Historic Tall Tales of Lake Tahoe
From John Muir to Jacques Cousteau, "Tahoe Beneath the Surface" looks at The Lake's hidden stories.
Bankrupt and blacklisted, a failed 70-year-old British philosopher named Bertrand Russell once sat stark- naked in his tiny cabin near the shores of Lake Tahoe, typing out a manuscript titled An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. That book would eventually help to reestablish the writer and philosopher’s career: Ten years later, in 1950, Russell was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Russell’s story is just one of many transformations that occurred at Lake Tahoe, making one wonder if Tahoe’s famous nickname, “The Lake of the Sky,” shouldn’t be changed to “The Lake of Surprise.”
TRANSFORMATIVE TAHOE
The surprising truth is that Lake Tahoe transformed America, not just once but many times over—from our earliest Ice Age civilizations all the way forward to the strangely tangled fates of the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, Jack Ruby and Marilyn Monroe (all alleged denizens of those subterranean tunnels hidden just beneath the North Shore’s notorious Cal-Neva Casino). Somewhere in between the Ice Age and the Rat Pack, Tahoe helped to conquer California, launch the Republican Party and save our national forests from destruction.
For newcomers, even the self-enclosed nature of Tahoe’s watershed must seem surprising. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard tourists stammer, “You mean all this water doesn’t ever flow to the Pacific?” They’re not alone. Right up to the 1850s, generations of mapmakers remained stubbornly convinced that there must be some kind of river connecting Tahoe to the Pacific.
Eventually, John Fremont, the first white explorer to “dis- cover” The Lake in 1844, etched these errors into the maps he used to carve out the official boundaries of the new state of California, accidentally dividing The Lake: two-thirds in California, one-third in Nevada. Later still, when Fremont became the Republican Party’s first-ever candidate for president, long before Lincoln, images of the Tahoe Sierra were still splashed across the GOP’s campaign posters nationwide. How much water did Fremont’s mapping error involve? A mind-numbing 39 trillion gallons of Sierra snowmelt hidden in a slim frosted granite goblet more than 1,600 feet deep, then hoisted more than a mile high into skies—a feast fit for the gods; a surprise for the eyes. That’s enough to fill 312 trillion little plastic pint bottles of Evian or Perrier—every drop of it just as pure as the stuff you pay for. Priceless. Yet given a pop quiz, how many Americans would guess that our nation’s largest single body of water by volume west of the Mississippi is Lake Tahoe, not the Great Salt Lake? Now there’s a surprise.
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