Last Friday at Kirkwood ski resort, I took one step too far. I went to grab my skis that were resting on a dirty snow bank and my foot sank into a deep pile of mud that was oozing from the edges of the melting snow. I pulled my foot out of the mud and that’s when I saw it: the mystery plastic blob, floating in dark water, long abandoned and forgotten.
Was it a food wrapper? A plastic bag? Whatever its purpose in its past life, now the mystery plastic blob was part of Tahoe’s mounting litter problem. Likely it was dropped in the snow, buried in a storm. A couple months later, that piece of litter is still here.
Across Lake Tahoe, as the snow melts, mystery trash appears. And spring is when a lot of that trash gets picked up from parking lots, roadways, trailheads and popular recreation areas. With Earth Day drawing near, dozens of crews of volunteers are heading to popular recreation areas with gloves and garbage bags, picking up that mystery piece of litter and the next one, and the next one.
Since the New Year, the League to Save Lake Tahoe has dispatched 91 cleanup efforts across the Tahoe Basin. Each cleanup is done by volunteers who organize under the league’s Tahoe Blue Crew program. The Tahoe Blue Crew provides volunteers with garbage bags and equipment. In turn, the volunteers provide cleanup data to the league so the organization can track how much litter is piling up in the Tahoe Basin.
So far this year, volunteers have removed 2,732 pounds of litter. Measured by volume, the litter collected adds up to 5,684 gallons.
“We have a group of crews who have been active throughout the winter, since it’s been safe to do so,” said Chris Joseph, communications manager for the League to Save Lake Tahoe, via email.
In the before times, during 2019, Tahoe Blue Crew did more than 400 cleanups, picking up 45,732 pieces of plastic, more than 3,000 dog poops, and upward of 26,000 cigarette butts. Each crew adopts a different part of Lake Tahoe to clean up.
So far in 2021, 9 more groups have joined the effort, including one family team at a popular sled hill on Spooner Summit.
“One crew, consisting of a husband, wife and her mother, adopted the sled hill at Spooner Summit and have been cleaning up every Monday and Friday evening,” Joseph said. “They have some unsavory stories to share about uncovering frozen diapers alongside the usual food waste and plastic sled shrapnel.”
Tahoe’s sled hills are ground zero for litter accumulation during the winter. Despite the pandemic, Tahoe was overwhelmed with visitors. On any given weekend, cars were piled up at every single pullout and parking lot across the Tahoe Basin. Families and kids spilled out of cars, ripping tags off of the newly purchased gloves and hats, running gleefully to the top of the hill with a plastic saucer, and sending it back down the icy hill.
Jen Dawn, a volunteer who organized a cleanup last year at Spooner Summit, told SFGATE earlier this winter that “thousands” of people were sledding at Spooner Summit every weekend. Cars were parked back-to-back on both sides of the highway all day long. In addition to the more well-known sled hills, tourists were also finding creative ways to play in the snow.
“Anywhere there’s snow, people are pulled over on the side of the road playing in it and trying to find little spots to sled or build snow people, have snowball fights, do all that stuff,” Dawn said.
While a visitor is sledding, things don’t always go according to plan. There are casualties, often a sled that’s shredded to pieces after hitting a rock, or a tree, or careening into a frozen snowbank at full speed. And all those pieces of plastic debris? They may have disappeared in the next snowstorm in February, only to show up in the mud come spring.
In the aftermath, Dawn and one of the Tahoe Blue Crew groups she runs pick up everything from shards of broken sleds to polystyrene food containers.
“We felt so extremely overwhelmed. I mean, thousands of broken bits of sleds,” said Dawn. “Styrofoam from hot chocolate — hundreds of cups. And you know those little plastic keeper tabs, when you buy a new pair of gloves and they’re connected together? There were easily 200 of those.”
Some finds are microscopic. Researchers have found microplastics in Lake Tahoe, a downstream impact of litter left behind. Microplastics have an outsized impact on the ecosystem. They enter the food chain, leach chemicals in the lake and show up in drinking water.
Other bits of litter are quite large.
“We even found a tire, like this huge industrial-sized tire,” Dawn said.
Dawn has also seen feces in the snow, from both dogs and humans. Poop is an environmental pollutant. A single gram of pet waste contains, on average, 23 million fecal coliform bacteria, and as the snow melts, all that poop will seep into Tahoe’s watershed and the lake.
“There’s no bathroom facilities,” Dawn said. “There’s nowhere for people to go. So people are pooping right there, right wherever. We’re seeing that. We’re seeing human waste and toilet paper at these areas because there’s nowhere else for anyone to go.”
Last summer, Tahoe’s litter problems were especially glaring. Trash cans overflowed with bulky to-go containers. People stacked aluminum cans on top of bear-proof garbage bins. With all that trash exposed to the wildlife, bears got in and became a big nuisance. Divers also collected lost litter that had sunk to the bottom of Lake Tahoe. (Last fall, Clean Up the Lake raised enough money to continue their underwater cleanup effort, with dives to pick up trash along the entire perimeter of Lake Tahoe scheduled to start this spring.)
There are efforts underway to educate visitors to Lake Tahoe about environmental stewardship in hopes of solving the litter problem. Take Care Tahoe is a basin-wide effort with billboards and signs posted throughout the Lake Tahoe region to inform people about how to dispose of sleds, trash, dog poop and more. Next week, Take Care Tahoe is hosting a weeklong celebration in honor of Earth Day.
Visitors to Lake Tahoe can also partake in the cleanup effort. The League to Save Lake Tahoe is also working with the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center and the Desert Research Institute to launch the Citizen Science Tahoe app, which allows people to log trash they’ve collected and litter observations in Lake Tahoe. Researchers will use the information collected to better understand Tahoe’s litter problems and their downstream impact on algae, fish and the ecosystem.
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