Tag: tahoe

TahoeGirl's blog has a trip report and photos from her backcountry hike into the Desolation Wilderness this weekend. The Desolation Wilderness is located in the mountains to the southwest of Lake Tahoe, and it's known for being dotted with lakes and gorgeous scenery. I went through a brief phase of being a backcountry hiker myself about a decade ago, and I went into Desolation a few times. But my one regret is that I never made it to Lake Aloha, which is the largest, and from all the pictures I've seen probably the most striking, of all the backcountry lakes in the area. TahoeGirl, of course, managed to make it there.

Lake Aloha sprawls over a rocky basin at an 8,000-foot elevation, seemingly at the top of the world. Lake Aloha is actually partially a man-made lake, dammed as part of the Sacramento reservoir system. This allows for wild fluctuations in the depth of the lake, as more water is stored in Aloha during the spring, and then slowly released as the year goes on. And since Aloha is pretty shallow to begin with, as the water level drops all these interesting islands and bays appear, creating the landscape that you can see in the picture above.

Lake Aloha butts right up against the Pacific Crest Trail and Tahoe Rim Trail, so there are a few ways of getting there, depending on what kind of mood you're in. The shortest path is to drive up to Echo Lake, off of Hwy 50 at Echo Summit, and hike in from there. But supposedly the most scenic route is to start at the far end of Fallen Leaf Lake and take the trail you find there. Or of course you could start at any of the numerous Tahoe Rim Trail trailheads around the lake, and given enough hiking, you'll find yourself at Aloha sooner or later. There are a bunch of maps online and an excellent book that can tell you exactly how to get there if you're interested. And if you go, take a picture for me!

TahoeGirl has an entire Hiking Lake Tahoe set on Flickr, and more pictures of Lake Aloha can be found here.

So is it true that no more donations are needed for the victims of the Angora Fire? That so many donations have already come pouring in that they literally have everything they need, and that they're now turning people away? Read through the comment thread on this post for the story of someone who detoured from a planned Las Vegas trip and instead went up to Lake Tahoe with a trunk full of donations, only to be refused everywhere they brought them. The final chapter:

After spending several days gathering donations and spending about $400.00 of my own money and driving the 5 hours one way to Tahoe, no one would take our donations. We were told the area had already received more than what was needed and we were turned away from everywhere we called or stopped at. So we dropped off the 100 lbs of dog food we had at the SPCA and left town after a couple of days. The donations were given to a Hospice in Placerville that we found on the way down the hill.

This seems pretty ludicrous that nobody at Tahoe would need any more donations, doesn't it?

Following links from Our Tahoe, I discovered a couple of new area blogs today:

Tahoe Girl

Tahoe Homes Blog

Firefighter Blog - not a local blog, but has a lot of coverage of the Angora Fire.

Also, I discovered a link to the Tahoe Transitions project, a rephotography project like my Then and Now articles. This one compares three views of a scene from Lake Tahoe: a historic picture from the archives, a rephotograph from last fall, and a rephotograph from the 1990s, taken from the book Stopping Time by Peter Goin. Our Tahoe has all the photo locations marked on a Google Map, so you can easily find a particular viewpoint. Or the official site is hosted at UNR.

The site's builders curiously decided to show the three photos morphing into each other using a QuickTime movie, so it's not the easiest site to navigate. And it crashes my browser. But it's still cool to see another Then and Now project out there, even if I do get jealous and territorial every time I run across one.

Ryan Jerz in the comments the other day slipped in a plug for his new Lake Tahoe placeblog, OurTahoe.org. I'd heard he was working on this project, but I never had a URL for it until now.

Right now the coverage is all about the Angora Fire, of course, and they seem to be aggregating a lot of opinions, blog posts, and Flickr photos about the fire.

The site is a product of the Interactive Environmental Journalism M.A. Program at UNR. In the past I've been critical of university-based projects like this, that seem to be done more for a grade than for the community. Most of my skepticism came from seeing the GoSkokie project go awry a couple of years ago. Go Skokie was a community site, a placeblog if you will, that was built by university students as part of a class project for a community outside of Chicago. After the class was over, the students got their grades and moved on, leaving the site barren and abandoned. It seems they had never drummed up interest among community members to keep the site going, so without the support of the students it died a painful death.

But things have gotten better since then. GoSkokie was reborn as SkokieTalk, a community-led effort that was built on the work the university students did. And other university/community collaborations became very successful, like Hartsville Today. So I'm open to the idea of OurTahoe, as long as there's good community involvement and it's not just the students carrying the whole site on their shoulders. I mean, I carry Around Carson entirely on my shoulders, but that's because I'm part of the community I'm covering. And also because I'm nuts.

So OurTahoe looks like a site to watch.

So now all of Carson City, Douglas County, Dayton, Washoe Valley, Fallon, and the Comstock have all been lumped together in the shadow of Reno and Lake Tahoe. In the new brand campaign, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada has taken what used to be called "Northern Nevada" or sometimes "Western Nevada" and renamed it to "Greater Reno-Tahoe". And they took $400,000 of our money to do it. They also came up with a lime green logo sporting the slogan "Can Do". The point is to get businesses and workers to move here from elsewhere in the country, and to put this snappy brand in front of them to get them to do so.

So far the response has been overwhelmingly negative.

Canned Poo.

Sounds suspiciously like a task on the "Apprentice".

$400,000 and that's all they can come up with?

Go back to your yuppie drawing board and leave us alone.

How do you say "can do" in Spanish?

Myrna has some thoughts, and the Nevada Appeal's editorial board. Most everyone says the same thing: generic, bland, could be used in any city in the Mideast. Kind of underwhelming.

September 18th was little Sammy's birthday. Every year on his birthday we try to think of something in the area that we've never done; something new we can try. So this year, since Sammy loves boats, the natural choice was to take a ride on the MS Dixie II.

The MS Dixie II is one of Lake Tahoe's three paddlewheelers (the others are the Tahoe Queen and Tahoe Gal). It leaves from Zephyr Cove and travels straight across the Lake to Emerald Bay. Then it swings around Fannette Island, pulls in close for a look at Vikingsholm, and heads back. It's a two-hour trip in all, and it's a good way to kill an afternoon.

It's actually a real, live paddlewheel boat, too. The wheel in the back spans the width of the boat and churns its way through the water, pushing the boat forward. Although their dirty little secret is that the paddlewheel only accounts for about 1/3 of the ship's propulsion. The rest comes from ordinary propellers underwater. And despite the smokestacks, it's diesel powered, not steam.

The MS Dixie II is a fairly new boat. It was built in 1994, specially for Lake Tahoe, and has only been sailing for 13 summers now. But its lineage goes back to the original MS Dixie, which was brought to the lake in 1949. From 1972 to 1993 the Dixie made the daily trips across the Lake. It even sank once, when the doors on the lower deck were left open one stormy night. The wind pushed wave after wave into the lower decks, filling up the hold with water. When the crew came out the next morning, they found the Dixie resting on the bottom of the lake, in about ten feet of water. Needless to say that day's cruises had to be cancelled, and for the next few weeks as the Dixie was raised, cleaned and repaired.

At the start of the 1990s, the MS Dixie was starting to show its age. 1993 was announced to be its final season, and they commissioned a new, bigger boat to be built to replace it. The MS Dixie II was constructed in Wisconsin, transported in pieces across the country by truck, and assembled on the beach at Zephyr Cove. It launched in the spring of 1994.

Most of the trip takes place out in the middle of Lake Tahoe, miles away from shore in water over a thousand feet deep. But the highlight of the trip is when the boat approaches the narrow entrance to Emerald Bay and enters the glacier-carved valley. As you pass through the mouth of the bay, the water's depth rapidly decreases until there is only about five feet of clearance between the boat's bottom and the rocks below. In fact, I think in years of extreme drought the MS Dixie isn't allowed to enter Emerald Bay; there just isn't enough clearance.

Sitting right in the middle of Emerald Bay is Fannette Island, Lake Tahoe's only island. In the 1870s this granite outcropping was the home of Captain Dick Barter, a crazy old hermit with many stories to his name. He built a crypt on the island and let everyone know he wanted to be buried there. But when his boat was dashed on the rocks in 1873, his body was swallowed by the cold depths of Lake Tahoe.

Later, in the 1920s, Mrs. Lora Knight moved to Emerald Bay and built a stone house on the shore. Vikingsholm was designed as a Scandinavian castle, and was built in 1929 as a summer home for Mrs. Kinght and her guests. She also had a stone teahouse built on top of Fannette Island, right near the place Captain Barter had dug his grave.

Mrs. Knight stayed at Emerald Bay until her death in 1945. After that the teahouse was abandoned and ravaged by vandals, until now only the stone walls remain. Vikingsholm, however, has been exquisitely preserved and is open for tours during the summer months. The MS Dixie II gets up nice and close to the shore to give you a good view of the castle. You can't stop and get out, though. If you want to visit Vikingsholm, you've got to park and walk down the mile-long trail yourself.

After a slow pass by Vikingsholm, the paddlewheel starts up again, and the Dixie swings back around Fannette Island, heading through the gap into the open waters of Lake Tahoe. From this point it's a nice leisurely cruise back across the lake to the Dixie's home port at Zephyr Cove. On the way back the video monitors across the ship queue up and show clips from Sunken Treasures of Lake Tahoe.

Before you know it you're back at the dock, and everyone on the ship presses together to disembark on the single gangplank at the bow.

It's a fun trip, riding on the MS Dixie II, even if it is a little pricey at $33. But it's one of the few public tour boats that will take you across the waters of Lake Tahoe, at least until the ferry service becomes a reality. So if you've got some time to kill, head on up to Tahoe for a ride on the Dixie. It has daily cruises to Emerald Bay all winter.

Check out the rest of my MS Dixie photo gallery.