Tahoe pt 1: Gold Medal for Capitalism!

Welcome, vacationing reader, as I give you an initial update on our holiday in Lake Tahoe. A quick spoiler alert: it's intensely beautiful and we love it here, but this post is going to contain some perhaps not-so-gentle ribbing of our American cousins. Those of you that love the good ol' USA so much that you're going to have trouble bearing that might want to look away now.

So we've travelled to Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the US, nestled 6000ft above sea level here in the Sierra Nevada mountains, half in California, and half in Nevada. This is a frequent vacation spot for Californians: not only is it a great base for all kinds of outdoor activities in the summer, but it's also home to some incredible ski resorts in the winter. It wasn't always so; up until relatively recently, the area was undeveloped and very much off the beaten track, but more of that later.

The drive up here was uneventful but fun, as any drive that takes you from sea level to 6000ft in the air must be: US Route 50, from just outside Sacramento up to Tahoe, does most of the climbing as it winds its way up a river valley, and over Echo Summit before a slight drop down to the lake. I think I enjoyed the drive more than Helen did, but as I said to her today, in the best part of 24 years of marriage I haven't driven her off a cliff yet.

Helen chose our accommodation here, and it's stunning beautiful, with a view over the lake and a nice private beach:

In fact, here's a portrait of someone that's justifiably pleased with themselves:

On our first full day in Tahoe, we took a trip to Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics. There, you can take a scary-looking cable car up to a high camp that includes a museum about those particular Olympic Games:

I didn't tell Helen about the 1978 accident on this very cable car, which killed 4 people, until we got back to the bottom.

Those Games are pivotal to the success of Tahoe as a tourist destination: before they happened, Squaw Valley wasn't even a city in its own right, and had only a single ski lodge and lift. The Games were won on a thoroughly capitalist promise of developing a world-class ski resort and other winter sport facilities in the area, and building sensible transport links including the US-50 route we drove up. And to some extent, they did that.

One thing they didn't do was build a bobsled run; apparently only 9 countries said they'd send teams to compete in this event, so the Californians considered it not worth spending the money to build. The IOC somehow signed off on just not having bobsled in the Olympics at all for 1960; it returned in 1964 in Innsbruck.

The other thing they didn't do was build Olympic venues that would last: the main arena was indoors (still relatively novel for the Winter Olympics in those days), but a world class skating arena that seats 7500 isn't all that useful in what after the Olympics was just going to become a highly commercial skiing resort. In 1976, roof leaks were repaired by applying a cladding which also made snow less likely to slide off, and created insulation that stopped the roof heating system from melting snow properly. Under heavy snowfall, the roof fell in in 1983. Then they demolished the rest of the building.

Today you'll find very few signs of the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley; here's what the ski jump looks like today:

... and here are the last two of the buildings used for the Games that are still standing:

What's more, Squaw Valley has nothing to indicate that these buildings had anything to do with the Olympics. It's slightly bizarre.

However, at the other end of the cable car is an Olympic museum, which contains some tasteful exhibits about the Games (I liked some of the uniforms and clothing, with those classic early 1960s powder blue and lemon yellow shades very much in evidence). As this is America, there's a whole display case on how hard it was to build the car park for the Games, because obviously that's the most important bit. And there's also this, celebrating a rare ice hockey victory over our mighty Soviet comrades:

There are some Olympic rings up here, but they're just for tourists: you're actually nowhere near any of the Olympic venues, and standing in a building built long after the Olympics had moved on.

Overall, this was a lot of fun, but underlined some basic truths about America and this area: it was built as a purely capitalist undertaking, to launch the area as a tourist destination; it succeeded, and so as a result, the Olympics were wiped off the map, except as a way to attract more tourists. Now I know I've just finished a course in Aristotlean philosophy, but it's not difficult to feel some of the moral outrage here. Oh, and along the way, the forces of capitalism somehow managed to defeat the mighty socialist ice hockey machine, which can't have been easy.

If you want an honest appraisal of the Squaw Valley Games and their legacy, head to the Gatekeeper's Museum in Tahoe City, which contains gems like this picture of the venues as they were in 1960. This allowed us to revisit Squaw Valley and walk around the place trying to find the surviving remnants of the Games.

On this diagram, you can see the two buildings we found - they're on the far left and just left of centre in this picture.

Anyway, the cable car itself is worth the price of admission. It's a beautiful, beautiful place, but blimey, they had a devil of a job building that car park!