Story Pop: Fuller Lake to Cone Peak, NV - The Art of the Scree

This Story Pop takes you from the quiet of Fuller Lake to the volcanic summit of Cone Peak — a short Nevada climb that delivers more lessons per mile than almost anything in the Carson Range.

We start in the forest, moving through the old Boy Scout camp — a place built for teaching resilience, teamwork, and the early rites of outdoor life. It’s the last structured space before the mountain takes over, and it sets the tone for the day: this route is about learning.

From there, the trail shifts into raw geology as Cone Peak rises ahead — a cylindrical volcanic cone built from ancient eruptions that blasted molten rock into the air and stacked it into the steep, unstable slopes we climb today. The upper mountain is pure Nevada: loose scree, shifting block, and terrain that demands presence, patience, and composure.

We break down how to move on scree without burning energy or confidence, w, and what this little peak teaches you about pacing, footwork, and staying calm when the ground refuses to cooperate.

If you’ve ever struggled on loose terrain — or avoided it — this episode gives you the tools, the mindset, and the story to take it on with confidence.

Featured in this episode:  
• Fuller Lake approach and the Boy Scout camp
• The geology behind Cone Peak’s cylindrical volcanic cone
• How cinder cones form and why they crumble underfoot
• Scree navigation: footwork, composure, and descent strategy
• What this climb teaches about presence and pacing

www.blisterpopadventures.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

This is Off You Pop, the podcast for hikers and adventurers who want to be epic in just one day. This one starts quiet. A cold morning at Fuller Lake. The water still enough to look like polished obsidian, the pines holding the last of the night air. Combe Peak sits above it, not dramatic from a distance, not famous, not even named on most maps. But like a lot of Nevada peaks, it hides its teeth until you're on it. This is a route that begins soft and ends volcanic, a lake shore warm-up that turns into a ridge of broken stone. A Boy Scout camp tucked into the forest, then a sudden shift into the raw geology of the Carson Range. A cylindrical volcanic cone rising out of the hillside like a relic from a different era. It's the kind of climb that doesn't need altitude or mileage to be hard. It's honest, it's steep, it's loose, and it demands attention all the way to the summit. This is Fuller Lake to Cone Peak. This is Story Pop. Now off you pop. So the Boy Scout Camp is the first real landmark on this route. It's a strange, almost nostalgic pocket of human order slowly being reclaimed by the forest. You move through places where cabins, flagpoles, and open clear clearings used to be used for instruction, teamwork, and rites of passage. It's a reminder that this landscape has been teaching people for decades. Kids learn knots here, learned how to move through the woods, learned how to be uncomfortable and keep going anyway. The camp feels like a threshold, the last structured space before the mountain takes over. Once you pass it, the trail stops feeling like a camp path and starts feeling like a climb. Comb Peak is exactly what the name suggests. It's a volcanic cone, cylindrical, steep walled and built from layers of fragmented volcanic material. It was formed millions of years ago as part of the Carson Range when it was a volcanic field. Comb Peak is a remnant of a cinder comb, built from repeated eruptions that blasted molten rock into the air. Those fragments called mid-ip flight fell back to earth and stacked into a near perfect cylinder of scaria, ash, and volcanic block. Over time, erosion carved the sides into loose scree, exposed ribs and unstable slopes. The exact terrain you'll feel under your feet when you climb this peak. It's not a big mountain, it but it's a geological time capsule. Every step is on broken fire, the remnants of eruptions that shape the entire western Nevada skyline. This is why the peak feels so very different from the forest below. You're literally stepping into another era. So let's get on the trail and let's start Story Pop. So to get to Cone Peak, you have to travel to the town of Verde. And once you get off the I-80, uh you follow the road to the base of the of the trail, and it runs along the railroad, the transcontinental railroad that was built in the 1800s by lots of Chinese immigrants. And when you reach the end of the road, there's a small gravel parking lot before the road turns up into the mountain, and you want to park there right before the railroad. And on this day I was joined by a couple of people that decided to join the inaugural Blister Pop training hike. Husband and wife, Dan and Laura, had just moved to the area from Michigan and were looking to get some adventure on the trail. And so we started at about 6.45 in the morning and began climbing up the road. Now, most of this trail, quote unquote, is actually a Jeep road. And I think you could probably drive a lot of it, but we weren't here for driving, we were here for hiking. And so the climb begins almost immediately. Switchbacks, not too steep, but steep enough to feel it. And you start out in the foothills around the town of Verde, and quickly you find yourself increasingly entering into the forest, and the ground becomes softer, the the plant life becomes more abundant. There are early flowerings of spring. And it was really a glorious morning, overcast and cool. It had rained the night before, but it just felt comfortable. And as you switch back up into the mountains and get deeper into the forest, you come across Fuller Lake. Now Fuller Lake is an almost round lake that is surrounded by pines. And this used to be an old Boy Scout camp. And if you use your imagination, you can still see some of the spots where the Boy Scouts used to hang out. There's some picnic tables, a few firings, a few clearings around the lake where they would have camped. Now there used to be a lot of outbuildings out here until quite recently, but they had become in a bad shape of disrepair and graffited and were knocked down. And so now you can slowly see nature uh reclaiming this pond. There's a few bits of garbage in there, attire and whatnot, but otherwise it's starting to really feel like it belongs as part of the natural part of the forest. And so this is where you start to climb a little bit more significantly, but it's still uh dirt, jeep road, all the way, it's gonna be all the way to Cone Peak. And we stopped, made sure we got our navigation right, and inevitably we did we went the wrong way. We started heading back down the trail, but I think we caught it quickly enough, and so we turned around and returned back to the lake and realized that the trail was on the other side of the lake. And from there, the road sort of meanders up the hillside, and it's sort of interspersed with older jeep tracks that are now falling into disrepair and a a communication channel that's been carved through the trees, and it can be a little bit confusing, but generally, if you follow the well-worn jeep trail, you're gonna make it up to the up to Come Peak. And after a short while, about another half mile, mile, you come to a another clearing and another lake, and from there you can see the cylindrical tower of Come Peak perched with the backdrop of the Sierra Nevadas behind it. And we had seen a couple of guys with a truck up there, and they had a puppy with them, and the puppy was insistent that he would like to come on the hike with us, and so we were hiking around this second lake on our way up to Come Peague, and the puppy kept following us, and his owners were hollering, and he was having none of it. He was going for a hike with us, uh, so eventually we had to stop and let the the owner catch up and and grab the puppy, but um but uh full of energy, and uh we all wish we had the puppy's energy. But once you come out of that second lake, uh you can see the trail to the east going fairly sharply up the spine and up towards Cone Peak, so it's relatively easy to follow. Now, the thing that I really appreciated about this hike was that uh we started out by the Transcontinental Railroad and the Truckee River and the I-80, where they all sort of funnel up through the Donner Pass, and it was relatively loud at the start, and I thought there was going to be this constant background hum of the road or the train, uh but as we got deeper into the mountain, it slowly dissipated. And by this point, you couldn't hear the road, couldn't hear any train. So it was really a peaceful place to be. And it was a little damp and a little wet, but a little muddy, but nothing, nothing too bad. And it had been a fairly relaxed hike up until this point. Now, Dan, I think, and Laura let me know at the end of the hike that this was the really one of the first hikes they had done. Uh, they'd done a couple of other hikes since they'd moved up into the Sierra Nevadas, and so they were still relatively inexperienced, which would have been nice to know, as you're about to find out before we took on Come Peak. Now, Dan was monitoring his heart rate on the way up, which was actually a very smart idea, and a smart idea for many of you who are out there on the trail because you don't want to burn out too quickly and find yourself bonking on the trail and stuck halfway up the mountain with no way down. And so he was very sensibly watching to make sure he was staying in the in the aerobic zone, so keeping his heart rate down, and he would occasionally stop and we'd stop with him so he could let his heart rate come back down again, which was actually very sensible. But he kept up with us, and once we had climbed the the ridge, I thought that there would be a trail to Come Peak because I had looked on all trails, and it seemed like there's a trail all the way to Cone Peak, but on closer inspection, there was not a trail to Come Peak, and so I had intimated that this was an easy to moderate hike to folks on the meetup and realized that this very last section, actually 600 feet up from the road, was going to be off trail. And so we got to a point where we were standing sort of between Come Peak and the Truckee River below. And so when you're looking up at the peak, you're looking directly east up at the peak. And I'd read a few trail reports, and there's not a tremendous amount out there that suggested you should come round from the back side of the peak, but there was no clear way to get to the back side of the peak. Uh, it would require a lot of book bushwhacking to get round the back of the peak. And so we could sort of see the peak up through the trees, and decided that would be the point that we would try and ascend Cone Peak, just go straight up and then figure out the summit block when we got there. And Dan had um decided that he'd had plenty of adventure for the day and would wait for for Laura and I at the bottom. And so it was just Laura and I going to ascend 600 feet up cone peak, and we could see Cone Peak from the trailhead, and we could see Cone Peak actually from the second lake, and it is a definite steep-sided classical cinder cone sticking out the side of the mountain. So you know it's gonna be steep, it's gonna be really steep. And so I made sure I checked with Laura. You sure about this? Have you done much off trail? She said she was happy to give it a go, and if she didn't feel like she could make it, she would she would turn back. And so, with that reassurance, we started the climb. And so, obviously, right off the road, very steep bank, but we had seen a space, a place where there was some animal tracks that sort of led up into the cone. So immediately started climbing up into this soft loam that was on the side of the road and into the tree line, leaving Dan behind almost immediately. The lower part, there was a fair amount of foliage, some manzanita mostly. Fortunately, not a lot of that spiky desert plant life, but you still had to sort of navigate through the foliage sort of up to your waist, chest height, but didn't last very long, and soon we were getting into the climb of it. Fair amount of consolidated dirt and boulder on in the lower part. I saw that Laura was using poles, and she was fairly adamant that she wanted to use poles, so we sort of let her carry on with it in the early part, but it got real steep real quick. There was just no doubt about it. You're on a syndicate, and so just trying to pick my way up through the plants and the boulders, and gotten about 200 feet up, and we encountered the first of the scree that would lead all the way up to the peak of the mountain. And the real challenge with this particular peak is it was 400 feet of scree. No more nice stuff, no more Mr. Nice Guy. We were on the uh on the Cindercombe peak, and there was no avoiding it. And so I let Laura catch up a little bit, and I said, you know, you should probably put the put the poles away because you might need to do a little bit of scrambling, you're gonna want to have your hands free for balancing, and there's also a high likelihood that you might end up snapping your your poles if they get caught in between the rocks, and so she agreed and put and put the poles away. But I think that's a nice segue to talk about how to move through scree because it's loose, it shifts, you could roll your ankles very easily if you get lazy. So this is my recommendation on how to move through the scree with composure. First, slow down. The moment that grounds changes and you're on loose rock, slow it down. This is gonna be tricky. You don't know which rocks are gonna move, which ones are not gonna move. You've got to think about how to pick your way up the scree line to go through the most solid line that you think exists, and even then, probably won't be that solid. So the scree really rewards patience. And the fastest way to fall is just to pretend, oh, this is just a normal trail and go hop in along. That's gonna get you injured. My second tip is really step on the big stuff, not the small stuff. So if it's small scree, it's gonna be like marbles, it's gonna be super slick. And going up, that's gonna mean it feels like you're treading in quicksand, and on the way down, if you choose to go on the small scree, better go on your butt because you're gonna be shooting off down the mountain. And then the larger blocks are really anchors. So try to aim for stable pieces, even if that means you're gonna be zigzagging up the scree. But it is really quite challenging because any one of the blocks, large or small, could be unstable. The third tip is really keep your center of gravity low, shorter steps, slight lean forward into the mountain, and think of sort of controlled pressure, not power hiking. I always think of like a deer. I want to be light on the rocks and not stomping my way through them. The next tip is really to test the rock before you trust it. So really sort of tap the rock a little with your toe before putting your weight on it. If it shifts, skip it. If it's uh it doesn't move and it's solid, you're probably alright to step on it, but always be prepared when you're taking that step that it might slip out from under it. So you've got to be on high alert that uh you might need to make a an evasive move move at move movement at any point. So just be careful. Now, this particular scree run in this cinder block is very steep, 45 degrees at least. We're not on a trail. This is a steep volcanic slope. So use your hands when you need them. Hands are fair game, it's okay. Don't don't be shy, don't be proud. You may need to be on all fours to get up the scree run. And so when you make it to the top of the scree run, you have to come back again. So the final the final recommendation is surf the scree, don't fight it. Let the slope move under you. Make sure your knees are soft, use controlled sliding, ride the give instead of resisting it. So that smaller scree, the marbles, you might find some areas where there's long runs of that. That's actually a pretty good way to get back down the mountain rather than picking your way through all the big stuff. But I recommend you do it with a very low center of gravity. I wouldn't run down it. You may want to even sit on your butt and sort of slide down it. And we'll talk about how we navigated that just in a second. And then just very, very careful through the bigger, blockier, looser stuff, pick your way through it. You get your hand trapped, you could fall over. There's a whole lot of challenges that can come through this. And the other thing on the ascent, especially on the descent, sorry, especially if there's more than one of you, be careful and mindful of each other, especially if you're the person higher up on the slope. You could quite easily dislodge a boulder and take out the person below you. And if you do dislodge a boulder, holler. Anyway, so Laura and I had reached the scree run, and it seemed like the scree ran all the way up to the summit block, so I decided this is the way we were going to go now. At the bottom, it was smaller stuff, a little bit looser, and so we slowly picked the way, uh, picked our way up, and I told Laura to sort of wait while I traversed across a section so that I wasn't knocking boulders down on her, and then she would do the traverse and catch up with me, and then I would traverse the other way, you know, picking away up through through the talus. And as we got higher, it got steeper, but the blocks got bigger and so a little bit more stable. And once we got out of the loose stuff, you could and we were right below the summit block. There was one just straight, slow, big, blocky volcanic rock up to the summit block. And I told Laura, Laura, you ready to do this? It looks like we're nearly there. When we get to the summit block, we'll figure it out. And she, I think, had had enough by this point of the scree, and it decided to stop. And she said, You know, I don't think I'm gonna go on and go upward. And I said, Okay, that's fine, you've done a lot. I I apologize. I did not expect the scree to be quite as aggressive as it was. I had expected there to be some sort of uh trail to get to the top, but there wasn't, and it was kind of challenging even up to this point, especially for a beginner. And we continued up. Well, I continued up the scree. So I continued up the blocky scree without Laura. It became a lot steeper, so I was using my hands a lot more, but it was much more consolidated and easier to get up the slope. And about halfway up, I got a sort of renewed sense of energy and really picked up the pace. And then lo and behold, I see Laura behind me and decided that she wanted to make the summit after all. And so she was coming up behind and very bravely making the final ascent. And I went to the north of the summit block, it was fairly evident that the south of the summit block was much steeper and much more dramatic, but it looked like there was a little saddle and a little way to reach the very top. And so if you're doing this and you're going up the screen run, go to the slightly to the north of the summit block when you're up there. And when you get up there, it's very easy to get to the very top of the peak. And so I got to the summit block, fairly easy to navigate to the high point, and got to the top, and lo and behold, the top itself is very craggy, very gnarly. There's just a small space where you can stand, and across there's another little peak, about the same height, but between it there's a very dramatic uh drop-off and a chute. And I think if you come up the scree run and go up the south side, you end up in the chute, and there's no way to get to the summit block. So don't find yourself in this little gully because you'll you'll unless you're an experienced rock climber, you're gonna have a hard time getting up to the peak. So go slightly to the north. And then Laura came up and she made it, and I was impressed that she had she made it all the way up here. She was retired with her husband, so a little bit older than me, I assume, and she retired super early, but had really made tremendous effort to uh to get up this scree run and overcome her her fear, especially for one of her first couple of times hiking out here. And when you get to the top, you can see the truckey rear though. We could see the transcontinental railway. There was one of those huge trains actually barrying barreling along while we were sitting down looking at it. The wind had picked up a little bit, but not too much. But it was evident that this was probably the best way to get up to the summit block there from from the road, straight up, and then just slightly to the north of the summit block because every everything around us was steep drop-offs. So we took a few minutes to enjoy the view, enjoy the summit, and then we had to come back down. And for those of you experienced with Scree, coming back down can be way worse than coming back up. I I didn't want to let Laura know that because she'd already taken on a tremendous amount to get through the top. So we slowly picked our way, and I stayed a lot closer to Laura on the way back because I Wanted to make sure that she was comfortable with the descent. And so we made our way back underneath the summit block and decided to go a little bit further south to come down because it looked like the scree run, at least from this angle, was a little bit shorter, so we wouldn't have to spend as much time on the scree as we had previously. And we sort of skirted across the big blocky stuff and stayed close below the summit block outcrop. And then we came to this point where there was a lot of very small, loose scree that was that ran sort of about halfway down the scree run. And so I told Laura, let's let's take this now. It's gonna be loose. Get on your butt, we'll sort of shimmy down it. And we did, we sort of slipped down it, and then I got out of the way and she slipped down it. And as she's slipping down it, she let she caught her hand on a big boulder and it came barreling down right past me, but she did holler. But that's exactly the point I was making. You've got to be very careful coming off this scree if you're in a group, because if you're up above, you could it's very easy to knock a boulder down, not your fault, but it could really hurt somebody below you. So you have to be very careful as you're navigating down to make sure you're not in the path of any potential boulders. So we came down one small scree run, loose stuff, found a little another little pathway of loose stuff, but then we were back in the bigger, blocky, looser stuff. So we were just picking our way back down through the scree run, sort of slowly and deliberately, and it was very loose in places, kind of tricky, but eventually we got off the scree and we were back in the foliage, back in this thick manzanita. We found ourselves in this little gully. It looked like there was a trail, there wasn't a trail. So we had to bushwhack through this thick manzanita, and I saw the gully back down to the road was just chalked with it. So instead, traversed through like a little short section of it up to a little ridge and where there were some large growth trees, and then picked our way back uh through that ridge, and eventually we made it back to the road. And who was waiting for us? Dan. He was just right there. We just happened to find exactly where he was, and we were really, really relieved to be off of the peak, and from then on it was just a gentle descent back through the forest. The day was warming up, it was really a glorious day, the clouds were starting to clear, and we made our way back down the Jeep track, back down to the start of the trail, where lo and behold, by the time we got down there, it was a whole bunch of people there taking the trail along the Chucky Chucky River. And I think I forgot to mention at the bottom the road you need to take is the Quiliche Ranch Road. It runs parallel to the to the railroad heading out of uh the town of Verde. And so it's pretty easy to find, and there's a nice bit of parking there. Anyway, so that was supposed to be an easy, moderate hike. Uh, to meet up with some locals, to introduce them to blister pop, and I guess we did it the blister pop way because we kind of started out easy and general and ended up in a gnarly scree. So Cone Peak is not one that is being climbed very often. Uh, when I look at Peak Bagger, I think a lot of people try and uh climb the Jeep trails, they go up to the lakes, and then when they get to that scree run and they see that steep ascent, say thank you, but no thank you. But it is one that you will see if you're driving out of Reno up to Sacramento through the Donner Pass. As you start to come in there and you look up, up to the left, up into the Sierras, you'll see this very definite uh cone. And I told Laura, every time you go skiing, she's an avid skier, and you're coming up here, you can look up and say, I climbed that. And uh not too many people have done. And so it was really a fun day. I thought it was going to be just a general stroll in the woods, became a bit of an adventure at the end, and and quite a lot of fun, getting a lot of experience, traversing up and down, up and down the scree. So we had a great day. Now off your pop.