Sand Harbor Lake Tahoe
— granite and water that lets the bottom show through.
Not only on a wall.
Sand Harbor Lake Tahoe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The clearest stretch of the lake's eastern shore, where the Carson Range runs down to meet the water and the granite breaks the surface in shoals. The lake itself is the second-deepest in the United States at 1,645 feet, and famously clear; at Sand Harbor the bottom shows through twenty or thirty feet of green water. On summer evenings the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival sets a stage on the sand and plays to an audience facing east, the lake behind them as the light goes. By November the road is plowed but the harbor is empty, and the boulders carry the first snow.
The place, in three passes.
Sand Harbor is a beach unit of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park, on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in Washoe County, Nevada, about four miles south of Incline Village. The harbor sits at the lake's surface elevation of roughly 6,225 feet, where the Carson Range descends to the shoreline in weathered Sierra granite. Lake Tahoe itself is the largest alpine lake in North America and the second-deepest lake in the United States at 1,645 feet, after Crater Lake. The Nevada park was established in 1971 to protect roughly three miles of the eastern shoreline; Sand Harbor is its busiest day-use area, especially in summer.
The water at Sand Harbor reads turquoise to deep blue because of two coincident facts. Lake Tahoe is unusually clear; average Secchi clarity has been measured at around 71 feet by the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. The lake bed at Sand Harbor slopes gently from the shoreline through pale granite sand and rounded boulders. Light passes through the clean column, picks up the white-gold of the bottom in the first thirty feet, and returns as the colour the photographs show. Where the granite boulders break the surface the colour deepens into cobalt; in the shallows it pales to the clearest green.
The park stays open through the year, with the busiest months in July and August; weekend lots routinely fill before nine in the morning. Summer water temperatures sit around 65 to 68 °F (18 to 20 °C) by late August, cool but swimmable. The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival has played each July and August since 1972 at the open-air Warren Edward Trepp Stage on the south side of the harbor. In winter the day-use area stays accessible by plowed road, and the boulders carry the snow into March.
