Lake Tahoe, first stop in our trip around the South-Western area of the USA.
With my beloved Alfredo, we arrived yesterday, Saturday 26th of February in San Francisco, CA, and we drove all the way to Lake Tahoe. Arriving there, we decide to go to Sqaw Valley, one of the two major ski resorts in this area.
On the road, the snow starts after Sacramento, the capital city of California. It is beautiful to see all the trees full of snow, but it is very cold!!
Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada range of the United States. At a surface elevation of 6,225 ft (1,897 m), it is located along the border between California and Nevada, west of Carson City, Nevada. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. Its depth is 1,645 feet (501 m) making it the USA’s second-deepest (the deepest is Crater Lake in Oregon, being 300 ft (91 m) deeper, at 1,945 feet (594 m) deep).
The lake was formed about 2 million years ago and is a part of the Lake Tahoe Basin. It is known for the clarity of its water and the panorama of surrounding mountains on all sides.
Lake Tahoe is the second deepest lake in the U.S., with a maximum depth of 1,645 feet (501 m), trailing only Oregon’s Crater Lake at 1,949 ft (594 m). Tahoe is 191 square miles (490 km2).
In spite of land-use planning and export of treated sewage effluent from the basin, the lake is becoming increasingly eutrophic (having an excessive richness of nutrients), with primary productivity increasing by more than 5% annually, and clarity decreasing at an average rate of 0.25 meters per year. Until the early 1980s, nutrient-limitation studies showed that primary productivity in the lake was nitrogen-limited. Now, after a half-century of accelerated nitrogen input (much of it from direct atmospheric deposition), the lake is phosphorus-limited.
Test results over the last eight years have shown a stabilization in lake clarity, announced the Lake Tahoe Research Group in March 2009. Fine sediment, much of it resulting from land disturbance in the basin, accounts for about half of the loss in clarity.
Lake Tahoe never freezes. Since 1970, it has mixed to a depth of at least 1,300 ft (400 m) a total of 6 or 7 times. Dissolved oxygen is relatively high from top to bottom. Analysis of the temperature records in Lake Tahoe has shown that the lake warmed (between 1969 and 2002) at an average rate of 0.015 °C per year. The warming is caused primarily by increasing air temperatures, and secondarily by increasing downward long-wave radiation. The warming trend is reducing the frequency of deep mixing in the lake, and may have important effects on water clarity and nutrient cycling.
To me, Lake Tahoe is a fantastic and awfully amazing lake which has been preserved from the human touch and is agreable to see surrounded by the local vegetation. People do not destroy it. No litter anywhere. Just boats and parks all around. Fabulous.
Viva la vida!! Life is beautiful... 