A year after landing on our annual cautionary tale, trash, traffic, and tourism in Tahoe still seems murky.
In 2023, Fodor’s was very worried about Lake Tahoe’s tourism problems.
During the pandemic, droves of tourists sought outdoor recreation and left behind a trail of trash–all of which threatened the iconic transparent waters that make the area famous. Locals were fed up. Environmentalists were fed up. And even leaders in the area’s tourism industry admitted crowds were too much. So, how is Lake Tahoe doing today after landing on last year’s No List?
The latest news isn’t great.
On July 5, 2023, the region made headlines when the League to Save Lake Tahoe found more than 8,000 pounds of trash during a post-holiday beach cleanup–more than twice as much as in 2022. A week later, the scientific journal Nature published a study that found Lake Tahoe has more microplastics than the infamous Pacific Ocean trash heaps, “which are at present considered some of the greatest plastic-accumulation zones in the world.”
And, no, traffic hasn’t gotten better either. “The traffic situation has not meaningfully improved in the last year,” says South Lake Tahoe City Councilman Scott Robbins. “Collision trend data provided by CalTrans at the recent Highway 50/89 Road Safety Audit (RSA) workshop show a dramatic and sustained increase in dangerous collisions starting right after COVID, with no signs of abating. This tells us that traffic is getting not just worse, but more dangerous.”
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Robbins says that the Tahoe Transportation District, the regional bi-state agency that oversees public transit, has diverted funding away from busses, leading to a reduction in service. “Busses consistently fail to meet their bare-bones schedule, and there are now regular days when all service is simply canceled, and there are no buses whatsoever. Traffic is not simply a matter of community annoyance, it is a major contributor to lake pollution. With local residents and workers wildly outnumbered by tourists, the failure of the regional agencies to get a handle on the car traffic from tourism is one of many examples of regional failures to adequately manage tourism numbers.”
Related: The 2024 Fodor’s No List
The Plan to Fix Tahoe
Despite criticism from Robbins and other locals, many regional agencies say they’re not failing. They’ve put plans in motion. And before Fodor’s No List even came out, the pandemic had lit a fire under 18 regional agencies. Officially introduced in June 2023, the Lake Tahoe Destination Stewardship Plan is a who’s who of environmental shared responsibility. It’s been signed by the California Tahoe Conservancy, Nevada Division of Outdoor Recreation, USDA Forest Service, among others. The plan is dense with 32 actions organized by four strategic pillars: Foster a Tourism Economy That Gives Back, Turn a Shared Vision into a Shared Action, Advance a Culture of Caring for Tahoe, and Improve the Tahoe Experience for All.
“If you had to distill 146 pages down to one sentence, it’s that we need a healthy, thriving tourism-based economy that demonstrably gives back to the community and the environment,” says Amy Berry, CEO of the Tahoe Fund, a major source of private funding for environmental projects around the Lake Tahoe Basin and a signatory of the stewardship plan. “If we can get that kind of circular thing working, then I think everybody will be happy. We will have an economy to support the people who live here and an economy to support environmental restoration. And then we’ll have a community that appreciates living in a tourism destination, and we’ll have an environment that’s well taken care of.”
Perhaps the biggest achievement so far was getting the region’s most influential organizations into the same room. Tahoe is shared by two states, five counties, and more than a dozen cities, as well as a mix of public, private, and federal lands. And the pandemic made those layers of varying jurisdiction even more confusing. Then came the headlines about crowds and the trash. This breaking point resulted in a weekly call with multiple organizations in the region trying to work together to fix it.
“And it was like all of a sudden we had this new group of people working together that were forced together by COVID. But then we realized this is probably the group that should have been together for the last 20, 30, 40 years,” says Berry.
“We rallied around a vision of, ‘Lake Tahoe is a cherished place, and it’s a cherished place for everyone who comes,’” says Carol Chaplin, President and CEO of Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority and another signatory of the plan.
However, for locals like Robbins, it’s not enough. “The widely reported, recently published, and tourism industry-led Lake Tahoe Destination Stewardship Plan, a document co-signed by 18 local agencies, seven of which are tourism businesses or promoters, contains exactly zero binding commitments from any of its signatories,” he says. “It’s a document that directly calls for indefinite increases in tourism numbers, even while it acknowledges that the numbers are what drive pollution. This is greenwashing, and our environment will suffer for it in exchange for the short-term profits of a few.”
Berry contends that while the stewardship plan doesn’t have binding agreements, it has financial agreements. “So we have, I think, over $250,000 committed for the next two years to make sure that this isn’t just a plan. That it’s tangible things where we’re going to see real change–that the community’s going to see, that the visitors are going to see, that the environment’s going to feel.”
Some of the initiatives have already begun: Local businesses are fundraising for the Tahoe Fund, asking shoppers to round-up transactions or donate $1. South Lake Tahoe has added a Lake Link, a new, free microtransit shuttle system modeled after the microtransit in North Lake Tahoe. And next year, the City of South Lake Tahoe will ban single-use plastic water bottles.
“We’ve also increased trash service throughout the region, especially on peak weekends or holidays,” says Berry. “And some places have brought in additional porta-potties to certain areas at certain times of the year.”
Robbins agrees that progress is being made. However, he says, it’s “in slow, incremental fits and starts, toward a re-balancing of locals vs. tourism needs. The city of South Lake Tahoe voted to develop an employee housing bill-of-rights to protect seasonal workers from exploitative housing conditions and will be also considering a minimum wage increase to help low-wage and service workers with the housing affordability crisis, as well as hotel overnight parking fees that will incentive tourist carpooling. The current situation of workforce and environmental exploitation need not be permanent. Local governments have the capability to reverse these trends. The only question is if there’s the will, and the votes, to do so.”
So, Should You Go to Lake Tahoe?
Both Amy Berry of the Tahoe Fund and Carol Chaplin of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority are quick to say that Lake Tahoe should have never been on the No List. “Tourism is not going away,” says Berry. “It supports a $5 billion economy in Tahoe. It just has to be better managed. So rather than be defensive or reactive to tourism, we have to get ahead of it, and ‘we’ being the whole region collectively.”
Trash is priority number one, Chaplin says. “We do think that litter is a problem, and we have to figure that out. Do we need more trash cans? Do we need more people to pick it up? Do we need signs at the trailhead to tell people that you need to pick up your own trash?”
But neither Berry nor Chaplin correlate more people with more trash. They say it’s a cultural misunderstanding of nature and behavior.
“It’s not Disneyland,” says Berry. “There aren’t guys in white suits that come out when the park closes and clean everything. When you wake up the next day, it looks exactly the same. That’s just not the experience you’re going to have here. So be responsible and be respectful, I guess, of coming into a beautiful natural environment. And know you need to take a little bit better care than maybe you do at other places you visit.”
Getting ahead of tourism–and trash–means marketing the message of stewardship to the various visitor segments, including so-called “untethered visitors,” which the stewardship plan defines as “those who are just passing through Tahoe or who recreate briefly but do not stay overnight or purchase a tour or activity, and therefore require new management and communications strategies.”
Berry thinks this type of tourist is the “trickiest part of this whole thing.” She says, “There’s the folks who drive up for the day, and they stop at Costco or Walmart on the way. They completely load up with plastic water bottles, all their food, all their beer. They drive up for the day. They pull up on the side of the road, they hike down to a beach that doesn’t have any entry fee. They recreate, they leave a bunch of garbage behind, they come back up, maybe they have a parking ticket, maybe they don’t, and then they leave, and you multiply that by 5 million visitors a year that fall into [the untethered visitors] category. And I think that’s where we really start to feel a lot of the impact of visitation, and they’re also the hardest people for us to communicate with and to reach with this messaging.”
That’s not to say Tahoe wants to be classist or exclusive. “I think we need lots of different types of tourists,” says Berry. “We don’t want to price everybody out of the Tahoe experience.”
And they’re certainly not looking to cap visitor numbers, like many National Parks, such as Mount Rainier, have done in the last couple of years, or require advance reservations, such as Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
“We don’t want to put gates up and keep people out of Tahoe,” says Berry. “There’s a value to people enjoying something that’s beautiful, but we have to build the infrastructure and the culture so that it’s well taken care of.”
Part of that new culture is hyping the fall shoulder season to hopefully spread out crowds. “Our strategy now is more year-round. We don’t really advertise in July anymore. We’ve got enough going on, and we’re busy enough. But we’d like to tell you about October. The colors are changing. The lake is beautiful. There’s less people. Your restaurant wait is going to be less.”
Another part of the culture shift starts at home, with locals.
“It is critically important to society, to humanity, that people spend time outside in beautiful places,” Berry says. “It just makes you a better person in the world. And so, I think for those of us that have been trained in that, it’s up to us to be welcoming, inviting, and educating at the same time, and help people understand, okay, you’re in a new place for you. It might be different from other places you’ve visited. Let us share with you the cultural norms of being in a place like Lake Tahoe. Don’t bring plastic water bottles. We have the best-tasting tap water in the world.”
For Berry and Chaplin, it’s less about over-tourism and more about fine-tuning a mutualistic relationship between tourists and locals.
“Everybody has a part to play in taking care of a place that’s beautiful,” says Berry. “So if you operate a business where you earn revenue based on people enjoying Tahoe, you have a responsibility to continue to protect the Tahoe environment.”
Still, Chaplin is realistic that there’s more work to be done to improve the situation at Lake Tahoe.
“Hopefully when you check in on us next year, we can talk about some of our achievements,” she says. “I wish we could talk about some of them now, because then I think that [South Lake Tahoe City Councilman Scott Robbins’] greenwashing comment might be easier to diffuse. But, we’re just toddlers in this whole thing. [We’ve] got to get after it and we’re going to do that.”
Robbins is right. Unless the "$250,000 committed for the next two years to make sure that this isn’t just a plan" is too low by a factor of 10 it would be an insult to chumps to call it chump change.