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.

At Boreal, on a breezy, nippy morning along I-80 at Donner Summit, a lone skier gracefully descended the beginner-friendly slope and caught the lift back up without a wait.

At a base elevation of 7,200 feet and with snow machines lining its ski run, Boreal managed to keep the terrain pure white, bolstered by a gift of 5 inches of natural snow in the past 72 hours. “A great spring skiing quality product,” said Tucker Norred, the resort’s events and social media coordinator.

Boreal is on track to remain open until April 12, he said, but without the machines the resort would have been “absolutely out of luck.”

Jerrica Shaw, tending the slope entry gate, said Boreal was pretty good in the morning on freshly groomed snow. As the days warm up, the snow turns to mushy “mashed potatoes,” then gets icy when the temperature drops in the evening, she said, speaking as a snowboarder.

Rich Castaneda of Santa Rosa, with his son, Ben, said they had passed up snow-barren slopes at Bear Valley and Homewood Mountain Resort to try their luck as snowboarding beginners at Boreal. “I’m more of a skier, but I’m hoping to board,” Rich Castaneda said.

His son said he hoped his experience on a skateboard would translate to the snow. They both struggled.

At Homewood, 1,000 feet lower along the lake, the silent ski lifts rose over a green slope.

The resort opened Dec. 20 and put the ski operation “on hold” after a few weeks in February, focusing the operation an a cafe across the road while hoping for a March or April snow dump, spokeswoman Lisa Nigon said.

“We’re looking at the forecasts all the time,” she said.

Meanwhile, Homewood intends to break ground in the spring of 2016 on a $400 million upgrade that includes a hotel, ice rink and condominiums.

California ski resorts avoided economic bust thanks to the December storms that stoked the slopes in time for the Christmas, Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidents Day holidays, said Bob Roberts of the California Ski Industry Association. Total visits should come in at 5.3 million to 5.4 million, a slight uptick from the winter of 2013-14, when 5.2 million visits were the lowest in 20 years, he said.

Ski industry revenue this winter was about 30 percent below the $1.3 billion mark documented by San Francisco State University in the 2010-11 season, Roberts said.

Resort owners recognized the dwindling snowpack trend several years ago and got Congress to approve a law allowing the 17 resorts operating on federal land to offer a broader range of recreational activities. That paved the way for investments in zip lines, ropes courses, climbing walls, mountain biking trails and entertainment venues, converting the ski areas into year-round destinations.

“The feeling is we’ve got to change our business model,” Roberts said.

Lake Tahoe itself is noticeably shrinking because of reduced runoff from the Sierra. The glacier-carved lake, one of California’s major tourist attractions, fell below its natural sandstone rim in October, cutting off water releases to the Truckee River, which flows 100 miles to the northeast into Nevada’s Pyramid Lake.

At the outlet dam in Tahoe City, the lake’s edge is a few hundred yards away over dirt and rocks. Shoreline beaches are broader and some private boat docks are either marooned on dry land or close to it, with ladders that stop short of the water surface - and the situation is expected to get worse.

Darren Kramer, operations manager at Obexer’s Boat Co. in Homewood, said his marina has one of the deepest harbors on the lake, but it still may have trouble accommodating sailboats drawing more than 5 feet of water and large twin-engine power boats.

“Some boats will have to be hauled out earlier than usual and a few may prefer not to go in at all,” Kramer said in a notice to customers.

Chad Blanchard, the Reno- based federal water manager who controls releases into the Truckee River, said Friday the lake was at 6,222.83 feet elevation, about 2 inches below the natural rim at 6,223 feet. The lake hit its lowest level on record - 6,220.26 feet - on Nov. 30, 1992.

Snowmelt should bring the 1,600-foot-deep lake to just above the rim next month, allowing a “trickle” down the river for a short time in early summer, Blanchard said. Evaporation, the cause of the lake’s major water loss, will lower the water level by 1 to 2 feet over the summer, depending on the weather, but not likely setting a new record low, he said.

Sarah Obexer, the boat company owner, said she remembers the summer of 1992, when she donned fishing waders to push boats out of the marina.

Low water also may make it difficult for larger vessels to enter Emerald Bay, where the boat channel was only 7 feet deep last summer, said Marilyn Linkem, superintendent of the California State Parks Sierra District. Piers in Emerald Bay and at Sugar Pine Point state parks may become inaccessible to boats and the boat ramp at Kings Beach State Recreation Area remains out of the water, she said.

Irrigation of the vast lawn at Sugar Pine Point, a popular wedding site, may be reduced or eliminated, letting the grass die, Linkem said.

There will be no drought- related restrictions on day or overnight hikes into the popular Desolation Wilderness, a 100-square-mile area west of the lake, said Don Lane, spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service’s Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.

There will continue to be a quota on overnight camping permits, intended to limit the crowds at 130 wilderness lakes, he said.

Hikers already are heading into the backcountry, where there is elevated fire risk in a drought-stricken forest of mostly second-growth trees susceptible to disease and bark beetles. The King Fire, an arson blaze, charred 100,000 acres west of the wilderness area last fall and the woodlands will be even drier this year.

One ignition, intentional or accidental, and “the mountain explodes,” Lane said.

With no water flowing into the Truckee River, Tahoe City will lose a major attraction: a business offering self-guided, paddle-powered inflatable raft trips down 5 miles of the river.

Whitewater boating action on 21 miles of the South Fork of the American River near Placerville will continue as usual, as the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and PG&E have signed a 50-year agreement with boating interests to provide adequate summertime flows.

The agreement is tailored to account for droughts “as bad as the one we’re in right now,” said Bill Center, owner of the Camp Lotus campground halfway down the rafting and kayaking stretch between Chili Bar dam and the Folsom Lake reservoir. It’s California’s most popular whitewater river, carrying up to 140,000 people a year.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.