Yeah, I know - it's a rather morbid topic, but it certainly opens up some interesting facts. Such as the fact that if a person were to drown in Lake Tahoe and not be rescued, his/her body would never rise to the surface as with most other aquatic environments.

Between the years of 1860 and 1874 early records indicate that a total of 14 people were drowned in the lake. None of the bodies were recovered when the drownings occurred in deep water.

Many curious stories circulated in the 1870s and 1880's concerning the ultimate fate of those who disappeared in the depths of Tahoe. In 1872 the San Francisco Bulletin solemnly assured its readers: "A corpse remains suspended and motionless (in Tahoe) at a depth of 200 feed and over, frozen stiff as though encased in a block of ice, and the great pressures encountered in the vast deep of the lake reduce an adult's body to that of a child's stature, exercising a clamping effect that holds the person in a viselike grip, preventing its rise to the surface."

Discarding conjecture and the fanciful, a sound, proven reason why bodies do not return to the surface of the lake is that corpses sinking into snow water, only a few degrees above freezing, do not decompose, as would normally be the case in warmer waters. Thus gases are not formed which would cause them to inflate and rise to the surface. It is conceivable that bodies are preserved in the watery abyss of Lake Tahoe much in the same manner as prehistoric mammals are found in massive ice floes after thousands of years of entrapment.

One final note about why bodies never make it back to the surface (of Tahoe anyway): It has been reported that often times when divers disappear exploring many of the underwater caves on the western side of the lake, that their bodies turn up in other lakes as far away as Donner Lake .

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