Open Sesame

At last the lake burst upon us, a noble sheet of blue water . . . walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full 3,000 feet higher still. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.

So wrote Mark Twain about Lake Tahoe, a 22-mile-long scenic jewel 150 miles northeast of San Francisco, and so the lake remained until about a decade ago. But it lies athwart the north-south line between two of the nation's most superlative states: the boomingest--California--and the gamblingest--Nevada. And this has been all but the ruination of Mark Twain's "noble sheet of blue water."

Neon & Sewage. A symbol of Tahoe's troubles is an eleven-story hunk of hardware with anodized aluminum trim called Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort Hotel, which opened for business last week. Three hundred invited guests showed up for 24 hectic hours of freeloading fun in the public rooms and the gadget-strewn suites (each with its own bar). Upstairs was a great big polynesian-style restaurant, and downstairs was a great big gambling casino; across the street was another casino run by Reno's Bill Harrah and featuring Comedienne Phyllis Diller. Who could ask for anything more?

Everybody, apparently. Harrah--who already runs two casinos along the southern shore of the lake--is reportedly planning to put up a 25-story hotel next to his Tahoe club; ubiquitous Builder Del Webb will soon break ground for a 1,200-room hotel and casino; the Frank Sinatra pack owns an old hotel on the northern side and is aiming to make it ring-a-ding with a 300-room expansion. But it is the southern shore, where the customers from California most conveniently meet the casinos of Nevada, that is teeming with neon civilization.

"In 30 or 40 years, the south end of the lake will be a slum," says San Francisco Attorney William Evers, a longtime Tahoephile. Along the northern shore, where prosperous Californians and Nevadans used to settle for summers of boating, fishing, hiking and mountaineering, a sprawl of jerry-building has sprung up to scar the scenery and threaten Tahoe's crystalline water with sewage.

A Conscience for the Lake. But as with many another threat to America the Beautiful, last-minute rescue operations are under way. Attorney Evers and Sacramento Newspaper Publisher Jim McClatchy founded a Tahoe Improvement and Conservation Association in 1957, and in 1960 a Lake Tahoe Area Council was organized, with representation from both states and all shades of interest--including nature-loving conservationists and action-loving Bill Harrah. In order to save the basin, they all realized, there would have to be planning and zoning that cut across and coordinated the jurisdictions of the two states and five counties.

The council has already spent $125,000 for an engineering study of how to keep sewage from clouding the lake's water. It succeeded in getting El Dorado County to enact an ordinance limiting the size and placement of roadside signs, despite a chorus of complaints from local businessmen. The council is fighting to prevent California's free-spending highway department from turning lake-skirting, two-lane Route 89 into a car-crammed semi-freeway and from building a bridge across Emerald Bay. And on the least developed, east side of the lake, there is a plan to buy a 30-mile tract of unspoiled shoreline and turn it, with some other bits and pieces, into a park, administered jointly by California and Nevada.

Both state legislatures are currently wrangling over the proposal. But even if it is doomed, the remainder of the beautiful basin's development will be planned and orderly. "The whole area now has a conscience," says Council President Harry Marks, a former mayor of Modesto, Calif. "We're all asking ourselves, 'Is this place going to be loused up like everything else?' There's enough here that can be saved if people have the guts to do it."

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