FAIREST TAHOE

I’d seen Lake Tahoe only in winter, its shores under deep snow. So, on Day 1 of my first warm-weather trip around the lake last month, I couldn’t stop prowling the water’s edge, scanning for new hues of blue. On Day 2, I rock-hopped and rented a bike. On Day 3, I hiked above Emerald Bay into the mist of Eagle Falls. ? So how, on Day 4, did I wind up in man-made subterranean blackness, stranded in a narrow stone tunnel somewhere between a dead playboy’s boathouse and his opium den? ? Blame the rich. Or thank them. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when New York’s hotshots were putting up their lakeside summer retreats in the Adirondacks, some of the West’s wealthiest families were putting the first necklace of summer mansions around Lake Tahoe, which lies partly in California, partly in Nevada. ? Some of these homes were stuffy and traditional, but others were the sort of extravagances -- secret passages, Viking design, you name it -- that no sensible family could sustain for more than a generation or two. ? In the last 60 years, half a dozen of these properties have landed in the hands of public agencies or nonprofits. And in summer, they open for tours. ? Between outdoor adventures, I hit all six of those old mansions. And if the governor and Legislature don’t close down Lake Tahoe’s state parks before Labor Day (see accompanying article, “If you go”), you can too.

Commons Beach, Coppola’s movie

The lake, which marks the northern end of the Sierra Nevadas, sits in a basin 6,229 feet above sea level, fed by runoff from surrounding mountains that stand as tallas 10,000 feet.

It’s a lot of runoff. The lake measures 22 miles long, 10 miles wide and up to 1,685 feet deep. Tourists have been coming since the 1860s, when a young writer named Mark Twain wrote a few admiring words (“the fairest picture the whole Earth affords,” now etched in a boulder at North Tahoe Beach) and accidentally set a big chunk of the north shore on fire. At least, that’s what he confesses to in “Roughing It.”

In light traffic, you can drive around the lake in about three hours. Afoot on the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail, the circuit might take you 15 days. I started on the northern shore, 40 miles southwest of Reno, and didn’t linger in the gambling houses of Crystal Bay on the Nevada side, so you’ll get no scholarship here on Frank Sinatra, JFK or Marilyn Monroe, who are all said to have spent time at the Cal Neva Resort.

Instead, heading south and west, I hit Commons Beach, just steps from the shops and restaurants of Tahoe City’s main drag.

If you can find a parking spot nearby, you can explore the pebble beach that is neighbored by a big playground and lawn, and it’s only a block or two from the little dam and bridge where the lake burbles into the Truckee River. Biking and running paths follow the lake shore here, and one trail follows the river for about five miles to Squaw Valley USA, the all-seasons resort that hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics.

Now, keep your eyes open as you pass through the Homewood area and you’ll notice the walled premises of Fleur du Lac. This estate, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, is where Francis Ford Coppola shot much of “The Godfather: Part II” in the early 1970s. It’s been converted to condos, so there’s no chance to sneak inside for your own Michael Corleone moment.

But it’s only about 10 more southbound miles from Homewood to Ed Z’berg-Sugar Pine Point State Park, which includes hiking trails, a nature center, a creek with seasonal fishing, a settler’s cabin that dates to 1872 and a mansion that you can get into.

Bankers, Vikings

and evergreens

The Hellman-Ehrman Mansion, a.k.a. Pine Lodge, was built as a getaway for banker Isaias W. Hellman of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The house, which went up in 1903, is a California Craftsman: three stories, nearly 12,000 square feet, with eight rough cedar columns fronting the porch. At one point, the resident staff totaled 27. The state acquired it in 1965.

“When this house was built, only 10% of homes in this country had indoor plumbing. And we have eight bathrooms here on the second floor,” said State Parks ranger John Harbison, who showed me around.

Next, we come to the corner of the lake that sends photographers’ heartbeats galloping: Emerald Bay, a glittering green pool that was carved by a glacier and is connected to the rest of the lake by a narrow passage. At the center of the bay lies the lake’s only island, Fannette, in exactly the spot an art director would have chosen.

If you were absurdly wealthy in 1928, you’d have demanded a vacation house here. And so it went, more or less, with an heiress-widow-philanthropist named Lora Josephine Knight. Her father and her former husband were captains of industry, controlling such companies as National Biscuit, Continental Can, Diamond Match and Union Pacific.

She wanted a Scandinavian mansion because the bay made her think of fiords, and by the time the stock market crashed in late 1929, the work was done on Vikingsholm. Swedish architect Lennart Palme and his team chiseled boulders, carved timbers, elaborately painted walls and ceilings, planted sod roofs, devised spiked eaves to repel evil spirits, put up six fireplaces and bought European fixtures and furniture dating back centuries.

On Fannette Island, Knight had workers put up a stone teahouse so she could take visitors out there by boat a few times a year.

This good life lasted 15 Tahoe summers. Eight years after Knight’s death at age 82 in 1945, the state acquired the property and made it part of Emerald Bay State Park.

It’s a little jarring, the trip from Old Scandinavia to the roadside kitsch of South Lake Tahoe. I dulled the blow with a night at Camp Richardson, which has offered cabins and rooms since the 1920s.

These days, the Forest Service owns the land, and concessionaires run the lodgings, campground, RV village, stables, bike and watersports rentals, the ice cream parlor and Beacon restaurant, where a raccoon approached me on the deck to demand lunch.

Camp Rich, as the locals call it, is not fancy. But my room was fine, and the cabin I checked out was spotless and reasonably priced. With the camp’s water frontage and spacious grounds, it’s one of the few places where a family can park the car and forget about it for days.

On a windless morning, walking onto the pier was like stepping into a watercolor: no sound, glassy water, impeccably reflected evergreens.

No wonder mining millionaire E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin (developer of the Santa Anita racetrack) put up one of the lake’s first resorts here in the 1880s and inspired others to raise three vacation houses after the resort was torn down.

Between 1965 and 1971, the U.S. Forest Service picked up all three houses: the Baldwin Estate (1921), the Pope Estate (1894) and the Heller Estate (a.k.a. Valhalla, 1923), now collectively known as Tallac Historic Site. These places do not match the grandeur of Vikingsholm or Pine Lodge, but just to the west, there’s a visitor center at Taylor Creek. And just east, there’s Pope Beach, one of the lake’s best for swimming.

The scion, the lion

and the Thunderbird

On most drives around the lake, the eastern shore goes faster. You might stop briefly at the casinos on the Nevada side or at Zephyr Cove Resort, where I had an unimpressive lunch and observed dozens of pale, tattooed college kids on the beach, buzzing around a keg of energy drink.

But north of Zephyr Cove, most civilization evaporates. From U.S. 50 and Nevada 28, you see few buildings. And you might wonder: How is it that the tree-hugging, whale-saving state of California has so thoroughly developed its side of Lake Tahoe, while growth-loving, casino-friendly Nevada has built so little?

The answer waits beyond George Whittell Jr.’s old front gate.

Whittell, born into a San Francisco society family whose wealth dated to the Gold Rush, was a classic spoiled rich kid, thrice married, twice divorced, inclined to drink hard, consort with chorus girls and collect menacing pets. He named his lion Bill, his elephant Mingo.

In the months before the crash of 1929, Whittell pulled $50 million out of the stock market. When the chance came to buy 40,000 acres of Nevada -- including 27 miles of Tahoe’s eastern shore -- Whittell had the cash.

Between 1936 and 1940, he and architect Frederick DeLongchamps built the rock-walled Tudor-Revival Thunderbird Lodge on the stony northeastern shore of the lake. Craftsmen included an Italian ironworker, Norwegian woodcarvers and a small army of Native American stonemasons who worked on the 600-foot granite tunnel connecting the main house, the card house and the boathouse. Whittell came and went in one of his Duesenbergs or in the Thunderbird, a 55-foot wooden racing yacht that John L. Hacker designed for him in 1939.

And though he did sell some land that was developed, Whittell decided to leave most of his shoreline acreage alone and keep his privacy. Amid rumors of secret liaisons, crazed parties and high-stakes poker games with Ty Cobb and Howard Hughes, Whittell held onto most of the property until his death at age 87 in 1969.

“The drinking didn’t get to him,” said Bill Watson, executive director of the Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society. “The smoking didn’t get to him. The womanizing didn’t get to him. But the nude sunbathing did. He died of melanoma.”

After that, a series of owners undertook a series of purchases, additions, swaps and resales. At one point, mutual-fund mogul Jack Dreyfus built additions that are easy to spot, then sold the estate for about $50 million to development company Del Webb in 1998.

But when the Nevada dust settled several years ago, the Forest Service owned most of Whittell’s old land, and the house and outbuildings belonged to the nonprofit Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society. In about 2002, the society started offering summertime tours.

This is not a side trip for everybody. The tab for the 75-minute Thunderbird tour is a hefty $39. But the estate is a singular place -- the way the house and its little lighthouse are wedged remotely among the boulders and trees, the mansion’s own little lagoon, the hedonist history and, of course, the dark tunnel.

Because I was visiting before the beginning of the summer tour schedule, Watson gave me a brief introduction, took me down to the tunnel, then let me prowl on my own.

I checked out the boathouse, then re-entered the 600-foot tunnel, let the door close behind me, rounded a bend, and everything went black. Somebody at the other end had turned out the lights.

I stood there blinking, heard my own breathing, tried to see my hand in front of my face.

Then I remembered my camera. Clicking every few seconds to throw a little focus-finding red light onto the walls, I inched my way to the card house, then stepped from darkness out into the sun-splashed, lakefront world.

The lesson here?

It’s nice to be rich, but it’s better to be above ground. And it’s better still to be above ground, under a blue sky, at the edge of this lake.

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chris.reynolds@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

If you go

THE BEST WAY TO TAHOE:

From Los Angeles, it’s a 444-mile drive to South Lake Tahoe by U.S. 395. The lake’s north shore is 42 miles southwest of the Reno/Tahoe International Airport.

THE STATE BUDGET MESS

In a bid to ease California’s budget crisis, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed closing 220 of the state’s 279 parks. A list of threatened parks includes D.L. Bliss, Ed Z’berg-Sugar Pine Point and Emerald Bay at Lake Tahoe -- home to severalof the sites described here.

But state parks information officer Sheryl Watson said that even if the Legislature agrees to the cuts, state officials plan to keep the parks open through Labor Day, drawing on existing funds to keep parks in operation and honor summer reservations.

If parks were to close, Watson added, the state would refund money to campers whose reservations are canceled.

WHERE TO STAY

Camp Richardson, 1900 Jameson Beach Road, South Lake Tahoe; (800) 544-1801, www.camp richardson.com. Year-round resort. About 40 cabins (summer rates $791 to $2,485 per week); seven motel rooms ($135 to $200 nightly in summer), marina-adjacent duplex ($2,485 per week per unit in summer); 26 hotel rooms ($95 to $180 in summer), one seven-bedroom house ($5,950 per week in summer), 200 campsites, 100 RV spots. No TVs or phones in hotel rooms. Wi-Fi $10 per night.

The Cottage Inn, 1690 W. Lake Blvd., 2 miles south of Tahoe City; (800) 581-4073 or (530) 581-4073, www.thecottageinn.com. Two-night minimum on weekends. Rates $158 to $340.

Rustic Cottage Resorts, 7449 N. Lake Blvd., Tahoe Vista; (888) 778-7842, www.rusticcottages.com. West of Kings Beach, near Tahoe Vista on the north shore. Across the street from the public Moon Dunes beach. Rates $74 to $229 for most cottages. Two three-bedroom houses go for $335 to $399 a night.

Sunnyside Steakhouse and Lodge 1850 W. Lake Blvd., Tahoe City; (800) 822-2754, www.sunnyside resort.com. On the west shore about 5 miles south of Tahoe City. Lodge includes 23 guest rooms and a pleasant upstairs area with free continental breakfast. Rooms $135 to $335, suites $210 to $380 per night.

WHERE TO EAT

Freshies, 3330 Lake Tahoe Blvd., No. 3, South Lake Tahoe; (530) 542-3630, no website. Best meal of my visit. Tasty, low-key, grown-up Hawaiian cuisine and setting, with organic emphasis. Open for lunch and dinner. Dinner entrees $12 to $25.

Evergreen, 475 N. Lake Blvd., Tahoe City; (530) 581-1401, www.evergreen tahoe.com. Seasonal American cuisine. Lunch and dinner. Dinner entrees $12.50 to $21.

River Ranch Lodge, Highway 89 at Alpine Meadows Road; (530) 583- 4264, www.riverranchlodge.com. Lunch and dinner daily in summer. Menu is heavy on seafood and steak, dinner entrees typically $18 to $32. Besides the restaurant and patio, it has 19 lodge rooms (summer rates $100 to $185).

THE MANSIONS

Vikingsholm, part of Emerald Bay State Park; (530) 541-6498, www .vikingsholm.org. Open for guided tours from Memorial Day weekend through Sept. 30. Adults $5.

The Hellman-Ehrman Mansion at Sugar Pine Point State Park, (530) 525-7982, open for tours daily from Memorial Day weekend through Sept. 30. Adults $5.

Tallac Historic Site, U.S. Forest Service, on California Highway 89, 2 1/2 miles north of Highway 50; (530) 541-5227; www.fs.fed.us/r5/ ltbmu/recreation/tallac/. Open June 13 to Sept. 12. 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily. Includes Baldwin Estate, Pope Estate and Heller Estate, and the free beach at Kiva Picnic Area. Tours $5 per adult.

Thunderbird Lodge, near Incline Village, (800) 468-2463, www .thunderbirdlodge.org. Tours cost $39 per adult (includes a shuttle bus ride from Incline Village), no children younger than 6 allowed. Or you can visit by wooden boat from the southern shore (lunch included) at $110 per adult.

TO LEARN MORE

Lake Tahoe Visitors Bureaus (south and north), www.visitinglaketahoe.com; www.tahoesbest.com; www.aboutlaketahoe.com.