  We shooed him across the road into the meadows, cleaned up and moved the can away from the cabin, and surprisingly he didn't come back again.  We must have been pretty scary looking to the poor bear.  Here is a picture another homeowner took last year of what looks like our bear.  Or at least that's what he looked like to me, at night, when I told him to "git" from about this same distance.

It's incredible but somehow pleasing that a wild animal this big can live so close to so many people in a relatively small patch of open space.  I bet he hibernates this winter in the crawl space under someone's cabin.