The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada

The mountains around Lake Tahoe were stripped to feed the Comstock, and the Great Incline was how the last of that timber went out. Completed in 1880 on the Sierra's east slope above the lake, it was a steam-powered cable railway that hauled cordwood and lumber straight up an impossibly steep grade—rising hundreds of feet—to the head of a flume that shot the wood toward the mills and mines. It was a marvel born of relentless demand for timber underground. The forests recovered; the incline did not. Its scar remains above Tahoe's Incline Village, which took its name.

What the plaque says

Located on the mountain above are the remnants of the "Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada." Completed in 1880, this 4,000 foot long lift was constructed by the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company. A unique steam-powered cable railway carried cordwood and lumber up 1,800 feet to a V flume which carried the lumber down to Washoe Valley where it was loaded on wagons for use in the mines of the Comstock. Driven by an engine on the summit, 8,000 continuous feet of wire cable, wrapped around massive bull wheels pulled canted cars up a double track tramline. This engineering feat would transport up to 300 cords a day from the mill located in what is now Mill Creek.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sand Harbor — 2.8 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 — 4.6 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
• Carson City — 10 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
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 10 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

More markers nearby

• Sand Harbor — 2.5 mi
• Franktown — 5.3 mi
• Mount Rose Weather Observatory — 5.5 mi
• Bowers Mansion — 5.8 mi