The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada

Look up the mountainside above Incline Village and picture a wooden railway so steep it seems to climb straight into the sky. That was the Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada, and it gave this town its name. In the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, the silver mines of the Comstock Lode over in Virginia City devoured almost unimaginable amounts of timber.

Miners needed wood to shore up their tunnels, to fuel their engines, and to build their booming city. The forests around Lake Tahoe became the supply, and moving that lumber over the crest of the Sierra was the great engineering problem of the age. The Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company solved it.

In eighteen eighty they completed the Great Incline, a cable tramway roughly four thousand feet long that lifted cordwood and lumber roughly fourteen hundred feet up the mountain. A powerful steam engine at the summit turned enormous bull wheels, winding thousands of feet of wire cable that hauled loaded cars up a double track while empty cars rolled back down. At the top the wood was dumped into a wooden V flume, a water filled trough that carried it plunging down the eastern side of the range into Washoe Valley.

From there wagons and rail delivered it to the mines. At its peak the operation could move around three hundred cords of wood in a single day. A working community grew at the base along Incline Creek, and by eighteen eighty four this little settlement even had its own post office.

Then the Comstock faded, the mines slowed, and the great machine fell silent. The tramway was abandoned, its timbers left to rot into the hillside. For decades almost nothing remained but the name.

Today Incline Village is a resort town of quiet luxury, and most visitors never learn that its name honors a vanished cable railway. But if you hike the old grade you can still find traces of the bull wheel foundations and the scar of the incline cut into the slope. Every time someone says the name Incline, they are remembering one of the boldest feats of nineteenth century mountain engineering.