We often walk forest trails in the Truckee area, but this last spring, we decided to try something different, ambling about Lake Tahoe, a place we haven’t visited in a long while. Accordingly, we set out for the Stateline Fire Lookout Trail near Kings Beach. The trail begins just across the Nevada border and offers a gentle hike uphill to an overlook that gives way to astonishing lake vistas.
The trail meanders above the lake, tracing a gentle rise through yellow pines. When we reached the end of the trail, the site of a fire lookout that was dismantled years ago, the view was, as trails writer Mark McLaughlin describes, “jaw dropping.” If you adjust your gaze to the south just right, you can squeeze out of view almost any structure along the opposite shore, whether highway or casino. The air was clear; the mountains above the south shore were still mantled with snow; and the lake reflected their images almost with the precision of a looking glass, or perhaps with the precision of a photograph, as one famous writer described a similar view.
In 1861, Samuel Clemens arrived in the west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed Secretary Nevada Territory; Clemens was Assistant Secretary. It didn’t take long before he tired of the job, however, and apparently he also tired of his brother. So, Clemens, tempted to make a fortune in silver mining, exercised his wit and energy away from the office. When mining didn’t work out, he and some companions decided to explore the mountains, searching for a promising site to begin a lumber camp, since Comstock mining interests were hoovering up trees to provide the timber necessary for the mines. The companions also wanted to visit Lake Tahoe, then known as Lake Bigler, after a California governor. It took some effort, but they did eventually manage to find the largest alpine lake in North America, or at least that was how the story got told. In his loosely autobiographical 1872 work, Roughing It, Mark Twain, Clemens’ nom de plume, recalls the moment this way:
We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination. 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 snowclad 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. (169)
It’s good that last spring we didn’t have to summit mountains “three or four thousand miles high.” The Stateline Fire Lookout trail climbs less than 400 feet. But even today it gives onto a view just as moving as Twain’s decades-old description.
Epic water clarity has long been one of the lake’s most attractive qualities, something that long ago Twain fully appreciated. While loafing about the shore, and apparently only occasionally paying attention to the “timber ranch” that was supposed to make their fortune, Twain and his companions explored the lake in a skiff:
So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand’s-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions “balloon-voyages.” (174-75)
Interesting that Twain’s description includes the claim that the water was eighty feet deep and startlingly clear. According to an April news release from the Tahoe Environmental Research Center, at the end of 2022, Lake Tahoe’s clarity was 80.6 feet, an increase of almost ten feet from the year before. “That is due,” explains the news release, “in part to a resurgence of the lake’s native zooplankton. They’ve provided a natural clean-up crew to help restore the lake’s famous blue waters.”
Today, trail monuments along the Stateline Trail mention that most of the old growth trees were harvested for the mines, and that what we see today are second growth yellow pine. McLaughlin reports that “one interpretive sign informs that it will take another 300 years for the second-growth trees to reach the ‘size and greatness of the old growth forest from a century ago.’”
But not all of that old growth lumber made it to the mines. Twain managed to burn some of it, instead. Biographer Ron Powers explains:
The [timber harvesting] plan probably would have worked, if they hadn’t set the mountain on fire. They spent two or three days cavorting in the wilderness, swimming and fishing in Lake Bigler, cooking trout dinners over campfires and smoking their pipes under the stars. Eventually they cut down the obligatory two or three trees to mark their claim. Sam lit a fire by the lakeshore and walked off to fetch a frying pan. When he came back flames were racing up the mountainside, from tree to tree.” (105-106)
Of this experience, Twain writes that they “. . . sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours,” so enthralled were they with the “ruddy glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell” (176). I’m not sure why writers visiting California sometimes managed to burn its forests. Twain wasn’t alone. Robert Louis Stevenson managed the feat as well.
It’s worth noting that Twain wasn’t totally all in with California’s natural luster, which manifests as what scholar Peter Messent sees as the structural tension in Roughing It between the beauty of nature and the predations of commerce that offers its rewards at nature’s expense. Note this change in attitude from Twain’s initial description of Lake Tahoe:
. . . a Californian forest is best at a little distance for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family—redwood, pine, spruce, fir-and so, at a near view there is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched downward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to ” Sh !—don’t say a word !—you might disturb somebody! ” (408).
The “sad poverty of variety in species” seems to erase the emotional value of “the fairest picture the whole earth affords” from earlier in the book. So what if a little fire burns the timber ranch, since it’s all a part of one vast and “monotonous” family? The “wearisome sameness” phrase, moreover, seems like an ancestor to another phrase from closer to our own time.
In 1966, while a candidate for California governor, Ronald Reagan offered this observation:
I think, too, that we’ve got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at? (qtd. in Mikkelson)
Mark Twain and Ronald Reagan would seem to make strange bedfellows. But maybe not. They were both entertainers.
Sources:
McLaughlin, Mark. “Jaw Dropping Views at Stateline Fire Lookout.” Tahoe Weekly. 5 June 2019. https://thetahoeweekly.com/2019/06/jaw-dropping-views-at-stateline-fire-lookout/. Accessed 17 May 2023.
Messent, Peter. “’It’s a Great Country, Ma’—Blind Leads and Shifting Ground: the West in Mark Twain’s Roughing It.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines. Vol. 26, No. 1, December 1996. MLA International Bibliography with Full Text. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Mikkelson, David. “Ronald Reagan ‘If You’ve Seen One Tree. . . .’” Snopes, 7 June 2006. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/if-youve-seen-one-tree/. Accessed 17 May 2003.
Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press, 2005.
Tahoe Environmental Research Center. “Lake Tahoe’s Clarity the Best It’s Been Since 1980s.” UC Davis. https://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/secchi. Accessed 18 May 2023.Twain, Mark. Roughing It. 1872. American Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Roughing_it/BKgvAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&bshm=bshqp/1. Accessed 16 May 2023.
