Lake Tahoe, USA

LAKE TAHOE, USA | "The Clear Blue Lake of the Sierra Nevada"

Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America and the second deepest in the United States — a 501 square kilometer lake at 1,897 meters elevation in the Sierra Nevada on the California-Nevada border, where the extraordinary clarity of the water (visibility to 21 meters at its clearest) and the specific blue of the lake against the surrounding granite peaks and the deep green of the Jeffrey pine and white fir forests have made it one of the most immediately recognizable landscapes in the American West. The lake is fed almost entirely by snowmelt and precipitation rather than rivers, and the combination of depth, clarity, and altitude produces a blue that shifts from the pale aquamarine of the shallow nearshore water over white sand to the deep cobalt of the open lake center in a way that changes completely with the angle of the sun and the season.

The colors are the specific palette of the high Sierra: the deep cobalt and turquoise of the lake surface at midday, the pale granite grey of the peaks above the treeline, the warm amber of the pine forests in late afternoon, and the extraordinary pink and gold of the sunset over the lake when the western sky lights the water from the Nevada side in a reflection that turns the entire surface into something that reads as more like a watercolor study than a photograph.