Barren Tahoe slopes harbinger of a summer of water woes
TAHOE CITY - Lake Tahoe’s tranquil waters sparkle in the bright sunshine, tots play in the sand on the town beach and visitors walk by in shirtsleeves, shorts and sunglasses near the end of March. But to Keenan Kelsey of Larkspur, who’s been coming to the jewel of the Sierra for 35 years, it’s an ominous scene.
Many of the mountains ringing North America’s largest alpine lake are bare of snow, some are lightly dusted and only the highest peaks, like 10,000-foot Heavenly far across the water on Tahoe’s south shore, wear a white mantle. At Tahoe City on the north shore, vast stretches of bare rocks lie between Commons Beach and the waterline.
“You know what, it’s scary,” said Kelsey, whose family owns a cabin nearby. “It’s scary to watch the lake recede this far. This is something you feel helpless about.”
Similar fears, both rational and irrational, have been echoed across the state. A recent Los Angeles Times op-ed carried the headline, “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” Scientists quickly lined up to refute the headline, pointing out the one-year supply refers to the state’s reservoirs and that there is likely decades’ worth of water underground.
Still, there is a renewed push in Sacramento to regulate the state’s groundwater supply, and some Central Valley communities last year saw wells run dry and demand for drilling services soar.
All 38.8 million Californians are rolling into a fourth year of drought, with the Sierra Nevada snowpack - source of 30 percent of the state’s water for farms and cities - at an all-time-low 8 percent of normal, the only single-digit figure in 65 years of measuring the snowpack.
A series of early December storms, including one atmospheric river event, left 57 percent of the Sierra covered in snow averaging nearly 8 inches deep, but the driest and second- warmest January in history melted most of it, leaving 13 percent of the Sierra with snow averaging 2.4 inches deep Friday, according to the National Weather Service.
In 2011, the last year with an above-average snowpack, 70 percent of the Sierra was snowy on March 27, with an average depth of 70 inches.
When the Department of Water Resources conducts its media-oriented snow survey on Wednesday at Phillips Station, 90 miles east of Sacramento on Highway 50, officials expect - for the first time ever - to be walking on bare ground. The historical average snow depth at the site on April 1, when the snowpack typically reaches its peak, is 66.5 inches.
The snowpack’s importance can’t be overstated. The 400-mile-long Sierra Nevada range is California’s largest reservoir, typically collecting 15 million acre-feet of water - in frozen form - over the winter. The state’s 154 largest manmade reservoirs can hold 38 million acre-feet, but the estimated total for the end of March is 18.1 million acre-feet, 68 percent of average storage (26.6 million acre-feet) for the date, said Maury Roos, the Water Resources agency’s hydrologist.
Since April and May, on average, contribute about 12 percent of annual Sierra precipitation, “there is little hope for a substantial change,” he said. Rainfall in the northern Sierra during those two months last year was about 3 inches, half the average, but in 1948 the two months produced 16 inches, Roos said.
The way it’s supposed to work, the Sierra snow serves as a natural bank account, melting during the spring and summer and replenishing the reservoirs as California farms and cities draw down the water stored behind concrete dams.
“We won’t see much of that this year,” said Doug Carlson of the Department of Water Resources. “We don’t have anything in the bank up there.”
Time seemed to have skipped forward last week in the Tahoe Basin, where people were bicycling, paddle boarding, golfing, sunbathing and hiking into the Desolation Wilderness backcountry on the lake’s west flank.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” said Hector Lopez, a ski lift operator at Boreal Ski Resort who grew up in Truckee and remembers snow berms 20 feet high along the streets. “Right now it’s really depressing.”
Were he less tied down to the area, Lopez, a snowboarder, said he would “go to Alaska.”
Daffodils were blooming in planter boxes last week in historic downtown Truckee off I-80 north of the lake.
Ruth Sanders, tending a T-shirt shop there, said the springlike winter was good for business because skiers would put in half a day on the slopes and then go shopping. “Usually they come up, go skiing and go home,” she said.
Nine of the 17 Tahoe area ski resorts were closed last week, with another scheduled to close Sunday, but there still was some schussing going on.
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