Ponderosa Ranch

The Ponderosa Ranch was a theme park based on the popular 1960s television western Bonanza, which housed the land, timber and livestock-rich Cartwright family. The amusement park operated in Incline Village, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, from 1967 until 2004. Portions of the last five seasons of the TV series and three TV movies were also filmed at that location.

The Ponderosa was the fictional setting for Bonanza. According to the 9th episode in the first season, it was a thousand-square mile ranch on the shores of Lake Tahoe, nestled high in the Sierra Nevada, with a large ranch house in the center of it. Ben Cartwright was said to have built the original, smaller homestead after moving from New Orleans with his pregnant third wife Marie and his two sons, Adam and Hoss. The grown Adam, an architect/engineer, designed the later sprawling ranch house as depicted on TV . The fictional ranch was roughly a two-hour horse ride from Virginia City, Nevada. . The ranch house was a single-level structure that had a facade second storey. Inside, a staircase seemingly led to the second-floor corridor, but it was a dead end. The bedroom scenes were filmed at Burbank Studios. David Dortort, the show's producer, said that the inspiration for the name was the large number of Ponderosa pines, which grow above 5,000 foot altitude, in the fictional ranch's location. A Latin derivation would be large . The exteriors for the television show were occasionally shot in Nevada, usually out of sequence. Crews were sometimes able to complete an entire season's work in just a few days.

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