Spooner Area (Logging and Lumbering Period: 1868- 1895)

Behind this spot lies the human end of a vast logging machine. The area carries the name of Michele Spooner, a French-Canadian who in 1868 joined other entrepreneurs in the Summit Fluming Company, an early venture cutting timber for the Comstock mines. Those operations were folded into the giant Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company in 1873. For nearly thirty years the forests here were felled and floated down to Carson City, until the timber gave out and mining slowed in the 1890s. Second-growth forest has reclaimed the ground, now part of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park.

What the plaque says

This area bears the name of Michele E. Spooner, a French Canadian entrepreneur, who, along with others, was instrumental in establishing the wood and lumber industry which supplied the needs of the Comstock mines and mills. In 1868 Spooner became a partner with Oliver and John Lonkey, the Elliot brothers, Henry M. Yerington, William Fairburn and Simon Dubois in the Summit Fluming Company and operated a shingle mill and sawmill. In 1870 Yerington, Bliss & Company took over the summit fluming company. In 1873 another sawmill was erected at Spooner Meadows. Later in 1873, all the mills were taken over by the Carson & Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company. This company, headquartered at Glenbrook, went on to become the largest of the three huge companies supplying wood and lumber to the Comstock.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 1.8 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 4.3 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 4.7 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
• Sand Harbor — 6.3 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

More markers nearby

• Spooner Summit — 1.2 mi
• Glenbrook — 2.2 mi
• Washoe Indians — 3.2 mi
• De Ek Wadapush - Cave Rock — 4.5 mi