Exploring Tahoe with Karen...

What a diverse day of belatedly celebrating not only Karen's birthday but also my return to South Lake Tahoe.

We headed to Taylor Creek with hopes of a bear spotting.

We saw so much evidence of bears crossing our path but no luck in actually seeing one.

Though views were enough to make us both happy!

A prescribed burn made the scenery quite interesting.

A must was a visit to admire Surfaced, a new sculpture constructed of trash pulled from Lake Tahoe during Clean Up the Lake’s 72-mile scuba diving clean-up project. It consists more than 450 pounds of discarded trash.

Using litter found underneath Tahoe’s surface (including lures and bobbers, sunglasses, paddles, traffic cones, chains, anchors, and rubber edging often found on docks and buoys), artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova created an original work of art depicting a bald eagle, a Lahonton cutthroat trout and a Ponderosa pine tree.

Stockdill and Salnikova collected precisely enough white paddles to form the tail feathers of the eagle. They used a mosaic technique to turn brightly colored bits of plastic — from sunglasses, lures and bobbers — into the thousands of tiny, life-size scales on the trout. The fins? Crafted from a traffic cone. And they made the bark of the Ponderosa pine tree stump out of hundreds of feet of chain. The stump, which measures three feet in diameter and is three feet tall, makes up much of the weight of the sculpture.

Surfaced is really something to see and thankfully Bally's allows free parking for a less than one hour visit. The perfect amount of time to be amazed by this unique artwork.