The Washoe (Wasiw) gathered at the lake each summer for thousands of years, and Tahoe remains central to their culture today. The first U.S. survey party to record the lake was General John C. Fremont's expedition in 1844, and within two decades the Comstock silver boom in Nevada had stripped much of the basin's timber to shore up the Virginia City mines. It was in those years, the early 1860s, that a young Samuel Clemens — Mark Twain — camped on the shore and later wrote it into Roughing It, calling Lake Tahoe "the fairest picture the whole Earth affords." The grand-estate era followed: by 1929 Lora Knight had built Vikingsholm, a Scandinavian stone castle, at the head of Emerald Bay.
Big Blue — a glacier-carved cobalt lake, a mile and a quarter high and a third of a mile deep. Lake Tahoe sits on the crest of the Sierra Nevada, on the line between California and Nevada, the highest large alpine lake in North America at about 6,225 feet and one of the deepest, near 1,645 feet. Its water is famous the world over for its clarity and its impossible cobalt blue. Long before any of the names on today's maps, this was Daaw — "the lake" — the sacred center of the Washoe people, who have lived in this basin for more than ten thousand years. This page tells the California-shore story of Big Blue: the lake, Emerald Bay, and the castle within it.
Why People Visit Lake Tahoe California
Lake Tahoe draws people who love mountains and water in the same view. It is Big Blue — the highest, deepest, clearest alpine lake in the West — with a National Natural Landmark bay, a Scandinavian castle, a ten-thousand-year Washoe heritage, and ski slopes and beaches a few hours from the city. Visitors come for the rare combination: cobalt water you can see straight down into, granite peaks above it, and a shore that's beautiful in snow and sun alike.
