WHY "THE LAKE OF THE SKY"?
Lake Tahoe is the largest lake at its altitude--twenty-three miles long by thirteen broad, 6225 feet above the level of the sea--with but one exception in the world.

Then, too, it closely resembles the sky in its pure and perfect color.

One often experiences, on looking down upon it from one of its many surrounding mountains, a feeling of surprise, as if the sky and earth had somehow been reversed and he was looking down upon the sky instead of the earth.
And, further, Lake Tahoe so exquisitely mirrors the purity of the sky; its general atmosphere is so perfect, that one feels it is peculiarly akin to the sky.
Mark Twain walked to Lake Tahoe in the early sixties, from Carson City, carrying a couple of blankets and an ax.

He suggests that his readers will find it advantageous to go on horseback.

It was a hot summer day, not calculated to make one of his temperament susceptible to fine scenic impressions, yet this is what he says: We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still.