The story of Incline Village.

Long before there was an Incline Village, this shore belonged to the Wašišiw, the Washoe people, whose world centered on the lake they call Dá'aw. Every summer for thousands of years, Washoe families came up from the valleys to fish, gather, and camp along these coves; the very word “Tahoe” is an adaptation of their name for the lake.

The Washoe Tribe remains an active presence in the basin today, and their deep connection to the East Shore, including Cave Rock, one of their most sacred sites, just down the lake, long predates and outlasts everything else on this page.

Incline Village is named for a piece of industrial machinery. When the Comstock Lode at Virginia City devoured timber faster than Nevada could grow it, the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company turned to Tahoe's forests. In 1880 the company completed the Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada: a 4,000-foot, double-track cable tramway climbing 1,800 vertical feet straight up the mountainside above today's town.

Driven by a steam engine at the summit and 8,000 feet of continuous wire cable, the Incline hauled up to 300 cords of wood a day from the mill near Mill Creek to a V-shaped flume, which floated the timber down to Washoe Valley, and on to shore up the mine shafts of Virginia City. The little company town at its base took the obvious name: Incline.

Two decades earlier, in 1861, a young Samuel Clemens hiked up from Carson City to stake a timber claim on this shore, and promptly set his camp, and a stretch of forest, on fire. He told the story on himself in Roughing It, years before the world knew him as Mark Twain. (Exactly where his camp stood is still argued over by historians.)

By the mid-1890s the slopes were cut over, the Comstock was fading, and the company moved on. The forests you see today grew back over the scars of that era.

While the rest of Tahoe sprouted resorts, the East Shore went quiet, thanks largely to one eccentric man. In the 1930s, San Francisco heir George Whittell Jr. bought roughly 40,000 acres of Tahoe's Nevada shoreline, over 20 miles of lakefront, with vague plans to develop it. Then he changed his mind: he built himself the stone Thunderbird Lodge (1936–39), kept a pet lion named Bill, raced his mahogany speedboat, and refused to sell to developers for decades.

His stubbornness is the reason the East Shore looks the way it does. After his era, much of Whittell's land passed to the U.S. Forest Service and to Nevada, becoming Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park, including Sand Harbor.

Meanwhile at Crystal Bay, the state line drew gamblers: little casinos straddled the border, and the Cal-Neva Lodge, where the line runs literally through the swimming pool, had its most famous years in the early 1960s under part-owner Frank Sinatra.

In the late 1950s, Oklahoma developer Art Wood and his Crystal Bay Development Company bought some 9,000 acres of Whittell's land above the north end of the lake and drew up something rare for the time: a fully master-planned mountain community, named for the old lumber incline whose scar still ran up the hill.

The pieces came fast. In 1961 the Incline Village General Improvement District (IVGID) was formed to build and run the water, sewer, and recreation systems, a structure that still shapes daily life here, since it's why residents collectively own their beaches, golf courses, and ski hill. In August 1966 crews broke ground on a ski area designed by Austrian ski pioneer Luggi Foeger; barely four months later, on November 19, 1966, Ski Incline opened, the first ski area in the West with snowmaking.

Then Hollywood arrived. In 1968, Bill and Joyce Anderson opened the Ponderosa Ranch, a western theme park built around the Cartwright ranch house from Bonanza, the TV show had set its fictional spread right here on Tahoe's northeast shore. For 36 years, tourists rode haywagons and ate flapjacks where the show's opening map burned on screen. Sierra Nevada College followed in 1969, giving the young town a campus.

The ski hill was renamed Diamond Peak in 1990 and remains one of America's few community-owned resorts. The Ponderosa Ranch closed in 2004, its land sold quietly into private hands, but its old access road became something better: in June 2019 the Tahoe East Shore Trail opened along the shoreline to Sand Harbor, instantly one of the most beloved walks at the lake. In 2022, Sierra Nevada College became the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Today about 9,000 people live at 6,300 feet among the pines, in a town that has never incorporated, it's still governed as part of Washoe County, with IVGID running the parks, beaches, and mountain. The name puzzles first-time visitors, the beaches puzzle them more, and the sunsets from Burnt Cedar explain everything.