The Lake Tahoe Dam: The Only Water That Leaves
Near Tahoe City, California
The calm water slipping under Fanny Bridge is the only water that ever leaves Lake Tahoe by natural means. From here it becomes the Truckee River, flowing north and east, past the town of Truckee, down to Reno, and finally into Pyramid Lake in the Nevada desert, where it simply evaporates, never reaching the sea. Controlling that outflow is a low concrete structure just upstream, the Lake Tahoe Dam.
A small private dam was built here in eighteen seventy, in the same era that a San Francisco engineer named Alexis Von Schmidt dreamed of piping Tahoe's water clear through the Sierra to San Francisco. His scheme failed, and that early dam was later replaced. The dam standing today, an eighteen foot tall slab and buttress design, was completed between nineteen oh nine and nineteen thirteen.
It does not make the lake deeper so much as bank the top few feet of water, roughly six feet, holding it like a savings account to be released downstream for farms and cities during dry months. Every gate raised or lowered here ripples across two states. This modest dam, at this modest bridge, quietly settles one of the longest running water fights in the American West.
