Lake Tahoe, “the jewel of the Sierra Nevada,” is an unusually clear, deep alpine lake that is twelve miles wide and twenty-two miles long. It stra

Lake Tahoe’s Bear Boom

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2024-11-27 16:30:04

Lake Tahoe, “the jewel of the Sierra Nevada,” is an unusually clear, deep alpine lake that is twelve miles wide and twenty-two miles long. It straddles two states: California on the west shore, which is damper and greener, and Nevada on the east, which gives way, almost immediately, to high desert. “A kind of heaven,” John Muir called Tahoe, in 1878, after raving about the diameter of its snowflakes and “lusty exercise on snow-shoes.” Tahoe is about a third of the size of Yosemite National Park, yet attracts three times the number of annual visitors. During the pandemic, several thousand people, including a lot of Bay Area tech types, fully relocated to the lake, joining seventy thousand or so locals. Tahoe couldn’t handle it. The traffic, the noise, the illegal parking—the trash. Last year’s Fourth of July crowds left an unprecedented four tons of garbage on the beaches alone. Fodor’s named Lake Tahoe one of the world’s “natural attractions that could use a break in order to heal and rejuvenate,” and suggested that outsiders avoid visiting for a while. The other day in Tahoe, I learned a new word: “touron,” a combination of “tourist” and “moron.”

The Tahoe basin is also home to one of the continent’s densest populations of black bears, Ursus americanus. The species flourished after its chief predator, the grizzly, was extirpated there, in the early twentieth century. Grizzlies are not to be fucked with. Black bears, which can be brown, reddish, or blond, are defensive and lazy, smart and resilient, ravenous and opportunistic. All they really want to do is eat. They lived mostly on grasses, berries, and insects until humans showed up. Why spend all day dismantling a yellow-jacket nest for the paltry reward of larvae when there’s dumpster pizza to be had?

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