Lake Tahoe’s pristine beauty was ringed by distant logging sounds

Evidence

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one’s life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American beautysnow-splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest color; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700 feet deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer’s axe. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 58

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The lumberer’s axe in an otherwise silent paradise speaks directly to the trees-as-infrastructure piece; echoes the tamarisk/bark-cloth themes as human extraction of landscape.
• XREF: The ‘strictly North American beauty’ and crystalline atmosphere parallel Deep Listening’s treatment of pristine soundscapes.