Sunday, October 28, 2012

Lake of the sky


Lake Tahoe is the drop dead beautiful centerpiece of my youth, and after a few years away from it, I rode along a stretch of highway along its north shore on a recent bike ride.
In the mornings of warm summer days, the deep blue majesty of this lake is like a high altitude mountain pool of consciousness, something vast, calm and spiritual to behold. It is in these early summer mornings when its surface is as smooth as a mirror, all is calm, before afternoon winds whipping off the mountains looking down from the west, rough it up. Within its perimeter of 72 miles, and its millions of acre-feet of melted snow, the lake is a quiet giant of nature in the morning hours. It is a sight that requires more than a few minutes to fully comprehend as one standing at its edge, scans its wide, blue, quiet surface.
I lived at Lake Tahoe from 1959 to 1971, from young kid to mid-teens, then spent weekends during many summers at our house there in subsequent years. Through those years, it became a touchstone, a powerful reference point of my growing up years and all the drama they contained. We had a great hardback history book on Tahoe, called “The Saga of Lake Tahoe,” by Edward Scott, which came out in the late 50s and covered with text and many old black and white photographs, the human footprints made at Tahoe -- especially those of profit-minded white men -- since the mid 1800s.
The Washoe Indians were the first recorded humans to bask in the glorious Tahoe summers. For centuries they escaped the summer heat of the Washoe Valley, which sits below the mountains on the east side of the lake. Explorer John Fremont was the first white guy to see the lake in 1844 and it no doubt blew his mind. I always wanted to see the face of the first human, probably a Washoe Indian, that laid eyes on the lake hundreds of years before that. What a discovery that must have been. A huge mountain lake, edged by hugely tall forests of fir, pine and cedar, all untouched by man. What would he or she have said? I like to think it was Washoe language version of “Holy fuuuuck!!!!” or if a Washoe squaw, “Isn’t this lovely!”
The Washoe Indians lived in harmony with the lake, hanging out there during its pleasantly warm weather summers, hunting and fishing.
But when the white men came barging in with their big plans, the shameless plundering of the lake basin’s forests and its trout filled clear blue waters of unspeakable beauty, began. They drove out the Indians, and because the silver mines in Virginia City, in the Nevada desert to the northeast, required lumber to frame and support the mineshafts from 1858 to 1890, much of the forests in the basin were clear-cut by rag tag crews of loggers using long two-handled saws. Teams of horses dragged the felled trees to nearby sawmills. These lumber men butchered the native forests mercilessly, leaving acres of stumps and triggering soil erosion that began the slow but measurable decline of the lake’s legendary clarity.
But amazingly, in about 60 years, the basin’s ecosystem managed to heal itself from the clear cutting gashes it suffered. Second growth forests grew back in many of the logged out areas, though the trees aren’t as tall and wide as those in the original growth forests. The scruffy early settlers in the 1800s also managed to fish out all the native trout in the lake, setting up fish canneries that eventually shuttered when there were no more fish left. Gee, we never thought we’d all but wipe out the trout population. Brilliant.
To keep fishing alive trout plants were eventually dumped in the lake as well as plants that were non native species: Mackinaw trout and kokanee freshwater salmon.
Mackinaws were brought in from the Great Lakes in 1886, and being a large deep water trout happy to eat smaller fish in the lake, these big boys promptly ate all the remaining native Lahontan cutthroats. Another brilliant move. Mackinaws are still the big fish to catch by Tahoe anglers on their own in boats or with the help of guides. Kokanees were in a Tahoe City fish hatchery in 1944 when holding ponds accidentally overflowed, spilling the freshwater salmon from the Pacific Northwest into Tahoe, where they’ve been spawning primarily in Taylor Creek on the south shore ever since.
Gambling casinos were built on the Nevada side of the state lines in north and south Tahoe in the 1940s. To this day they attract gamblers to the area with little or no interest in the stunning natural beauty of the area. Dreaming of making the big score, they’d rather spend all their Tahoe time in the smoke filled casinos, sloshing booze, squinting at sleazy lounge shows and losing money on the craps tables, playing 21, keno, or pulling down no yield slot machine handles through the night, only to drive home somewhere below Tahoe, broke, with murderous hangovers.
But if I'm coming clean, I owe my years growing up in Tahoe to the casinos. Because one of them, Harrah's Club, on the south shore, in 1959 hired my dad to play upright bass -- he was a professional bass player in Los Angeles -- in their South Shore Room house orchestra. He was no fan of LA and loved the mountains and the lake. He decided that's where we were going to live, and moved my mom, two older sisters and me, up there. Our first stop was in a double-wide mobile home in Oliver's trailer park. It had no frills dirt roads and a loose grid of trailer spaces among sparse pines. Denizens were mostly club worker neighbors, many of whom worked all night and slept all day. "Tortilla Flat" was my mom's name for it. Good call.
Broken down abandoned cars owned by skunked gamblers were common in Tahoe in the 1960s, their humiliated owners figuring it was easier to go home by bus than deal with a broken down car. These days, Tahoe casinos have been hit hard by a double smack down in their popularity by all the Indian casinos that have seriously eroded their market share, along with a longstanding economic recession. 
But through redevelopment, the look of South Lake Tahoe has been cleaned up immensely from the “Tijuana of the Sierras” look it had in the 60s when the California side of the south shore was rife with crummy hotels and ramshackle apartments in the club worker pine forest ghettos. Adding to the tackiness was beat up pavement on the main drag of Highway 50 sporting no shortage of  trinket and t-shirt shops. Now there are bike paths, modern upgraded shopping areas, a tramway up the mountain to Heavenly Valley and there's a look and feel somewhat more befitting a small alpine city sitting in a world-class destination.

Over the years, development by rich landowners included mansions in choice secluded shoreline spots around the lake. But most of the housing early on in the mainstream discovery of the lake was lodges and cabins used during the spectacular Tahoe summers of crisp air and moderate heat. Winters would shoo away vacationers, but the development of ski resorts like Heavenly Valley on the south shore, along with the gaming industry, rounded out a seasonal tourist economy. Heavenly’s contribution to the erosion problem came with cutting down trees growing on the Southeast shore mountain face to make ski runs. Left was the unmistakable dirt scar visible from across the lake called the Gun Barrel. 
As highways were improved and widened to four lanes along the east shore, housing developments started getting built in the 1960s. The 1960 Winter Olympics held at Squaw Valley made the Tahoe area a world stage, even through Squaw is just outside of the Tahoe basin on its northwest side.
The conservation movement of the lake’s environment began in earnest in the 1960s, with studies beginning to see how deep a white plate could be seen in the water when dropped on a metered pole from a boat. Erosion from development --- causing oxygen-eating, water warming nutrients to flow into the lake from its feeder streams, and algae growth – was identified as the biggest factor in the lake’s steadily declining clarity. Oops.
So development moratoriums were put in place and construction permits limited to a lottery and waiting lists to slow down the erosion effects of development. My parents built a house on the Nevada side of the south shore in 1963 before any development moratoriums were in place. So our family was part of the problem in erosion promoting development. Ironically my mom was the executive secretary for the Lake Tahoe Area Council, a now defunct nonprofit that worked to combat erosion-causing development in the basin. Since then, the federal government has stepped in to fund more studies of the lake, including an underwater topographical map of the lake’s bottom, and maps showing its various depths and temperatures in different parts of the lake. Now, tourists can look at an outdoor display in shoreline public spots such as Kings Beach on the north end, recounting the ongoing battle to keep Tahoe’s deep blue waters from become green, murky and choked with algae.
After that north shore bike ride a few months earlier, I got on my road bike and rode the 72 mile perimeter of Lake Tahoe with a riding buddy. I’ve been on that route many times in a car, but always wanted to see what it would be like on a bike. Early in the ride, which we started at Stateline on the Nevada side of the south shore, we got to the unpopulated woods of the southwest shore that flank the winding two lane Highway 89. There, I was happy to learn the obvious:  On a bike you can look up to see a stunning view the mountains that a car with a roof doesn’t afford. Looking up we saw the vertical face of Mount Tallac. Tallac is about 9,000 feet high, up about 3,000 feet from the lake level, and is an incredible day hike I’ve done many times over the years. The view from the top of Tallac is like being in an airplane, showing nearly the entire surface of the lake.  As we continued riding switchbacks approaching Emerald Bay there were the sweeping views looking northeast over the lake. These are jaw dropping world class vistas of vast blue water, blue sky and green forest. Continuing north on the west shore, we rode by Meeks Bay Resort, where as a young teen I worked for three straight summers on the maintenance crew. Now it is less cluttered and still offers a great shoreside view of the mountains on southwest shore of the lake. We rode north several more miles through Tahoe City, where I’d spent a college summer working as a reporter at the Tahoe World weekly newspaper, which is now long gone. We headed east at the north side of the lake and rode through Incline Village’s Shoreline Drive, where many rich people have built mansions. Starting to head south on the east side of the lake we climbed the winding two lane road to Spooner Summit. Then a descent past Glenbrook and I saw the wide spot in the road where my dad and I used to hike down to an isolated deep water fishing spot on a huge granite boulder.
We rode through the granite tunnel at Cave Rock and by its much improved parking lot and boat landing where I fished from the rocks with my Dad and  boyhood friends. The old Manny’s, a greasy spoon hamburger joint that was there all through my childhood was no longer there, probably a good thing.
We rode by my elementary school, and then by the neighborhood I grew up in, the corporate version of the once mom and pop store where I used to catch my bus to school. A few miles later we passed the road down to our favorite beach. And not much farther ahead we rode past the old Rabe’s meadow, just down the hill from the site of what was Oliver's trailer park where we first lived upon moving to Tahoe. And in a flash we were back to our starting point at a casino parking lot at Stateline.
A wonderful statement of Nature, Lake Tahoe is. Its power of mass and sheer beauty has moved many to see it with eyes filled with wonder and awe. May its residents now and in the future protect its beauty, its clarity, its trees, its beaches and clear fresh air from the ravages of uncaring populations of previous generations. Tahoe was taken for granted by too many environmentally unconscious people for too many decades. But it has managed, with help, to recover very slowly from its man-inflicted wounds. May that encouraging trend continue.
May the inspiring beauty of Lake Tahoe always be.



Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf