Lake Tahoe
by chateaugrief
Lake Tahoe is 1645 ft deep, and the second deepest lake in the United States. It’s formed over a fault line, not a volcanic crater, but it’s way up in the mountains at 6,000 feet. Because it’s pretty deep, if there was an earthquake on the fault under the lake, they figure that there might be a 20ft tsunami from it. This would mess up a lot of very wealthy people’s second vacation homes. Wikipedia hints that California and Nevada briefly went to war against each other in 1864 over this territory but doesn’t give any satisfactory account.
It’s a tourist trap for the SF Bay Area, and people down here love to put bumper stickers on their cars that say ‘keep Tahoe Blue’. I would like to assume this is related to some corporate effort to rename Tahoe’s famous Emerald Bay to ‘Sapphire Bay’, but the real meaning, particularly among its adherents, appears to be extremely vague. I asked someone about this once, and after some hemming and hawing they said that the whole exercise was simply to ‘raise awareness’ rather than do any specific thing to effect a change in the lake. In actuality, the lake is well managed by a very active water quality control board who do things like importing salmon and trout for the fishermen and putting pressure on the real estate developers to not have their work crews dump trash into the water. Keep Tahoe Blue is a corporation that has been around for 50 years and was started to protest the expansion of the highway around the lake, they fundraise and print bumper stickers and oppose development. Interestingly, when I searched their website for the word ‘casino’, it seems the various Nevada casinos are major donors to the organization, despite being the targets of protests. Forgive me a cruel chuckle.
UC Davis does most of the research on the lake, and it’s a great place for their grad students to do experiments and observations. My personal experience in Tahoe was that the place reeks overwhelmingly of weed. Not my cup of rotting skunk, thanks. They also have bears up there! I remember listening to an uber-wealthy former coworker of mine talk about how his vacation house had been ransacked by bears the previous weekend, they just broke down the door and trashed the place, ate all his flour and dry goods and stuff.
So there you have it, the super wealthy, sky high in more ways than one, fighting bears and stickering their cars, getting fleeced by casinos, and tripping over phd candidates in ecology, on skis. That’s Tahoe. Have fun. Traffic is horrendous.
