The scenery
Emerald Bay and Vikingsholm by boat
How glaciers cut Emerald Bay, why Fannette Island has a ruined tea house, and who built the Scandinavian castle you pass on the cruise.
Reserve your Tahoe dinner cruise ↗A bay cut by ice
Emerald Bay is a glacier-carved canyon that opens onto the lake. Wikipedia explains that glaciers carved several of the canyons around Tahoe, among them Emerald Bay, Cascade Lake and Fallen Leaf Lake, and that they retreated about 15,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Lake Tahoe itself never held a glacier. It sits behind volcanic deposits that dam the basin, so the bay is a cut made by ice in the mountains beside it, and it opens onto water held back by the basin's volcanic dam. That is why the sides of the bay rise so steeply from the water.
The bay today
The bay is about 1.7 miles long and about two-thirds of a mile across at its widest. The Department of the Interior recognised it as a National Natural Landmark in 1969. In 1994 California State Parks added the water of the bay to Emerald Bay State Park, which makes it one of the state's first underwater parks and protects the wrecks and other objects on the bottom. In a hard winter the bay can freeze over, even though the open lake does not.
Fannette Island and the captain
Fannette Island is the only island in Lake Tahoe. In the 1860s an English-born sailor, Captain Dick Barter, lived there from 1863 to 1873. He built himself a tomb and a chapel, and he earned the nickname Them's My Toes by showing guests the toes he had lost to frostbite. He was never buried in the chapel, because he was lost in a storm off Rubicon Point in 1873. Swimming to the island is not allowed, because of the cold water and the boat traffic.
The tea house on top
The ruin on the island's summit is a stone tea house. Lora Josephine Knight, who built Vikingsholm, had it made so that she could take guests across for tea. The island can only be reached by boat, and steps carved into the rock lead up to it. Vandals destroyed the flat roof, the door and the windows, so only the stone shell with a fireplace in one corner remains. From the water you can pick out the small stone building on the summit.
Who built Vikingsholm
Knight built Vikingsholm as a summer home. The foundation was laid in 1928, and about 200 workers finished the house in 1929. Before building, she and her architect travelled to Scandinavia to gather ideas, and the house shows it: carved serpent designs above the doors, sod roofs on two wings, and east-wing walls of light mortar and dark stone built to resemble those of Olavinlinna, a stone castle. Some parts of the structure use no nails or spikes. Wikipedia calls it one of the finest examples of Scandinavian architecture in North America.
Why the bay draws a crowd
Wikipedia describes Emerald Bay as one of Lake Tahoe's most photographed and popular locations, and the park also holds Eagle Falls. The park is reached from State Route 89 on the lake's southwest shore, and in summer its temperatures run from the low 40s Fahrenheit at night to the mid-70s by day. A cruise is a different way to see it: you arrive by water, and you can sit down while you look.
From private house to state park
After Knight, a lumberman named Harvey West owned the land, and he sold it to the state of California in 1953 for half of its appraised value. The park itself was established in the same year. Today the house is a museum, and Knight's tea house on the island belongs to the same state park. Public tours of about 30 minutes run in the summer months. To reach it you walk down a steep one-mile trail from the highway parking lot, or take a longer 1.5-mile trail from Eagle Point Campground, and then climb back up.
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