Keep Tahoe Blue
Near Incline Village, Nevada
Lake Tahoe is famous for one thing above all, its water. This is one of the clearest large alpine lakes on Earth, so pure that in places you can peer dozens of feet down and watch boulders and fish drift by. Scientists measure that clarity by lowering a white disk into the water and recording how deep it can go before it disappears from view.
In nineteen sixty eight that disk stayed visible roughly one hundred feet down. Over the following decades, as roads, development, and runoff carried fine sediment and nutrients into the lake, the clarity slid dramatically. In recent years the annual average has fallen to somewhere in the low to mid sixties of feet, a stark loss within a single lifetime.
The fight to protect the lake goes back to nineteen fifty seven, when concerned residents and visitors founded the League to Save Lake Tahoe, the group behind the beloved slogan Keep Tahoe Blue. Working with many partners, they have pushed to limit the fine particles washing off roads and developed land. Their efforts, along with a regionwide environmental program, have helped slow the long decline, and clarity has improved somewhat in recent years even though it has not fully recovered.
Every time you see a Keep Tahoe Blue sticker, it points back to that decades long effort to save this water.
