Lake Tahoe Has Quietly Been an Old-Money Retreat Since Long Before Silicon Valley Discovered It

Straddling the California-Nevada border, Lake Tahoe has drawn wealthy visitors since the late 19th century, well before it became known, more recently, for the string of estates that Silicon Valley executives have bought along its shoreline. The lake's older history is easy to overlook, but much of it is still standing.

A Gilded Age eccentric's estate

Thunderbird Lodge, built on the Nevada shore in the 1930s and 1940s by the reclusive heir George Whittell Jr, remains one of the clearest physical records of Tahoe's early wealth: a stone lodge, boathouse and private lighthouse built for a man who reportedly kept a pet lion on the property and preferred the lake's isolation to San Francisco society. The estate is now open for limited public tours run by a preservation society.

An Olympic Games on its doorstep

Squaw Valley, on the lake's north-west side and renamed Palisades Tahoe in 2021, hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics, the first Games broadcast on American television and the event that put Tahoe's ski terrain on the map for a national audience beyond the wealthy families who already summered there.

The newer money, on the same shoreline

In recent years, a number of technology executives, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, have bought or built property on Lake Tahoe's shoreline, a matter of public record through local land filings and regional press coverage, extending a pattern of private lakefront ownership that traces back to the same Gilded Age families who built Tahoe's earliest grand houses.

Traveller tips

• Reno-Tahoe International Airport, on the Nevada side, is the closest major airport to the lake's north shore.
• Thunderbird Lodge tours run seasonally and require advance booking through the Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society.
• The north shore tends toward the quieter, more residential end of the lake; South Lake Tahoe has the denser casino and resort strip.
• Summer afternoons see the heaviest boat traffic on the water; early morning is calmer for photographs along the shoreline.