Bucketing load after load of river rock up scaffolding to help build the beautiful, three-story stone chimneys of Lake Tahoe's Chambers Landing lakefront development in the early 1980s, I wasn't thinking about the Great Walls of China and Peru, the castles of Europe, or even the stone walls of my New England upbringing.

Typically, I was concentrating on not dropping a rock on my toe, in between of course keeping the mud and stone coming for my boss, Joe Angel. The eye-catching stone work at Chamber's Landing, not just the chimneys, hearths, and fireplaces, but surrounding stone walls that reside quietly within the view of passerby's driving on highway 89, remain a tribute to a talented stone mason and his crew's creativity and hard work.

It was Joe, for many years one of Lake Tahoe?s most sought after masons, who taught me that there is no such thing as a half-built stone wall. It's either a wall or a stone pile. And to get from one to the other takes a lot of lifting. A cubic foot of rock weighs the better part of a hundred pounds.

If that's the case, then a little decorative wall only three feet high, two feet wide, and twenty feet long weighs some five tons or more. It comprises a thousand or so average-sized stones. If the stonemason (or his apprentice more than likely) has to fetch stones from some hidden stash or a quarry, there is a bunch of loading and unloading to go along with the actual installation. That little twenty-foot wall can have a person lifting well over twenty tons of dead weight before the project is finished.

That's just one reason I enjoy studying the efforts made by stone masons at Lake Tahoe--whether it's at the River Ranch looking at the late Stan Tomlinson's ledge system behind the bar; reading the newspaper in front of Jack Emerson's cage-style fireplace in the Tahoe City Library; shopping at Sports Tahoe while admiring Greg Beck's stacked joint work, or just sitting atop Alex English's chamfered stone wall in front of the Alpine Meadows ticket windows.

It's easy to add up why there's so much stonework to be viewed around the lake. The mile-thick, ancient ice sheet that once scoured, gouged, and plowed away Tahoe's earth mantle left in its retreating wake drumlins of stone perfect for building purposes.

Between 1890 and 1930, hundreds of elaborate homes sprang up at Lake Tahoe. These elegant places such as the Harvey and Snyder Houses at Zephyr Cove, the Pope, Baldwin, and Valhalla estates at South Lake, the Ehrman Mansion at Sugar Pine Point, and North Shore's old Tahoe lakefront estates such as the Beck's, Parson's and Thomas's homes, each contain intoxicating rockwork, and lots of it.

Yet, the Thunderbird Lodge's stonework, at least to a former professional rock lifter, remains unequaled.

Situated just south of Sand Harbor on Lake Tahoe's East Shore, the landmark stone edifice was completed in 1938 by George Whittell, a scion of a pioneer San Francisco family. He'd inherited a fortune amassed by his father from banking, railroading, and real estate.

The F.J. DeLongchamps designed 16,500 square-foot main house, as well as the garage, club house, boat house, and caretaker's house, were all constructed primarily of stone, and they were built by Native American stone-masons from Carson City's Stewart Indian School.

The Native American stonemasons were the high priests of rock in their day. As youths, Stewart provided them with a masonry school taught by the legendary u-ber rock-meisters, the Christopher brothers of Reno. The Thunderbird Lodge remains a legacy to their skill.

For three years, 1936-38, the Washoe craftsmen, building with only hammers and chisels, camped with their families amidst the hundreds of tons of stone they'd stack in constructing one of Tahoe's true temples--Thunderbird.

"The Washoe stone masons were distinctive with their skills and stone patterns," says Phil Caterino, the former Executive Director of the Thunderbird Lodge. "They quarried a softer grade of salmon colored granite from Carson City for the walls of the main house. A more native gray was used for the walkways and bridges, pilfered most likely from the all the excavation done on the grounds."

The vernacular quoin, keystones, and rabbets reflect the hand of the Washoe: slightly tooled joint work; free-ended standing stone used on some fireplace stacks, the treatment of exteriors, especially the Dragon Bridge with stones set in a free form, jagged, tooth-like projection under the casements.

"The stonework surrounding the grounds is remarkable in its blend of natural thinking--how pathways go around, not through objects, lending a sense of harmony to the land. The fountains have the look of being built by nature's hand," explains Caterino. "The Thunderbird Lodge is an amazing synthesis of masonry design."