In 1861, Mark Twain set up camp on the shores of Lake Tahoe. He was obviously taken with the view. “I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” Twain later wrote in “Roughing It.
As it happened, later that night, Twain would accidentally set fire to the forest. But that wasn’t such a big deal to him. Twain thought Tahoe’s natural beauty was abundant. He couldn’t have been more wrong.