About Lake Tahoe - EL 6229'

Tahoe residents are extremely proud of their lake and sooner or later you will hear all of the following facts, persuading you to grant them bragging rights.

Surrounded by mountains, the present day lake sits in a valley at an elevation of 6,229 feet. It is the highest lake of its size in the United States. It is the third deepest lake in North America and the tenth deepest lake in the world.

Lake Tahoe is 22 miles in length and 12 miles in width and covers a surface area of 191 square miles. The consistently beautiful shoreline is 71 miles, with the California shoreline being 42 miles and the Nevada shoreline being 29 miles.

This breathtakingly blue lake is so clear that in some places objects can be seen to depths of 75 feet! The reason the lake is so blue is that the thin, clear mountain air allows the lake's pure, crystalline water to reflect the blue sky above. The lake can also appear red during sunsets or gray-black during storms.

The average annual rainfall in the Lake Tahoe Basin is 8.3 inches and the average annual snowfall is 216 inches or 18 feet, for a total annual precipitation of 30 inches. (The ski areas average 350-600 inches of snow per year!) Most of the snow and rain falls directly into the lake or drains through lakeside marshes and meadows that act as water filtering systems, preserving the purity of the water.

Sixty-three streams flow into Lake Tahoe, but the Truckee River is the only one that flows out, past Reno and into Pyramid Lake. The maximum depth is 1,645 feet, near Crystal Bay, and the average depth is 989 feet.

The water shed of Lake Tahoe is 519 square miles. The lake holds over 39 trillion gallons of water, enough to cover a flat area the size of California to a depth of 14 inches. If drained, it would take 700 years to refill the lake!

Lake Tahoe loses much of its water to evaporation. If the water that evaporates from the lake every 24 hours could be recovered, it would supply the daily requirements of a city the size of Los Angeles.

The maximum surface water temperature is 68 degrees F. and the minimum surface water temperature is 41 degrees F. Below 600 feet, the lake's water is extremely cold, staying at 39 degrees F. year-round.

And for the curious, Lake Tahoe never freezes because the huge volume of lake water is always in motion. Each winter, the cold water on the surface sinks while warm water rises from the deep. Some protected inlets like Emerald Bay have been covered with a layer of ice at times.

So, let the locals have their moments by resisting the urge to say, "I knew that!"