Tahoe City, Tahoe City, CA

Tahoe City is the north and west shore's downtown, and it has been a resort town longer than almost anywhere on the lake. Platted in 1863, it came into its own around 1900 when Comstock timber baron Duane Bliss ran a steamer and a narrow-gauge railroad up from Truckee and opened the grand Tahoe Tavern. The lake's only outlet is here, controlled by the 1913 dam beside Fanny Bridge, named for the row of tourist backsides bent over the rail watching the trout. The appeal is that you can actually live a walkable life: Commons Beach and its summer concerts, the Gatekeeper's Museum, restaurants and shops at the Y where Highways 89 and 28 meet, and the Truckee River rafting put-in. Housing runs from old lakefront estates to mid-century cabins to the Tahoe Tavern condos built where the hotel once stood. The catch is that same Y. It is the region's chokepoint, and summer and holiday traffic backs up where the two highways funnel together past the bridge, with a long-planned realignment adding its own disruption. Older cabin stock and the usual wildfire exposure round it out. For services and walkability on this shore, nothing else is close.