Letter: A graveyard of trees at Camp Rich
Tree removal this summer at Camp Richardson. Photo/Liana Zambresky
To the community,
The USFS has done the deed. The trees have been cut.
The campground will never again be the same. I walked through it with dismay. As I looked at the big piles of dead trees and slash, and also at the few left standing, I asked myself why this is necessary? I saw a western tanager and robins hoping around on the piles of debris, as if they were also questioning why anyone would want to cut these trees. Why are they doing this in a campground that has already been here for decades?
Ever since the Angora Fire, the USFS has been on a relentless agenda to get rid of trees. However, in a place like Camp Richardson, where people want to be closer to nature and enjoy the Tahoe experience, they should have a gentler hand. This is a great tragedy. What they have done is too excessive. They are ruining Tahoe. They are ruining Camp Richardson. Everyone knows what a supermarket parking lot looks like. That’s not why people come to Tahoe to camp at Camp Rich.
Liana Zambresky, South Lake Tahoe
So Sad to see it so empty, What trees are being cut next? Such a tragedy ,It should of never happened.where is the next place in Lake Tahoe?
Liana Zambresky, The USFS is rollng around the lake with chainsaws, cutting trees down like crazy! Wait untill they get to the Spring Creek area and head over to Emerald Bay an over on the West shore…
Hopefully they don’t clear cut the whole place. OLS
I personally do not have a problem with the safe removal of trees for this project. The campsites were very overgrown as much of the forest is because humans have been interfering with Mother Nature for a century. 100 years ago the Indians set fires in the fall to burn the trees before they became overgrown. Yes some of the trees being cut down were 100 years old because that’s about the time you kicked the Indians out as well. Maybe the world should not evolve around your personal agenda.
It’s all about the tourists and their dollars. Very, very few tourists know how to enjoy nature. If there isn’t pavement they won’t go. If there aren’t stores they won’t go. It there aren’t 1000’s of other people they won’t go. They want it to look like the congested, paved, smog filled homes they come from.
Just look at how they crowd into the campground that is open at Camp Rich. That’s how they enjoy it. Take a stroll down to Vikingsholm and see how they act and what activities they are doing, If you can find a parking spot for $10 ! They now rent sups and kayaks there, the only thing missing is an ice cream store. Boats crammed into the bay, rafters and kayakers crowding onto Fannett Island and helicopters buzzing overhead.This is what Tahoe has become. They are not here for nature and Tahoe.
And so the forest service “modernizes” Lake Tahoe to accommodate them.
Lisa: The next place is across the road. Emerald Bay should be safer as it is run by State Parks and they appear to have a gentler hand caring for our forests.
Shameful and disgraceful.
The following is copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe
“Upon discovery of gold in the South Fork of the American River in 1848, thousands of gold seekers going west passed near the basin on their way to the gold fields. European civilization first made its mark in the Lake Tahoe basin with the 1858 discovery of the Comstock Lode, a silver deposit just 15 miles (24 km) to the east in Virginia City, Nevada. From 1858 until about 1890, logging in the basin supplied large timbers to shore up the underground workings of the Comstock mines. The logging was so extensive that loggers cut down almost all of the native forest.”
I think that the native forest which loggers extensively cut down from 1858 to 1890 have made more than a remarkable recovery in the past 125-years. Prior to “persons of European descent” interfering with Mother Nature’s forest maintenance the forest used to naturally thin probably via lightning strikes which burned the low growth and didn’t get into the tree crowns and burn down every tree in the forest. Unfortunately, after persons of European descent began “management” of the forest it’s become so overgrown with thick underbrush and dead trees that when it does burn it’s a “clear burn” leaving nothing behind, such as what happened in the Angora Fire Burn area.
The forest thinning on Lake Tahoe Boulevard from the High School intersection toward the Saw Mill Pond area looks great (as does the new bike path that was built) and if man isn’t going to allow nature to do the thinning then we need to do it so when a fire does happen it won’t burn down every tree and structure in the basin.
Nature will always do a much better job of thinning than man ever could. USFS involved will always wreck anything they are involved with.
The question I have is why dont they make an effort to weed out the lodge pole pine? They were planted here after the virginia city logging because they are faster growing. They do not belong here. They only have a approx 50 year lifespan, therefor they do not help the carbon sequestering like a 100-200year old tree and they take over meadows and our watershed and create more pollin.
SHAME ON YOU, US FOREST DISSERVICE
Thinning out smaller, dense trees is helpful for reducing fire danger and encouraging healthy forests. Cutting larger (and more profitable) trees, which are less of a fire threat, and doing so to accommodate more RVs, is a different situation. Sad.
A “graveyard” is a bit over the top. Yes, to be close to nature and Highway 89… both at the same time.
Yeah, lets get rid of the Department of Agriculture and all that, and put it in charge of “private industry” that will fix it… sure.
Nature used to use fire as the thinning process but allowing fire to do the job is not realistic with thousands of people around.
Remember. After the Native Americans were forced to leave, Camp Richardson started as a timber harvesting business.
Forest Service spokesperson, Cheva Heck (I believe is her name) has weighed in on other topics—why not this one? could it be that even she and her supervisors find this indefensible?
Hiker your logic is faulty.
Isn’t it her job to interface between the agency and the public? This topic has generated more comment than anything else in the past three years. Seems like official comment is appropriate–not just anonymous comments from current or past FS employees in support of the projects.
I heard on a good report today that the USFS has actually cut over 600 trees. Our government agencies, whose purpose is to protect Tahoe, like TRPA, signed off on this proposal. The USFS deliberately lied when they publicly announced they were planning to cut ‘only’ 250 trees.