Getting to know Lake Tahoe's warmer side

The pleasures of a summer visit: hiking, swimming, fishing. Oh, and don't forget the cribs of the rich and kooky -- a Viking palace, a movie mafia stronghold, secret tunnels and more.

By Christopher Reynolds, Reporting from Lake Tahoe, Calif.
03:27 PM PDT, June 19, 2009

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I'd seen Lake Tahoe only in winter, its shores under deep snow. So, on Day 1 of my first warm-weather trip around the lake last month, I couldn't stop prowling the water's edge, scanning for new hues of blue. On Day 2, I rock-hopped and rented a bike. On Day 3, I hiked above Emerald Bay into the mist of Eagle Falls.

So how, on Day 4, did I wind up in man-made subterranean blackness, stranded in a narrow stone tunnel somewhere between a dead playboy's boathouse and his opium den?

Blame the rich. Or thank them. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when New York's hotshots were putting up their lakeside summer retreats in the Adirondacks, some of the West's wealthiest families were putting the first necklace of summer mansions around Lake Tahoe, which lies partly in California, partly in Nevada.

Some of these homes were stuffy and traditional, but others were the sort of extravagances -- secret passages, Viking design, you name it -- that no sensible family could sustain for more than a generation or two.

In the last 60 years, half a dozen of these properties have landed in the hands of public agencies or nonprofits. And in summer, they open for tours.

Between outdoor adventures, I hit all six of those old mansions. And if the governor and Legislature don't close down Lake Tahoe's state parks before Labor Day (see accompanying article, "If you go"), you can too.

Commons Beach, Coppola's movie

The lake, which marks the northern end of the Sierra Nevadas, sits in a basin 6,229 feet above sea level, fed by runoff from surrounding mountains that stand as tallas 10,000 feet.

It's a lot of runoff. The lake measures 22 miles long, 10 miles wide and up to 1,685 feet deep. Tourists have been coming since the 1860s, when a young writer named Mark Twain wrote a few admiring words ("the fairest picture the whole Earth affords," now etched in a boulder at North Tahoe Beach) and accidentally set a big chunk of the north shore on fire. At least, that's what he confesses to in "Roughing It."

In light traffic, you can drive around the lake in about three hours. Afoot on the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail, the circuit might take you 15 days. I started on the northern shore, 40 miles southwest of Reno, and didn't linger in the gambling houses of Crystal Bay on the Nevada side, so you'll get no scholarship here on Frank Sinatra, JFK or Marilyn Monroe, who are all said to have spent time at the Cal Neva Resort.

Instead, heading south and west, I hit Commons Beach, just steps from the shops and restaurants of Tahoe City's main drag.

If you can find a parking spot nearby, you can explore the pebble beach that is neighbored by a big playground and lawn, and it's only a block or two from the little dam and bridge where the lake burbles into the Truckee River. Biking and running paths follow the lake shore here, and one trail follows the river for about five miles to Squaw Valley USA, the all-seasons resort that hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics.

Now, keep your eyes open as you pass through the Homewood area and you'll notice the walled premises of Fleur du Lac. This estate, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, is where Francis Ford Coppola shot much of "The Godfather: Part II" in the early 1970s. It's been converted to condos, so there's no chance to sneak inside for your own Michael Corleone moment.

But it's only about 10 more southbound miles from Homewood to Ed Z'berg-Sugar Pine Point State Park, which includes hiking trails, a nature center, a creek with seasonal fishing, a settler's cabin that dates to 1872 and a mansion that you can get into.

Bankers, Vikings and evergreens

The Hellman-Ehrman Mansion, a.k.a. Pine Lodge, was built as a getaway for banker Isaias W. Hellman of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The house, which went up in 1903, is a California Craftsman: three stories, nearly 12,000 square feet, with eight rough cedar columns fronting the porch. At one point, the resident staff totaled 27. The state acquired it in 1965.

"When this house was built, only 10% of homes in this country had indoor plumbing. And we have eight bathrooms here on the second floor," said State Parks ranger John Harbison, who showed me around.

Next, we come to the corner of the lake that sends photographers' heartbeats galloping: Emerald Bay, a glittering green pool that was carved by a glacier and is connected to the rest of the lake by a narrow passage. At the center of the bay lies the lake's only island, Fannette, in exactly the spot an art director would have chosen.

If you were absurdly wealthy in 1928, you'd have demanded a vacation house here. And so it went, more or less, with an heiress-widow-philanthropist named Lora Josephine Knight. Her father and her former husband were captains of industry, controlling such companies as National Biscuit, Continental Can, Diamond Match and Union Pacific.

She wanted a Scandinavian mansion because the bay made her think of fiords, and by the time the stock market crashed in late 1929, the work was done on Vikingsholm. Swedish architect Lennart Palme and his team chiseled boulders, carved timbers, elaborately painted walls and ceilings, planted sod roofs, devised spiked eaves to repel evil spirits, put up six fireplaces and bought European fixtures and furniture dating back centuries.

On Fannette Island, Knight had workers put up a stone teahouse so she could take visitors out there by boat a few times a year.

This good life lasted 15 Tahoe summers. Eight years after Knight's death at age 82 in 1945, the state acquired the property and made it part of Emerald Bay State Park.

It's a little jarring, the trip from Old Scandinavia to the roadside kitsch of South Lake Tahoe. I dulled the blow with a night at Camp Richardson, which has offered cabins and rooms since the 1920s.

These days, the Forest Service owns the land, and concessionaires run the lodgings, campground, RV village, stables, bike and watersports rentals, the ice cream parlor and Beacon restaurant, where a raccoon approached me on the deck to demand lunch.

Camp Rich, as the locals call it, is not fancy. But my room was fine, and the cabin I checked out was spotless and reasonably priced. With the camp's water frontage and spacious grounds, it's one of the few places where a family can park the car and forget about it for days.

On a windless morning, walking onto the pier was like stepping into a watercolor: no sound, glassy water, impeccably reflected evergreens.

No wonder mining millionaire E.J. "Lucky" Baldwin (developer of the Santa Anita racetrack) put up one of the lake's first resorts here in the 1880s and inspired others to raise three vacation houses after the resort was torn down.

Between 1965 and 1971, the U.S. Forest Service picked up all three houses: the Baldwin Estate (1921), the Pope Estate (1894) and the Heller Estate (a.k.a. Valhalla, 1923), now collectively known as Tallac Historic Site. These places do not match the grandeur of Vikingsholm or Pine Lodge, but just to the west, there's a visitor center at Taylor Creek. And just east, there's Pope Beach, one of the lake's best for swimming.

The scion, the lion and the Thunderbird

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