Because I had packed my binoculars for this trip, I asked my sister if we could go wildlife watching today. Fortunately, she lives near the American River Parkway, so around mid-morning, we set out for the Effie Yeaw Nature Center, in Ancil Hoffman Park. The Nature Center is part of a 77-acre preserve with riparian and oak woodlands, shrub lands, meadows, and aquatic habitats.

We stopped at the Visitors’ Center briefly, then headed out along the trails. Although we didn’t keep a list of species sighted, we observed quite a few. We also heard more birds than we could identify by sight. These are some of the animals we did see: dragonflies, squirrels, a woodpecker, wild turkeys, a great blue heron, deer, a jack rabbit, California quail, and wood ducks. Apparently, the coyotes, snakes, and turtles were hiding from us, though they do inhabit the preserve.

Mike, Marti, and I packed and checked out this morning, then drove together to Tahoe City, on the northwestern shore of Lake Tahoe. There we met many of our group for an afternoon cruise on the Tahoe Gal, a mid-western paddlewheel ship christened and put into service in 1994. The captain provided a wealth of information about the Lake, including such trivia as:

Lake Tahoe is fed by 63 streams and 2 hot springs. According to research, with a volume of 39 trillion gallons of water, if the Lake was ever drained it would take around 700 years for the hot springs, snowmelt and precipitation to fill it again entirely.

While cruising to Emerald Bay on the south shore, we enjoyed a leisurely lunch and took in such sights as Sugarpine Point, the spectacular Rubicon Point, Vikingsholm Castle, and Fannette Island. I tried to capture the water’s incredible shades of blue (these are thumbnails, so you can click on each image to view it in a larger format).

The title quotation is Mark Twain’s tribute to the Lake’s beauty from his travelogue, Roughing It, published in 1872.