The Flume Trail and Marlette Lake
Near Incline Village, Nevada
High above the eastern shore runs one of the most spectacular trails at Lake Tahoe, the Flume Trail, and it too owes its existence to the thirst of the Comstock mines. Virginia City needed not just timber but enormous quantities of water, and the clean water of the high Sierra was the answer. In eighteen seventy three the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, led by the lumber magnate Duane Bliss and the railroad man Henry Yerington, built a dam that enlarged a mountain reservoir now called Marlette Lake.
To carry its water toward Virginia City, engineers built an astonishing system completed in eighteen eighty seven. It included a tunnel nearly four thousand feet long bored through the mountain divide, many miles of wooden flume clinging to the cliffs, and a great inverted siphon of iron pipe that carried water down across Washoe Valley and up the other side under its own pressure. The achievement was later honored as a national historic civil engineering landmark.
Eventually the old flume collapsed and was abandoned. Then in the late twentieth century mountain bikers helped clear the route, and the Flume Trail was reborn as a recreational path. Today riders and hikers follow that narrow ledge, with the whole lake shimmering hundreds of feet below.
