The Ponderosa Ranch, Home of Bonanza

For nearly forty years, one of the most popular attractions at Lake Tahoe was a Western movie set built to satisfy fans of a television show. In the late nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, the hit series Bonanza told the story of the Cartwright family and their sprawling Ponderosa Ranch, and the show's famous opening map placed that fictional ranch right here at the north end of Lake Tahoe, near Incline Village. A couple named Bill and Joyce Anderson had come to Tahoe in nineteen sixty two, when Bill's job was clearing pine trees and boulders to help build the new community of Incline Village.

Tourists kept stopping by their land looking for the real Ponderosa. Sensing an opportunity, the Andersons obtained blueprints of the Cartwright ranch house from the network and built a replica out of salvaged lumber. The Ponderosa Ranch theme park opened in nineteen sixty eight, and more than one hundred fifty thousand visitors came in its very first year.

For decades families wandered the Western town, watched staged gunfights, and ate a hearty breakfast hayride meal. By the early two thousands the park was drawing around two hundred thousand visitors a year. Then in two thousand four the property was sold to the software billionaire David Duffield, and the Ponderosa Ranch closed its gates on the twenty sixth of September that year, ending a beloved thirty six year run.