Cut for the Comstock: How Tahoe Was Nearly Stripped Bare
Near Tahoe City, California
Look at the dense green forest climbing the slopes around you, and you would never guess that a little over a century ago almost all of it was gone. In eighteen fifty-nine, miners struck an immense body of silver ore across the mountains in Virginia City, Nevada, the fabled Comstock Lode. Those mines were hungry for wood, endless miles of it, to shore up their deep tunnels and to fuel and build a booming city.
And the closest great forest was right here, ringing Lake Tahoe. Between about eighteen sixty and eighteen ninety, the basin was heavily clear cut. Estimates suggest well over half of Tahoe's forests were felled.
Loggers used wagons, railroads, steamboats, and enormous water flumes to move the timber. One survey counted ten major flumes stretching some eighty miles, carrying tens of millions of board feet of lumber and well over a hundred thousand cords of firewood. Much of the back breaking cutting and flume tending was done by Chinese laborers.
The silver eventually ran out, but the scars remained. The forest you see today grew back all at once afterward, which is one reason these woods are now unnaturally crowded, and one reason Tahoe still lives with the ghost of the Comstock.
