Lake Tahoe
Interesting facts
- A drop of water entering Lake Tahoe stays in it for about 650 years on average before leaving.
- The lake holds about 150 cubic kilometres of water, enough to flood all of California roughly 3 centimetres deep.
- Although 63 streams feed the lake, its only outlet is the Truckee River, which flows northeast through Reno.
- Evaporation, not the river, removes most of the water: an estimated 40 to 60 percent of the outflow simply rises into the air.
- The basin began forming about two million years ago as faults dropped a block of crust between rising mountain ranges.
- Between 1858 and 1890 loggers stripped almost all of the basin's native forest to timber the silver mines of the Comstock Lode.
- The cold, deep water preserves remarkably well: a diver lost in the lake was recovered almost intact from about 90 metres down after 17 years.
- The steamer Tahoe, launched in 1896 and 52 metres long, once carried passengers and mail between the lakeshore settlements.
- In an 1864 newspaper piece Mark Twain grumbled about the name Tahoe, calling it an unmusical label for so lovely a lake.
Why it is worth it
Lake Tahoe fills a fault-block basin high in the Sierra Nevada, its surface sitting about 1,897 metres above sea level with California on two-thirds of the shore and Nevada on the rest. It is the largest alpine lake in North America and astonishingly deep: 501 metres at its lowest point, second in the United States only to Crater Lake. The volume is so great that, among American lakes, only the five Great Lakes hold more water. Stand on one shore and look across the long axis, and at water level the far shoreline sinks partly below the horizon, hidden by the curve of the Earth — the lake is 35 km long and 19 km wide.
What people come for is the water itself, famous for its transparency and for the ring of mountains reflected in it on every side. Clarity, though, is also its great worry. Long-term measurements by scientists at UC Davis showed visibility falling for decades as nutrients and fine sediment washed in, and the lake has become a test case for how development around a mountain lake is policed. It never freezes, and its deep water mixes only occasionally.
The Washoe people, for whom the lake — dáʔaw, simply "the lake" — was the centre of their world, gave it the name that English later borrowed. Cave Rock on the southeast shore, now pierced by a highway tunnel blasted in 1931, is a Washoe sacred site. The southwest corner holds the most photographed scene: Emerald Bay, a glacier-carved inlet with tiny Fannette Island in the middle and the 38-room Vikingsholm mansion on its shore. The west shore road, State Route 89, threads through Emerald Bay and D. L. Bliss state parks; the 270 km Tahoe Rim Trail circles the entire basin along the ridgelines.
Tahoe works in every season. Winter belongs to the ski resorts that ring the basin, including Palisades Tahoe, where the 1960 Winter Olympics were held. Summer brings boating, beaches such as Sand Harbor on the Nevada side and Kings Beach on the north shore, and mountain biking on the Flume Trail above the east shore. The Nevada side also has lakeside casinos at Stateline and Crystal Bay, a legacy of the state's legal gambling — a jarring contrast with the forested California shore, and part of Tahoe's odd two-state character.
Getting there
South Lake Tahoe, the largest town on the lake, is about 17 km from the lake's centre; Tahoe City and Incline Village anchor the north shore. Truckee Tahoe Airport (TKF), about 28 km away, handles general aviation only — the nearest scheduled flights use Reno-Tahoe International Airport (RNO), roughly an hour's drive from the lake. Amtrak's California Zephyr stops at Truckee, and local buses connect the shoreline towns. Main roads in are Interstate 80 via Truckee and US 50; in winter, chains or snow tyres are often required.
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From the encyclopaedia
Lake Tahoe is a freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada of the Western United States, straddling the border between California and Nevada. Lying at 6,225 ft (1,897 m) above sea level, Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America, and at 122,160,280 acre⋅ft (150.7 km3) it trails only the five Great Lakes as the largest by volume in the United States. Its depth is 1,645 ft (501 m), making it the second deepest in the United States after Crater Lake in Oregon.
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