The SS Tahoe: Queen of the Lake
Near Incline Village, Nevada
The SS Tahoe launched on June twenty-fourth, eighteen ninety-six, assembled at Glenbrook from hull sections built in San Francisco and hauled over the Sierra Nevada by wagon. The steamer ran a hundred and sixty-nine feet long but only eighteen feet wide, slender enough to cut across the lake at speed. She carried up to two hundred passengers in a dining room, a ladies' cabin, a gentlemen's smoking lounge, and private staterooms, with hot and cold running water in the passenger cabins.
For forty years the Tahoe connected remote communities and luxury resorts around the shoreline. When a road around the lake opened in nineteen thirty-five, the ship became unnecessary. On August twenty-ninth, nineteen forty, her owner deliberately scuttled her off Glenbrook.
She rests today in four hundred feet of water, remarkably intact in the cold and dark.
