TAHOE MONSTER
by Skylaire AlfvegrenContinued...
Andrew Navarro spied the beast in 1991. “The first thing I saw was water shooting out of the lake, like when a whale blows water out of its blow hole. Then I saw the surface of the water being disturbed by something underneath,” he told John Kirk of the BC Scientific Zoology Club. “This was followed by a hump of a brown creature which came out of the water It moved around in a circle…up and down, not side to side like a snake. My first thought was it was a whale, since the creature had to be huge from the size of its hump, but I know that there are no whales in Lake Tahoe.”
Although McCormick no longer operates the Tahoe Tessie Museum at King’s Beach, Tessie continues to popping up. Lake-goers continue to report giant “black shadows” beneath their boats and torpedo-like waves. Fishermen have hooked something, which after a tremendous struggle, bends the tines of their lines and leaves dime-sized scales on their hooks. Trout reeled in are found mauled, or covered with teeth marks an inch apart, the holes big enough to “put a pencil into,” indicating something with very large jaws had tried to turn them into lunch.
Mike Conway saw “a brown humped beast” during a commercial shoot at Zephr Cove a few years ago. “I believe I yelled ‘cut’ and told them to swing the camera around,” he says. Did they film it? “I heard they destroyed the footage.” They? “You know,” he says. “Them.” Some Tahoe insiders whisper that the lake’s marketing council has bought up film footage of the creature because they don’t want their lucrative tourist destination strangled by something scary, scaly and potentially dangerous.
Skeptics claim that the most likely candidate for the beast in Tahoe is a huge sturgeon. Sturgeon can live to be 100 and have no natural predators. One sturgeon found in the Sacremento River was measured at over 22 feet long, and weighed in at over a ton. A seven-foot sturgeon was caught in Pyramid Lake in 1888, which is connected to Lake Tahoe by the Truckee River.
There are tales of underground rivers connecting Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. Although Tahoe has 63 tributaries, The Truckee River is its only outlet, flowing strangely north-east into Pyramid Lake. (Perhaps Tahoe Tessie and the Pyramid Lake monster are one in the same. Perhaps they trade lakes from time to time, utilizing an underground river system to facilitate their aquatic time-share agreement.)
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