The Ponderosa Ranch was a theme park based on the 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 1968 until 2004. Portions of the last five seasons of the TV series and three television films were also filmed at that location. Origins TV origins of the fictional Ponderosa Ranch The Ponderosa was the fictional setting for Bonanza. According to the 9th episode ("Mr. Henry Comstock") in the first season, it was a thousand-square mile (640,000 acre or 2,600 km2) 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 ("Bonanza, The Philip Diedesheimer Story", Oct. 31, 1959, NBC-TV; Bonanza: The Return, April 1993, NBC-TV). The fictional ranch was roughly a two-hour horse ride from Virginia City, Nevada. (Note: There are slight variations as to the origin of the Ponderosa Ranch, from the original Bonanza series, Lorne Greene's 1964 song "Saga of the Ponderosa", the 1988–95 TV movies, and the 2001 PAX prequel series Ponderosa). 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 (root of the English word ponderous). 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. The first Virginia City set used on the show from 1959–1970 was located on a back lot at Paramount. It was also used in episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel, Mannix and The Brady Bunch. In the 1970 Bonanza episode "The Night Virginia City Died", Deputy Clem Foster's pyromaniac fiancée leveled the town in a series of fires. This allowed for a switch to the