Truckee, CA
Live jazz and craft cocktails in a mountain town. Lake Tahoe is 12nm south — the water color from above is unreal.
At 5,900ft MSL in the Sierra Nevada, density altitude is critical here — summer DA can exceed 9,000ft. Lake Tahoe (12nm south) is one of the most photographed natural features from the air in North America. The lake's cobalt blue color against the granite peaks is unforgettable. The Donner Party's ill-fated 1846 encampment was near present-day Truckee.
7,056ft pass through the Sierra Nevada — the route of the Central Pacific Railroad's 1860s tunnels and the modern I-80. Named for the Donner Party, 87 pioneers who became trapped in winter snows at Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) in 1846-47; only 48 survived. The Donner Memorial State Park preserves the Murphy cabin site. From the air, the railway tunnels are visible threading the granite. KTRK is 5 miles east.
Straddling the California-Nevada line high in the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America and one of the deepest lakes on the continent — 1,645 feet — holding water famous for a clarity that can let you see 70 feet down. It formed in a fault basin and was scoured by glaciers; the water is so pure largely because little sediment flows in. The Nevada east shore is the wild, granite-and-pine side — Sand Harbor's boulder-strewn coves, the cobalt-to-turquoise shallows, and the climb up to the casinos at Stateline. Mark Twain, who camped here in 1861, called it "surely the fairest picture the whole earth affords."
In 1859, prospectors on the slopes of Mount Davidson hit the Comstock Lode — the richest silver strike in American history. Virginia City exploded into one of the largest, wealthiest towns in the West almost overnight, its mines funding the building of San Francisco and helping bankroll the Union in the Civil War (and giving Nevada the statehood, in 1864, that made it the "Silver State"). A young reporter named Samuel Clemens worked at the Territorial Enterprise here and first used the pen name "Mark Twain" in print in 1863. The boom faded, but unlike most ghost towns Virginia City survived — its steep main street of Victorian saloons, boardwalks, and the old Enterprise office is preserved as a National Historic Landmark district clinging to the mountainside.
The Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento are the Mother Lode — Highway 49, named for the '49ers, threads the Gold Rush towns. Grass Valley's Empire Mine is the crown: one of the oldest, deepest, and richest hardrock gold mines in California, worked for over a century until 1956. It pulled 5.8 million ounces of gold from 367 miles of underground passages reaching nearly a vertical mile down — all of it now flooded and silent since the pumps stopped. Above ground, mine owner William Bourn Jr.'s cottage and formal gardens survive, and the visitor center's "Secret Room" holds a scale model of the whole impossible maze. Unlike placer gold you pan from a stream, this was won by men in buckets lowered into the dark to drill and blast. The park is on the National Register.