Tahoe's first recorded discoverer, Captain John Charles Fremont, came closer to a true determination of the lake's actual length than a full dozen pioneers, explorers, surveyors and resort owners would for decades to come. Fremont estimated the lake to be 15 miles in length, missing its actual north-south measurement by over 7 miles. However, he viewed this vast body of water in mid-winter from a point some 16 air miles distant. When his calculation is compared to the fantastic measurements submitted as fact over the next half century, which ran as high as 65 miles in length, Fremont's estimate may be considered reasonably accurate.

It was a stubborn and erroneous conviction of Fremont's, for some 40 years, that the outlet of Tahoe issued from the south end of the lake even though the lake's actual outlet had been discovered barely nine months after Fremont first viewed what he called "Mountain Lake." A horseback party of six young men and women from the Stevens-Townsend-Murphy emigrant group had broken off from the main company at what is now Donner Creek's influx into the Truckee River. They traveled "up the stream draining northerly out of the mountains" (Fremont's Salmon Trout River - Truckee) following its northeast side. Daniel Murphy is said to have been the first to reach the lake's outlet, and he and the others became the first white people to set foot on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

William Morris Stewart, who went on to become Nevada's great lawyer and senator, was the seventh white person of record to locate the outlet. During the summer of 1850 Stewart left Nevada City to prospect up the North Fork of the American River. Form its headwaters he crossed a ridge and then dropped down to the lake, where he "followed the shore with great difficulty" to the head of the Truckee River.

June of 1853 found John C. "Cock-eye" Johnson and an unnamed Placerville Herald correspondent moving up the Rubicon River Gorge and striking east over the Sierra past Lost Corner Mountain to what is now Meeks Bay. Upon viewing Tahoe spread out before them they generously estimated it to be 60 miles in length by 20 miles across.

During the summer of 1856, Asa Hershel Hawley, James Green and John "Snowshoe" Thompson carried a small skiff, built by Hawley, to the lake and while Green and Thompson rowed on a course paralleling the shore, Hawley paced off a half mile on the land to determine their rate of speed. The three would-be mariners then proceeded to circumnavigate the lake, becoming the first white men to do so, and came up with the startling calculation that it was 150 miles around, more than twice its actual circumference. The trio passed Tahoe's outlet, but Hawley later admitted that he and his companions did not realize it was the head of the Truckee River.

In August of 1856, a Placer County survey party, headed by Thomas Young, moved up the Truckee River after crossing the western Sierra by way of Squaw Valley. Young described the lake's outlet in detail before traveling north around Tahoe and over the Carson Range.

During the fall of 1860, Lieutenant S. Mowry, in the course of running a government survey to determine the California-Utah Territory (Nevada) boundary, reached the astonishing conclusion that Tahoe was 40 miles in length. He compounded his error by placing the division line, running through the lake, one an one-half miles farther into California than it was later proven to be.

In June of 1863, Butler Ives of Nevada and John Kidder of California, after a joint survey, repudiated Mowry's fantastic findings when they determined that the length of Tahoe was 26 miles. Von Leicht and Hoffmann's Topographical Map of Lake Tahoe and Surrounding Country, published in 1874, shows the length correctly as 21.6 miles but places the width as only 101/2 miles. Depth is noted as 1,525 feet and the altitude of Tahoe above the sea, 6,202 feet.

On July Fourth, 1875, C. F. McGlashan and Charles Burkhalter took 35 evenly spaced soundings between Campbell's Hot Springs (Brockway) and Emerald Bay. Their most important discovery was that Tahoe's maximum depth was 1,645 feet. In addition they found a variance of only 245 feet in the water's depth for 18 miles down the center, the soundings running between 1,400 feet and 1,645 feet.

In the summer of 1881, R. E. Wood, editor of the Tahoe Tattler, bracketed the lake as 26 miles in length and 121/2 miles in width, hitting the width nearly exactly and placing the maximum depth at 1,506 feet.

So went the see-saw of Tahoe's length, width and depth, with the final official measurements showing the lake to be the second deepest body of water in North America (Crater Lake is first) as well as the largest Alpine lake in the world from the standpoint of elevation, dimensions, depth and volume of water impounded.

Tahoe is a vast marine amphitheater with 193 square miles of surface area that averages, including shallows and bays, a remarkable 980 feet in depth. Its perpendicular drop-offs occur so suddenly that a boat may be in 25 feet of water one moment and in 1,400 feet the next. At normal high water level the lake is 6,229.1 feet above sea level, although shoreline rocks show that it has reached 6231.49 feet. The natural rim level, below which water may not legally be drawn, is 6,223 feet.

At the northern stateline point soundings show a descent of 1,500 feet one-half mile offshore. A five-mile shelf runs along the southwest side of Tahoe varying in depth from 4 to 22 feet, with a granitic sand underwater floor extending well out into the lake, caused by deposits from the Upper Truckee and shoreline erosion. On the northwest side of Tahoe, in the vicinity of Tahoe City, a six-mile shelf follows the shore, averaging several miles in width, with depth running to 120 feed. Beyond these shelves lies the Great Deep of Tahoe, flanked by massive sections of sheer rock that constitute the perpendicular underwater walls of the subterranean canyons. In many places they drop 800 feet straight down and even incline in over the vertical, running for miles north and south through the lake.

Three separate shelves are generally recognized: the first a shallow sand and gravel margin banding the shoreline up to 160 feet in depth; the second, an "introductory deep" running to 700 and 800 feet; and, lastly, the tremendous bottom basin or Big Deep of Tahoe which drops off from 800 to 1645 feet and accounts for three quarters or more of the billions of gallons of water in Tahoe.

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