Читать книгу Oregon, the Picturesque. A Book of Rambles in the Oregon Country and in the Wilds of Northern California онлайн

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ACROSS LAKE TAHOE

From painting by H.H. Bagg

The descent from the summit of the divide to Truckee is gradual, some twelve hundred feet in nine miles, though there are a few short, steep grades of from fifteen to twenty per cent, according to our authority. It was dark when we reached Truckee, but as there was no chance of going astray on the road to Tahoe Tavern, we determined to proceed. The road for the entire distance of fifteen miles closely follows the Truckee River, a swift, shallow stream fed from the limpid waters of Lake Tahoe. It was a glorious moonlight night and the gleaming river, the jagged hills on either hand, and the dark pine forests, all combined to make a wild but entrancingly beautiful effect. As we later saw the Truckee Canyon by daylight, we have every reason to be glad that we traversed it by moonlight as well.

Tahoe Tavern, with its myriad lights, was a welcome sight, none the less, after an exceedingly strenuous trip, the personal details of which I have forborne to inflict upon the reader. We were given rooms in the new annex, a frame-and-shingle building, and were delighted to find that our windows opened upon the moonlit lake. The mountain tops on the opposite shore were shrouded in heavy clouds through which the moon struggled at intervals, transmuting the clear, still surface of the lake from a dark, dull mirror to a softly lighted sheet of water with a path of gleaming silver running across it. Directly a thunder storm broke over the eastern shore—very uncommon in summer, we were told—and we had the spectacle of clouds and lake lighted weirdly by flashes of lightning. The thunder rolling among the peaks and across the water brought vividly to our minds Byron’s description of a thunderstorm on Lake Geneva in the Alps. For a short time it seemed as if “every mountain peak had found a tongue,” but the storm died away without crossing the lake.