Month: September 2021

It’s not the Ritz-Carlton. The remote cabin my family has rented in South Lake Tahoe for the past 10 years is small, buggy, mouse-infested and surrounded by dirt. There’s no turndown service – there’s not even cellphone or internet service. Amenities include a river, beavers that emerge at sundown and an overwhelming sense of peace.

Now our little piece of paradise is threatened by the massive Caldor fire as the entire Tahoe region becomes the latest flashpoint in the global climate crisis. Years of drought and rising temperatures have created California’s worst fire season on record. The images are horrific: giant walls of flames descending mountain sides. Orange skies. Homes scorched to ash. The entire town of South Lake Tahoe, which includes 22,000 year-round residents and many more summer visitors, has been evacuated.

Lake Tahoe – a 22-mile (35km), sapphire-blue lake nested in an emerald-green forest and ringed by soaring granite mountains – has been a favorite vacation spot for generations of American families, among them my own.

Our daughters were just three and five when we first brought them to Tahoe. They are city girls, and I wanted them to experience nature first-hand as I had during my Indiana childhood. Our house was perched on the edge of a woods, and my brother and I would disappear into this interstitial space of freedom to look for box turtles or build forts. I’ve returned to the solace of nature throughout my adulthood, and I wanted to introduce my children to this wellspring as well.

The former fishing cabin, built in the 1920s along the Upper Truckee River, fit the bill. It was the perfect inexpensive vacation spot for our family – which is important when you’re a teacher and a writer living in the Bay Area. When we started renting it, it cost $80 a night.

The house is a place out of time, still furnished with the original Wedgewood stove and cooking utensils. Without the constant blare of the internet and social media, the days move slowly. Entertainment includes playing in the river, reading in a hammock, identifying flora using a field guide. We alternate between lazy beach days at Lake Tahoe and hiking days, following trails up mountains to snowpacks, flowering meadows or alpine lakes. Along the way, conversations happen. Connections happen.

It was on a beach day last year that we witnessed the arrival of what was – until then – California’s worst fire season on record. As we sat in an isolated cove at the south end of Lake Tahoe – our girls floating on their inflatable rafts in the famously clear water, my husband and I paging through magazines – I noticed what looked like a fog bank forming at the north end of the lake. Over the next hour it rolled toward us, growing taller and darker and obscuring the casinos in Stateline, Nevada, on the lake’s eastern side and billowing over the 9,000ft peaks on the western side. Then we caught a whiff of smoke. By the time we packed up our car, the world was sepia-toned.

The smoke was from the Loyalton fire, sparked by lightning in the Sierra backcountry – one of nearly 10,000 wildfires reported in California in 2020 which burned an unprecedented 4.2m acres. We cut our vacation short and drove home through a fire-ravaged landscape, at one point passing vegetation still burning in the highway’s median strip. Our relief at coming home to clean air was short-lived, however; a few weeks later we woke to an eerie, blood-orange sky and ash falling on the trampoline as the smoke from multiple conflagrations raging across the state converged over the Bay Area. Crickets chirped in the noon darkness; it felt like the end of the world.

This year, I didn’t hesitate to book the cabin again. I assumed 2020’s wildfires were an exception. I was wrong. On 4 July, lightning sparked a fire just 24 miles away from South Lake Tahoe and as nearby towns evacuated, I reluctantly cancelled our reservation and planned a last-minute road trip to southern California instead.

That fire, the Tamarack fire, is still burning today, two months later. But now there’s an even worse peril: the Caldor fire, which, for the first time in reported history, jumped over the high granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada and entered the Tahoe Basin.

Back home, smoke has once again reached the Bay Area, elevating pollution levels. I’ve retrieved our air purifiers from the garage. I’ve obsessively tracked the fire’s voracious progress online, anxiety burning my stomach as I find photos of familiar mountainsides and cabins devoured in orange flames. This year’s conflagrations have already burned more acreage than last year’s fires. On Wednesday, for the first time in history, the US Forest Service closed all national forests in the state to try to thwart more infernos.

As I scroll through the hundreds of photos we’ve taken in Tahoe over the past 10 years, my throat wells with sorrow. My phone’s screensaver is a clip of my daughters chatting as they hike down our favorite trail on a blue-sky day. I worry that those blue-sky days are numbered.

The thing I love most about the buggy little cabin – its off-the-grid, deep-forest isolation – is now a dangerous liability. Without cellphone service or internet, how will we know if a fire is racing in our direction? After an emotional discussion, my husband and I decided it’s just too risky to spend more summers there. I feel the loss viscerally, like Eve being cast out of Eden. Although it’s just a rental, the cabin is an integral part of our family history.

I’ve made one last reservation, for a weekend in mid-October, to say goodbye. At that time of year, the quaking aspens alongside the river normally turn a buttery yellow and I like to sit under them with my morning coffee, mesmerized by their cheery shimmer.

“Normal” is now a relative term, of course. I don’t know whether the 100-year-old cabin will still be standing next month, or if it, too, will be reduced to ash – a grim warning of an apocalyptic future.

• Julia Scheeres is a writer and the COO of Sustainabar, which makes zero-waste beauty and cleaning products
• This article was amended on 4 September 2021 to clarify that the writer rents the cabin and does not own it

Things looked grim for South Lake Tahoe as the Caldor fire barreled toward the treasured resort community this week.

The fire spotted over a granite ridge that officials had hoped would keep flames from spreading into the Tahoe Basin. Forecasters warned of gusty winds and bone-dry conditions that could push it further toward populated areas, raising fears of an urban conflagration. Tens of thousands of residents and visitors fled, gridlocking traffic along Highway 50.

But the danger appeared to have largely abated Saturday, as authorities said the fight against the 214,112-acre blaze seemed to have turned a corner. The fire is now 43% contained.

Crews made a stand in Christmas Valley and held the fire south of Meyers in the northern Sierra Nevada. No structures burned in South Lake Tahoe, and crews were also able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers.

Firefighters had carved containment lines around more than a third of the blaze. They credited a combination of aggressive firefighting tactics, improved weather conditions and past efforts to prepare the landscape for wildfire.

“If we would have had the same weather and fire behavior continue for two more days, we would have had a real problem,” said Dominic Polito, a public information officer on the fire. “So there was a little bit of divine mercy.”

“It’s no longer burning miles upon miles in a single 12-hour period, and that just had to do with the change in weather,” he said.

Although it was too soon to say South Lake Tahoe was completely out of the woods, authorities were cautiously optimistic, said Capt. Parker Wilbourn, another public information officer on the fire.

There were still some areas of concern where crews were working to ensure flames would not slop over containment lines, including the Christmas Valley and Kirkwood areas, as well as portions of the Heavenly area, he said.

He ticked off the factors that played into the improved prognosis. Some of it was terrain: a portion of the fire’s northern flank reached granite around Pyramid Peak in the Desolation Wilderness, depriving it of fuel to burn, he said. Some of it was luck, as it always is.

Some of it, he said, was the weather: the winds were not quite as fierce as initially forecast and subsided further midweek.

“A decrease in wind, decrease in temperatures and increase in humidity have all played to our advantage over the past two to three days,” Wilbourn said. “We’ve used that time to bolster our containment lines and start putting crews directly on the front lines for a firefight.”

Officials also noted the return of an inversion layer that helps to keep the sun from heating vegetation and the fire from sending up a plume of heat and smoke, effectively putting a lid on its activity: “Because if the smoke can’t leave, it means the fire can’t breathe,” Polito said.

But ultimately, Wilbourn credited three key factors with helping to save South Lake Tahoe: extensive firefighting operations, residents maintaining defensible space around their homes and past forest management projects.

“They’ve had a forest clearing initiative for the last nine to 10 years that really cleared out that fuel load,” he said, crediting the U.S. Forest Service with completing both prescribed burns and vegetation thinning operations.

The Forest Service partnered with the Sierra Nevada Conservancy on a project that called for 8,800 acres to be burned in the Caples Creek drainage over 10 to 15 years starting in 2017. The project included the 3,435-acre Caples prescribed burn in 2019, which was declared a wildfire after winds picked up and it burned at a higher intensity than intended, requiring suppression resources to be called in.

Like many Western U.S. forests, the watershed once benefited from frequent, low-intensity fires caused by lightning and Indigenous burning practices, experts say. But after colonization and aggressive fire suppression tactics upended that cycle, with the imbalance compounded by drought and climate change, the forest there was infilled with smaller trees and understory vegetation that increased drought stress on larger trees, according to the Forest Service. These so-called ladder fuels can also carry fire up into the canopy, helping it burn hotter and spread more quickly.

By thinning tree density and reducing the amount of smaller trees and vegetation, authorities had hoped to lessen the intensity of future wildfires that moved through the area.

The Caldor fire served as the project’s first real test, and experts have been closely monitoring the outcome.

Wilbourn said it appears to have played a role in significantly slowing the fire’s spread in some areas, helping crews to catch it. He pointed on the perimeter map to a pocket of green in the southern finger of the fire that overlapped with part of that prescribed burn, as well as other treatments he said had been performed in the Kirkwood area.

“The reason it’s kind of fingering out is you’ll see where some of that forest mitigation has happened,” he said.

Susie Kocher, forestry and natural resources advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, agreed.

“If you look at any of the fire maps, there’s a big gap between Kirkwood and Tahoe,” said Kocher, who was forced to evacuate her Meyers, Calif., home Monday. “That’s Caples.”

She said that due in part to its allure, the Tahoe area has been more successful than many parts of the Sierra in attracting resources for such projects.

The Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, a multiagency coalition formed after the damaging Angora fire in 2007, said it has performed 65,000 acres of fuel reduction work in the Tahoe Basin over the past 13 years. The group also helps neighborhoods prepare for fire.

In a recent community briefing, Rocky Oplinger, an incident commander, described how such work can assist firefighters. When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes, he said.

“It takes both fuels reduction and active suppression in an environment like this to help the community and the forest survive,” Kocher said.

There’s not yet word on the cause of the Caldor fire, which started Aug. 14 about four miles south of Grizzly Flats and eventually decimated the town. About 55,000 people had been forced from their homes as of Friday, but that number had dropped by Saturday as some were able to return, authorities said. The fire had destroyed 687 homes and 18 commercial properties, with damage assessments 75% complete, Wilbourn said.

Firefighters were able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers using a combination of tactics Polito described as fairly typical. First, authorities estimated where the fire was likely to travel based on the weather and topography. Then, crews went out to those areas and prepared structures by removing log piles, lawn furniture and brush to give embers fewer opportunities to take hold.

Once the fire arrived, they did what’s called a “fire front following,” Polito said.

“It’s impossible to stop a big fire from coming through, but what we can do is position ourselves on the roads in vehicles and in what we call safety zones,” he said. “Then as the fire comes through and starts to ignite all the fuels, we will follow it from behind and put out the different fuels that are near the structures.”

They also lit backburns to eliminate fuel between the communities and the fire, he said.

Firefighters were further helped by the fact that residents evacuated quickly, allowing crews to focus on saving homes rather than people, Polito said.

“Because that fire came so fast, if people would have been dragging their feet and blocking the roads, we couldn’t have saved all those homes,” he said.