, ever the man of vision, saw that Lake Tahoe would transition into a playground for San Francisco, Reno and Carson City’s wealthy.
Thus, he built hotels and sought to dominate the transportation infrastructure of the remote mountain getaway.
D.L. Bliss commissioned San Francisco’s Union Iron Works to construct the SS Tahoe in 1894. The parts were forged and shipped piecemeal via train to Carson City, where a horse-drawn wagon drug them up for assembly on Glenbrook’s shore.
The steamship launched in June 1896. It disembarked from Tahoe City, carrying up to 200 passengers, cargo and the daily mail while rotating in a counterclockwise direction to deliver its freight.
The pier at Tahoe City had railroad tracks so passengers could disembark
and immediately board the S.S. Tahoe to continue their journey to points
around The Lake. Photo courtesy The Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection
Two wood-burning boilers turning a 2,400-horsepower turbine that drove two enormous three-bladed props powered the ship. Bedecked with brass and marble fixtures, electricity, steam heat, hot showers and an ample dining room, the vessel was the picture of luxury and style and a symbol of D.L. Bliss’ material success.
However, the advent of new technologies, including the automobile, soon rendered the ship’s reign as queen of Tahoe’s waters obsolete. In 1930, after nearly three decades of supremacy, the SS Tahoe received the greatest blow to its relevancy as the highway around Lake Tahoe was completed, meaning cargo, people and mail could be transported more efficiently.
The SS Tahoe lost the U.S. Mail contract in 1934, and William Bliss, struggling to prolong his father’s business glory, sold the ship, which sat defunct just off Tahoe City’s shores.
Vandals defaced and even used the once-proud boat occasionally as a rough commode.
Embarrassed by the degradation of his family heirloom, William Bliss bought back the boat for a song and began his most ill-fated project.
He decided he would scuttle the grand ship in 100 feet of water, just off Glenbrook, where the boat was born, and glass-bottom boats would be able to observe the grandeur of yesteryear.
The SS Tahoe would serve as a sort of underwater museum, the thought went.
On August 29, 1940, William Bliss stood with a throng of bystanders gathered to watch the family’s beloved vessel sink to The Lake’s floor.
The only problem—a major one—was the engineers in charge of the project, including William Bliss, miscalculated the slope of The Lake floor off Glenbrook’s shore, and the boat sunk and then slid out of sight, taking with it any plans for an underwater museum.
So concludes the first part of the drama. As much as the first installment is about the decline of a family’s fortunes and the vanishing of a gilded age at Lake Tahoe, the second installment is about dreaming wildly, about tempting the impossible, about feats of human engineering as opposed to debacles and, in the end, about peerless accomplishment.
Finding SS Tahoe
Martin McClellan grew up in nearby Reno, but didn’t become fascinated with Tahoe’s depths until later in life.
McClellan admits he knew nothing of the SS Tahoe or three other boats scuttled or purposefully sunk in the early twentieth century. Instead, he discovered the mystery of the SS Tahoe and its maritime graveyard by way of a devotion to SCUBA diving’s technical aspects.
In 1998, McClellan was studying decompression theory, mixed gasses and technical equipment in relation to deep diving.
“I took a technical course and the instructor mentioned his interest in someday visiting the steamer Tahoe in Glenbrook,” McClellan says. “I was shocked. I had no idea there was a shipwreck in Lake Tahoe.”
While he stored that realization away, he and colleague Brian Morris began developing advanced computer software simulating the decompression theory that allows SCUBA divers to delve deeper underwater and stay there longer than ever before.
They soon realized that going deeper for its own sake wasn’t as attractive as going deep for the sake of discovery, of seeing something neve