About This Site

This is about Tahoe, it’s about this place. I’m trying to present it as the truly enchanted wild place it is, with the tacky, make-believe human conceits and presumptions out of frame. It’s a bit hard to even get ones head around these days.

The Lake has been here in this spot for a couple million years, one of the oldest lakes on Earth, through a fluke of geology, or rather a few happily coinciding flukes. For perspective, if the lake was only about two thousand years old, the Washoe would have been here proportionally for nearly a decade, and white folk showed up a few months ago. If we squint just right, we can still see the true wildness that lies beneath the impacts of our culture’s fabricated narratives. 

The Lake averages nearly a thousand feet deep currently, over sixteen hundred feet at it’s deepest, twenty two miles by twelve, at its longest and widest, suspended over a mile above sea level, ringed by peaks and ridges that stand three or four thousand additional feet vertically above its waters. It is a fault-bound graben lake, its floor dropping between two uplifting ranges. So the rim wears away as it rises, maintaining it’s stature, and that material collects on the lake bottom as it is dropping, so it doesn’t fill up, the offseting trends perfectly balanced in time, so far.

During the many ice ages it has hosted, Tahoe never froze over, the glaciers converging from it’s radiating drainages, calved ice bergs into the lake, which floated to the outlet, where they repeatedly collected, damming off the lake flow and raising its level as much as six hundred feet, before inevitably failing, sending massive walls of water thundering down the Truckee River canyon, floating house sized boulders all the way to Reno.

The Sierra Nevada is the longest tallest wildest continuous mountain range in the continental US, stretching along far above the Pacific coast for over three hundred miles, square to the jet stream, it’s orographics wringing out the rivers of tropical moisture sent our way. With it’s moderate latitudes and sun angles, It’s flanks are home to a rich biodiversity, the most iconic conifer forests, the biggest sheer cliffs, the tallest peak, the deepest valley. Tahoe is the sapphire gemstone in the navel of this voluptuous range. My ski tracks are just so many sparkly crystals hanging briefly, dancing in a halo around her.

 

This site is a work in progress, being built around daily photos, and gradually being fleshed out with writings (#ramblings, #trip log), and additional photos from years past. I will be going back and adding text, and editing and refining things in an ongoing fashion. By the time you finish reading this, it may have changed.

These mountain settings compose themselves in passing and have patiently taught me how to see, just as the wildflowers have taught me how to walk, and the snows to fly. The images shared here are my own (except where noted), mostly taken on my iPhone, on the fly. I have done a minimum of editing, mostly just cropping, leveling and adjusting the lighting, rarely boosting saturation.

Frequently things here in the mountains are over exposed up in the blazing sun and under exposed in the shadowy forests, and so I invariably have to adjust accordingly, striving to match my admittedly rose colored recollections of just how blue the sky was, and how vivid the golden hour. Sometimes my cup  runneth over.

As a rule, I do not erase or mask extraneous human intrusions in my photos, trying for an accurate, authentic representation of the scene at hand. No AI is employed, (though I am fond of spellcheck). No ski tracks were erased, or shadow photo bombs, lens flares, contrails, boats, planes, piers, people, etc. (unless otherwise noted).

The one notable exception I make is the ski run scars at the big resort on the SE shore, across the Lake in many of my shots, which I generally erase because I find the scars distracting, and diminishing of the special nature of nearby natural avalanche paths and above treeline alpine terrain (the real ski runs as opposed to the practice hill), and the large fire scar, fire also being a natural part of this landscape (granted this particular ignition was from a cigarette butt flicked from the lift in the summertime, but I’m ok with irony. It’s one of the things humans do best, with varying degrees of self awareness.)

The pristine wildness is real, if only suggested inside the frame. It is a gesture towards the timeless archetypes that precede us. I try not to let the ‘perfect’ be the enemy of the ‘good enough’. I do note a keen distinction though, between the deep beauty and grace reflected in the Whole of All Creation, and all the fake human crap everywhere.

 

 

I am not a trained Botanist, just an avid amateur, yet another engaged member of the ecosystem. I recognize most all my botanical neighbors by sight now, even when not in bloom, but my original identifications were primarily made from Michael Graf’s Plants of the Tahoe Basin, in conjunction with John Muir Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada. I have since confirmed, refined and updated my IDs online via the Jepsons Manual, CalPhotos, and Calflora, as well as Inaturalist for non natives. I do my best, but I know it’s literally not 100%. 

The ski tracks featured are my own, the lingering slipstream of my passing snow dance, they are intended as part of the art, my ephemeral expressions of this landscape, more akin to the bouncing course of a butterfly, than to any product of human will or cleverness. The occasional skiers appearing here are my friends and I.

Photos from a given day are generally in chronological order, so they represent a progression of locales to give one a general feel for the habitat and sense of the unfolding tour.

I do not identify specific locations out of deference to their sensitivities. And also so as not to stunt the learning of those who would seek to follow (you can thank me later). The process of getting to know this place is truly enriching, learning how to learn, how to read natural sign (not just the glowing hole in your hand). I try to do more with less in my journeying, to intentionally skip the micro beta, to allow for exercising discovery and growth, open to happenstance and serendipity. 

Shortcuts and expediencies objectify this living landscape, excluding us. Easiness is a scam, making us weaker and stupider, and fouling our relations with this place. Just leave the tick lists to $anta kids, and go find what you love in Nature, what really speaks to you, and then dig in and get to know it, one on one, with some skin in it, taking your time like it’s personal and it matters, following where it leads, like it’s just between you and this Life, and nobody is watching, as if we were building a real relationship here, not just a shallow performative ‘one and done’, checking boxes. Our conscientious exercise of humble restraint is a measure of the depth and grace of all our relations. It makes the toiling intimate and personal, and the rewards ring true.