Lake Tahoe is a great cobalt-blue lake set 6,200 feet up in the Sierra Nevada, straddling the California–Nevada line. It is North America's largest alpine lake — twenty-two miles long, twelve wide, and famous for the clarity of its water, which is so transparent at the deeper edges that the bottom is visible at depths of more than twenty metres. The lake fills a fault basin between two ridges of the Sierra: granite peaks to the west, the dry desert mountains of Nevada to the east, snowy through most of the year and reflected in the water on a still morning.
The shoreline divides into a few distinct moods. The South Shore, around Stateline and South Lake Tahoe, is the busy end — neon-lit casinos on the Nevada side, the long curve of Pope Beach on the California side, and the cable-car-served slopes of Heavenly rising directly above town. The West Shore is the quietest and prettiest, with Emerald Bay's improbable blue-green crescent and the granite slabs of D.L. Bliss and Sugar Pine Point state parks. The North Shore mixes the resort villages of Tahoe City and Incline Village with the celebrated ski areas of Squaw Valley (now Palisades) and Northstar, while the wilder East Shore along Highway 28 has the painted boulders of Sand Harbor and the long uncrowded white-sand beach at Secret Cove.
Tahoe is a year-round destination: world-class skiing in winter, swimming and paddling and hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail in summer. Avoid weekends in July and August unless you enjoy traffic; the rim road is a single lane each way for most of its 72 miles. The mountain weather is fickle even in summer, so layer up; thunderstorms often build over the Sierra crest by mid-afternoon.