Lake Tahoe’s Bear Boom

Lake Tahoe, “the jewel of the Sierra Nevada,” is an unusually clear, deep alpine lake that is twelve miles wide and twenty-two miles long. It straddles two states: California on the west shore, which is damper and greener, and Nevada on the east, which gives way, almost immediately, to high desert. “A kind of heaven,” John Muir called Tahoe, in 1878, after raving about the diameter of its snowflakes and “lusty exercise on snow-shoes.” Tahoe is about a third of the size of Yosemite National Park, yet attracts three times the number of annual visitors. During the pandemic, several thousand people, including a lot of Bay Area tech types, fully relocated to the lake, joining seventy thousand or so locals. Tahoe couldn’t handle it. The traffic, the noise, the illegal parking—the trash. Last year’s Fourth of July crowds left an unprecedented four tons of garbage on the beaches alone. Fodor’s named Lake Tahoe one of the world’s “natural attractions that could use a break in order to heal and rejuvenate,” and suggested that outsiders avoid visiting for a while. The other day in Tahoe, I learned a new word: “touron,” a combination of “tourist” and “moron.”