What's Down There?

One of the things I like best about our local beach, North Tahoe Beach, is the shallow entry with water that stays ankle- to chest-height for a long while, allowing our children to venture safely out of their comfort zones. These family-friendly shallows hardly hint at what’s offshore, where the lake deepens, and deepens, and deepens, eventually reaching 1,644 feet. Just to give you a sense of things, that makes Lake Tahoe the 16th deepest lake in the world and almost twice as deep as the Hudson Bay. That’s deep.

I am fascinated by deep water, equal parts intrigued and terrified. Eben and I met in an advanced scuba diving class in the Monterey Bay, where Eben was a natural and I was conquering my fears. Deep water, like outer space, is largely unknowable to humans. We can only venture so far without complicated technology. What’s down there? There is only so much we can say.

Legends abound. According to local lore, deep waters off the south shore hold hundreds of preserved corpses at 900 feet, suspended in dark, cold animation, still wearing the pin-stripe suits they were wearing in the 1920s when gangsters used the lake as a graveyard for their victims. There is the legend of Tahoe Tessie, the sea monster-like creature said to live in the depths. Finally, there is the eerie quote from Jacques Cousteau who is said to have done a deep dive in the lake in the mid-1970s, saying something like, “The world is not ready for what I have seen.”

Intriguing, to say the least. And slightly terrifying.

In this article in SFGate from 2004, Tom Stienstra dreams of taking a submarine to the bottom of lake and solving her mysteries once and for all. In 2016, CBS chronicled how researchers began that journey, diving off the south shore in submersibles to practice for deep ocean dives. To this day, much of Lake Tahoe’s depths remain uncharted and mysterious. Without more exploration, the answer to “What’s down there?” must be: “We don’t really know. . .”

For information about newly discovered sunken barges from the 1920s and 30s and the “underwater trail” in Emerald Bay that’s opening in late September so that scuba divers can visit them, check out this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.

To visit Happy Cabin during your trip to North Lake Tahoe / Tahoe Vista / Kings Beach, click here.