on: STEAMER TAHOE OFF CAVE ROCK, NEVADA SIDE, LAKE TAHOE]

THE LAKE OF THE SKY
LAKE TAHOE

CHAPTER I

WHY "THE LAKE OF THE SKY"?

Lake Tahoe is the largest lake at its altitude--twenty-three miles
long by thirteen broad, 6225 feet above the level of the sea--with but
one exception in the world. Then, too, it closely resembles the sky
in its pure and perfect color. One often experiences, on looking
down upon it from one of its many surrounding mountains, a feeling of
surprise, as if the sky and earth had somehow been reversed and he was
looking down upon the sky instead of the earth.

And, further, Lake Tahoe so exquisitely mirrors the purity of the sky;
its general atmosphere is so perfect, that one feels it is peculiarly
akin to the sky.

Mark Twain walked to Lake Tahoe in the early sixties, from Carson
City, carrying a couple of blankets and an ax. He suggests that his
readers will find it advantageous to go on horseback. It was a hot
summer day, not calculated to make one of his temperament susceptible
to fine scenic impressions, yet this is what he says:

We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake
burst upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand
three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by
a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three
thousand feet higher still. It was a vast oval, and one would
have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around
it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly
photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be
the fairest picture the whole earth affords!

And there you have it! Articulate or inarticulate, something like this
is what every one thinks when he first sees Tahoe, and the oftener
he sees it, and the more he knows it the more grand and glorious it
becomes. It is immaterial that there are lakes perched upon higher
mountain shelves, and that one or two of them, at equal or superior
altitudes, are larger in size. Tahoe ranks in the forefront both for
altitude and size, and in beauty and picturesqueness, majesty and
sublimity, there is no mountain body of water on this earth that is
its equal.

Why such superlatives in which world-travelers generally--in fact,
invariably--agree? There must be some reason for it. Nay, there are
many. To thousands the chief charm of Lake Tahoe is in the exquisite,
rare,