The Best Beaches to Stop at While Paddleboarding Emerald Bay

Emerald Bay was the first major stretch of water on our five-day paddleboard circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe, and it's the section people ask me about most. The granite walls, the color of the water, the small island at its center, all of it looks stunning from the overlooks along Highway 89. From a paddleboard, moving through it slowly with my best friend Michael Whalen, it revealed a different side entirely, including a few beaches worth building your own route around.

The Beach You Won't Find on a Map

Coming north out of the bay on our second day, we found a small crescent of sand tucked against the granite and pine on the north side, completely undeveloped, with water in front of it running an almost tropical blue-green. It's not marked on any list I'm aware of. We stumbled onto it, pulled our boards up, and lay flat on the sand feeling like we'd found something nobody else had, even though people have certainly passed this stretch of shoreline for generations.

If you're planning your own paddle through Emerald Bay, budget extra time to explore the north shore rather than paddling straight through to your next destination. The beaches that don't show up in guidebooks tend to be the ones worth the detour.

The Beach at the Mouth of the Bay

The entrance to Emerald Bay itself is where conditions can get difficult before you ever reach the calmer water inside. We hit a stiff headwind right at the mouth strong enough to stop our progress, and pulling off onto the rocky shoreline there to wait it out gave us a good vantage point to watch how the wind was behaving before committing further into the bay. It's not a beach in the traditional sense, more a rocky pull-off, but it's a useful stopping point if conditions at the entrance are working against you.

Fannette Island's Small Landing Beach

Fannette Island, the only island in Lake Tahoe, sits about a mile and a half into the bay and has a small landing area where paddlers can pull their boards ashore before climbing up to the old stone tea house at the top. We camped here on our first night, and the landing beach itself, while small, offers one of the more dramatic stopping points on the entire route given the history of the structure above it and the views out over the bay in every direction.

What Makes Emerald Bay Different From the Rest of the Lake

Once you're inside the bay, the water calms considerably compared to the open lake, which makes it a good stretch for slower, more exploratory paddling rather than a straight push toward mileage. We treated our time in Emerald Bay as a section to linger in rather than rush through, and that decision shaped some of the best material and the best memories from the entire five days.

Timing Your Stop Around the Wind

Wind at the mouth of the bay tends to build through the day, so paddlers hoping to explore the interior beaches without fighting a headwind on the way in should aim for an early morning entrance when conditions are typically calmer. We got lucky in some respects and unlucky in others with our own timing, and a slightly earlier start would likely have saved us the wait at the entrance.

Why This Stretch Is Worth Building a Whole Day Around

If your own circumnavigation plan allows for it, I'd recommend treating Emerald Bay as its own day rather than a stretch to pass through on the way to somewhere else. Between the hidden beach on the north side, the island landing, and the sheer scale of the granite walls surrounding the water, this section rewards slow movement more than almost anywhere else on the lake.

What We'd Skip Next Time and What We'd Add

Looking back, we spent less time than we should have on the beaches lining the western edge of the bay closer to the entrance, mostly because the headwind delay had us focused on getting deeper into the bay once conditions eased. If you have a full day to dedicate to Emerald Bay specifically, work the western edge into your route before pushing toward the island, rather than treating it as a pass-through on the way to somewhere else.

We also didn't fully explore the southern edge of the bay near the dam, an area with its own beaches and rock formations that we saw only briefly from a distance while paddling past. That's the one addition I'd make to our own route if I paddled this stretch again, building in enough time to actually stop there instead of noting it as something to come back to later.

Why Photographing This Stretch Is Different From the Overlooks

As someone who has spent a decade photographing landscapes across every continent, Emerald Bay from a paddleboard offered a completely different set of compositions than the famous roadside viewpoints most photographers rely on. Low angle, water-level perspective, with the granite walls rising directly out of the frame rather than viewed from above, produces images that most visitors to this stretch of Lake Tahoe never see or capture. If you're bringing a camera on your own paddle through the bay, prioritize getting low and close to the water rather than trying to replicate the wide, elevated shots everyone has already seen. That water-level perspective is available to anyone with a paddleboard and a bit of patience, and it's a genuinely different visual record of a place most people only ever see from a car window or a tour boat deck.

What Time of Day Changes About the Light Here

Morning light in Emerald Bay hits the water at an angle that makes the color shift dramatically compared to midday, when the sun sits directly overhead and flattens some of the contrast between the granite and the water. If photography is part of your reason for paddling this stretch, an early start does double duty, giving you calmer wind and better light in the same window of time, which is exactly the kind of overlap worth planning your whole morning around.

Before You Close This Tab

Would you rather rush through a scenic stretch like Emerald Bay to hit your mileage target, or slow down and risk falling behind schedule?

What time of day would you plan your own entrance into the bay to avoid the headwind we hit?

Have you built in enough flexibility in your route to explore an unmarked beach if you find one?

What's the one stretch of shoreline on your own planned route that you'd want a full day to explore properly?

Dalton Johnson is a photographer, filmmaker, and brand storyteller based in South Lake Tahoe, California. Over the past decade he has worked with brands including Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, and Ford Bronco across all seven continents. He is the creator of the Follow The Journey distribution framework, which has produced over one million organic views per 30-day cycle without paid media. His work includes two published books, an award-winning documentary that aired on PBS, and more than fifty commercial spots directed. He runs Stories by Dalton on Substack, read by more than 34,000 subscribers.