The Big Blue of the Sierras

High in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, straddling the border between Nevada and California, you’ll find the largest alpine lake in North America, Lake Tahoe - sometimes called Big Blue. 115 kilometres in circumference, with an average depth of 300 metres, it has the sixth-largest volume of any lake in the US - only the Great Lakes are larger. For at least 6,000 years, the territory of the Washoe people centred around Lake Tahoe, but the arrival of non-native people in the 19th century led to a series of armed conflicts and eventual loss of land to farms and townships.
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