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Matinee: 'Lake Tahoe Basin'
8 April 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 495th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Lake Tahoe Basin.
This 8:45 video by David N. Braun celebrates the beauty of the Lake Tahoe basin that straddles California and Nevada in the Sierra Nevadas.
The images were captured between 2013 and 2023 and are shown, Braun tells us, in chronological order.
"After spending 13 rewarding seasons with the U.S. Forest Service, I have managed to transition to full-time self-employment," Braun writes on his site. "While working for the Forest Service I was part of a highly experienced crew that did everything from firefighting to wildlife surveys, but our work was centered around large-scale watershed restoration projections. That hands-on knowledge and experience has played an integral role in shaping my career as an outdoor photographer."
And he has quite a subject to work with.
Tahoe, which means "The Lake" in Washo, is the largest alpine lake in North America and sixth largest lake by volume after the Great Lakes. With a depth of 1,645 ft., it is only surpassed by Crater Lake in Oregon.
We spent part of every summer there as a kid, immediately getting a sunburn at its high altitude while swimming in the heated pool at the lodge and the frigid snow melt of the lake both. Special attractions were Pee Wee golf, a horse ride into the surrounding hills and a visit to the movie theater.
The place has a way of growing on you as a young person.
In Chapter 23 of Roughing It, Mark Twain writes about living there with a buddy as a young man himself:
While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forest free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice, and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to "business."
That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from the shore, and then lay down on the thwarts in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought. The shore all alone was indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep mountainsides rose right up aloft into space -- rose up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded with tall pines.
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-breath 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 and 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....
He marvels on about this magical place but we'll let you off here on the assumption that you have Easter eggs to juggle. But don't forget that we left you with a story about moving a big rock away on this holy occasion.
And with no better excuse than to accompany a stunning slide show of one of the most beautiful places in the galaxy.