River Ranch Lodge retains appeal 30 years later

It was the fall of 1978, and I was wheezing up Interstate 80 from Berkeley in a borrowed VW Beetle with nothing but multicolored flip-flops for footwear, headed for the River Ranch Lodge.

When a freak storm hit Lake Tahoe, blanketing the parking lot and the Beetle, my girlfriend and I were snowed in for three days. I was pleased to learn that I could get from the room to the bar to the restaurant and back without ever having to go out in the snow in those plastic thongs.

That's all you need when you are a college couple on the lam from midterms. But you wonder if it will be quite as romantic when you are in your 50s and whirring up 80 in an owned VW Passat, wanting to share the romance with a different person in the passenger seat and not knowing if the old roadhouse will be how you remembered it and whether that will turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing.

But I was encouraged enough to risk it based upon a phone call. You ask for reservations and she handles that. You ask for dining room reservations and she handles that, too. The desk clerk handles everything, and I could picture her in that cramped little office just inside the front door and under the stairs.

I jogged my memory, which was boozed up back then, to recall precisely which room I'd stayed in. The clerk helped because there are only seven rooms upstairs and four on the ground floor, and if you remember hearing the river it is upstairs.

Upon arrival, I went straight past the check-in counter to the photo gallery I had remembered studying to kill time when I was snowbound. There had been a guy I knew from high school on the lodge softball team. And there he was, still in the same frame all these years later.

This was encouraging and so was the bar scene. Two Tahoe-based members of the U.S. Ski Team were there, and they wouldn't be in a tourist joint. The dining room with the big stone fireplace is the same. Our room was snug and cozy. To sleep we needed earplugs and Ambien. Not for the traffic noise on Highway 89 in front of the lodge, but the roar of the Truckee behind it.

I didn't remember the continental breakfast, probably because it closes at 10 a.m. It is served in the auxiliary dining room where all tables overlook the river, and it's free. If you get there on a snow day, it is magical and quiet.

The Truckee River comes out of Lake Tahoe, and sitting here contemplating my coffee it occurred to me that in the 31 years since I'd last been here, the water in the ancient lake itself has changed more than the River Ranch has.

E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page O - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle