Sand Harbor

Sand Harbor was a working waterfront before it became one of Tahoe's loveliest beaches. In the lumber era, timber cut around the lake was rafted and handled along this sheltered cove on Tahoe's northeast shore, part of the vast operation that fed Sierra wood to the Comstock mines. The same granite coves and clear shallows that served the log trade now draw swimmers, kayakers, and summer crowds. The marker recalls the industrial past beneath the scenery. Sand Harbor is now the centerpiece of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park, its beach among the most photographed on the lake.

What the plaque says

History records Sand Harbor as playing an important role in the operations of the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber company, one of three large combines supplying lumber and cord wood to the Comstock mines during the late 19th century. Walter Scott Hobart organized the company and John Bear Overton was its general manager. The steamer "Niagara" towed log rafts from company land at the south end of Lake Tahoe to Sand Harbor. Here the logs were loaded on narrow-guage [sic] railway cars and taken two miles north to a sawmill on Mill Creek. Lumber and cordwood were started on the way to Virginia City via an incline tramway 4.000 feet long, and rising 1,400 feet up the mountainside where the material was transferred to water flumes and transported to Lakeview just north of Carson City. The tramway has been described as "the great incline of the Sierra Nevada".

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sand Harbor — 0.3 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 2.4 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 7.9 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back
• Carson City — 9.1 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since

More markers nearby

• The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada — 2.5 mi
• Spooner Area (Logging and Lumbering Period: 1868- 1895) — 6.5 mi
• Lakeview — 6.8 mi
• Franktown — 6.8 mi