Chapter One Introduction with Key Findings

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION WITH KEY FINDINGS Dennis D. Murphy ©1999 J.T. Ravizé. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION WITH KEY FINDINGS Dennis D. Murphy When Mark Twain first spied the immensity This written component of the Lake Tahoe and grandeur of Lake Tahoe he could hardly contain Watershed Assessment is an initial step toward himself, relating in his 1871 travelogue Roughing It: bringing better informed management to the lake “At last the lake burst upon us—a noble and its surrounding basin—to make this era of resto- sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred ration and renewal as successful as possible. The feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim goal is to collect in a single document information of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full that can be used by land and resource managers to three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, develop a comprehensive conservation plan for the and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred lake and its watershed. Although the lake has been good miles traveling around it. As it lay there with the focus of conservation concern for decades, a the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photo- sense of immediacy now prevails. Scientists warn graphed upon its still surface I thought it must surely that should lake clarity continue to decline at recent be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. rates, Tahoe’s famed aqua waters may be perma- “So singularly clear was the water, that nently compromised in less than a decade. where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bot- Not only waters are at risk. The forests of tom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed to the Tahoe basin were ravaged by indiscriminate tim- be floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty ber harvests more than a century ago and by fire feet deep. Every pebble was distinct, every speckled suppression since then. Today’s landscape is haunted trout, every hand’s-breadth of sand . The water by a ghost of those disruptions to the natural cycle was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly of forest disturbances, differing from its historical so.” structure and composition, subject to devastating Twain’s romance with Lake Tahoe took an insect outbreaks, and at risk of wildfire ignitions as unexpected turn when just hours after he penned never before. So too, many of Tahoe’s meadows and that description a campfire bounded from his con- wetlands have been destroyed and others are in dan- trol, engulfing the surrounding forest and charring ger. Overgrazed at the turn of the century, overde- miles around. veloped since, their unique ecological role in filtering In so many ways Twain’s initial Tahoe ad- sediments from the turbulent stream waters of the venture epitomizes the last century and a half of Tahoe basin and supporting its diverse wildlife has human experience at the lake. The great montane been compromised by any measure. The resident body of water was discovered by excited explorers, species of the lake basin have hardly fared better. rapidly exploited for its diverse natural resources, One of nature’s most productive inland fisheries and then urbanized by waves of settlers. Only in the sustained generations of Native Americans. That past several decades have the effects of our rapa- fishery’s vast uncountable numbers of cutthroat cious appetites for Lake Tahoe’s resources become trout have not just declined, they have vanished. fully evident. And now, after loving and abusing the Nevertheless, yesterday’s environmental Sierra Nevada’s grandest lake for so long, we embark abuse has become today’s environmental challenge, on an era of restoration and renewal. and that challenge is being met at this country’s Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment 1 Chapter 1 highest levels of government. Recognizing the na- This document, however, does offer explicit rec- tional importance of Lake Tahoe’s diverse resources ommendations for research, monitoring, and an and their dramatic declines, United States Senator adaptive management strategy that will be necessary Harry Reid of Nevada brought President Clinton to inform future management. The task of compiling and Vice President Gore to Lake Tahoe in 1997 for available information for future uses from widely a first-ever presidential forum. There Mr. Clinton dispersed sources has proven to be a fair challenge in affirmed “a shared responsibility to build on our its own right. The watershed assessment science commitments at all levels to be sure the lake and its team has largely restricted itself in this document to environs are protected.” On July 26 of that year the that narrowly defined task. administration promised to fund a diversity of new and expanded efforts directed at water quality, forest Science and the Watershed Assessment management, transportation, and recreation and A list of superlatives has served as the start- tourism, including the development of this water- ing point for most environmental descriptions of shed assessment. Lake Tahoe. The lake is among the most dramatic The watershed assessment thus joins other manifestations of water and geology on earth (Figure ongoing scientific efforts designed to inform policy 1-1). Its depth is more than a third of a mile. Its lake development and resource management at Lake Ta- bottom is hundreds of feet below Carson City, Ne- hoe. Most closely linked to the watershed assessment vada, in the adjacent Great Basin. At nearly two are the water clarity modeling effort being carried hundred square miles, the surface area of the lake out at the University of California at Davis, which is covers nearly two fifths of the Tahoe basin. No intended to advance our understanding of nutrient fewer than 63 small rivers and streams feed Lake and sediment inputs to the lake and their impact on Tahoe, and one large river, the Truckee, drains it its clarity, and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s (Figure 1-2). So much water resides in Tahoe that (TRPA) “real time” management program, which the travel of a snowbank droplet from nearby Mt. attempts to bring reliable information from research Tallac’s alpine summit through the lake and out the and monitoring to resource management in the ba- Truckee River takes seven hundred years. This ex- sin. traordinary residence time of waters in Lake Tahoe is The watershed assessment itself was pro- the driving feature in plans for its restoration. Lake posed in the October 1997 document Presidential Tahoe’s hugeness serves to ameliorate our lesser Forum Deliverables to provide for “the integration of environmental excesses, but that same remarkable ecological knowledge about the Lake Tahoe basin” size creates a long-lasting memory of our worst in- and was “to clearly define the issues and priorities sults. Disturbances to Lake Tahoe from past decades identified during the Presidential visit and to balance will challenge our best management efforts for dec- these priorities in resource management.” The as- ades to come. Nevertheless, fair hope exists for a sessment was further intended to “describe and de- solution to Tahoe’s environmental crisis; more than fine existing conditions, reference variability, and four fifths of the lake’s surrounding basin is in public desired future conditions for key ecosystem elements ownership and can be managed to conserve and en- and environmental indicators.” That job description hance ecosystem health and services (Figure 1-3). was amended; in fact, a mature political process al- The watershed assessment team presup- ready has identified desired future conditions or poses that readers of this document are familiar with “thresholds” for key environmental variables in the the dimensions of the lake, the physical characteris- Lake Tahoe basin, which are evaluated and amended tics of its surrounding landscape, its fate at the hands on a five-year cycle. Appropriately the watershed of settlers from the east, and recent attempts to re- assessment does not prescribe specific management verse more than a century of environmental degen- actions or land use policy. That job correctly resides eration. Those less familiar with Lake Tahoe and its with regional governments, agency staff, and the environment should take advantage of Douglas diverse coalitions of stakeholders at Lake Tahoe. Strong’s wonderful volume Tahoe: from Timber Barons 2 Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment Chapter 1 Figure 1-1—The Lake Tahoe basin and watershed boundary. Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment 3 Chapter 1 Figure 1-2—Lake Tahoe tributaries. 4 Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment Chapter 1 Figure 1-3—Lake Tahoe land ownerships and transportation network. Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment 5 Chapter 1 to Ecologists(1999). The multivolume Sierra Nevada research reports, articles, and books on the lake and Ecosystem Report, Status of the Sierra Nevada, in- its surrounding watershed dating back to 1878, the cludes a factually dense treatment of Lake Tahoe as a report described information shortfalls that com- case study by Elliott-Fisk et al. (1997) that pairs an promised management of the basin’s air, water, vege- overview of the biophysical challenges faced by ba- tation, fish and wildlife, and resource systems (the sin managers with a description of current institu- latter referring to the cumulative effects of human tional responses to those challenges. These two activities on integrated ecosystem services). More works and the many reports by TRPA that describe than eighty separate research agenda items were pro- its efforts during the past thirty years to meet basin- posed and given “five years as a workable time span wide environmental objectives provide requisite to emphasize current problems over anticipated reading for those desiring to take full value from this ones.” Despite expenditures of more than a million assessment.

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