Lake Tahoe

Tahoe sits at 6,225 feet in a fault basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Carson Range, and it is deep the way few lakes anywhere are deep: 1,645 feet at the bottom, second in the United States only to Crater Lake. It holds enough water to cover California a foot deep. The clarity that made it famous — a white plate visible seventy feet down — comes from granite watersheds that give the lake almost nothing to carry.

The Washoe people summered here for thousands of years before the Comstock silver strike of 1859 turned the basin into a timber yard; nearly every old-growth tree around the lake was cut to shore up the mines under Virginia City. The second growth is what you see today. Then came the resorts, the casinos at Stateline, and the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley that put Tahoe skiing on the map.

Our board is cut from the 1998 U.S. Geological Survey multibeam survey — the first full-coverage map of the lake floor — so the shelf off Tahoe City, the drop at Rubicon and the flat abyssal plain in the middle are the real thing, not an artist's guess.