February 9-22, 2022 GET OUTSIDE
TAHOE TRAMPLED BY TRASH B ROKEN S LE DS, I LLE GA L PAR K IN G P ROB L E MS PERSIST BY PRIYA HUTNER
Sledding at Spooner Summit. | League to Save Lake Tahoe
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n a recent cross-country ski at Prosser Reservoir, a popular area for recreating, a friend and I found ourselves at the top of the hill overlooking the frozen reservoir. The ground was littered with tiny pieces of plastic wrappers blowing around the area that would eventually blow into the reservoir and surrounding creeks. We picked up as much as we could, stuffing it into our pockets. A few days later on a trip to Coldstream Canyon, another popular spot where people snowshoe and cross-country ski, the area was also littered with plastic wrappers and bits of plastic from kid’s snow toys. Litter is a problem that exists yearround, but winter brings a different challenge. During the winter months, there is no place to dispose of trash because service to most parks and trailheads is shuttered or limited. The trash is left behind by people looking for a place to enjoy playing in the snow, including tubing with the family. Unfortunately, the sheer number of visitors in the Tahoe Sierra during the winter is fraught with challenges, trash and parking issues among them. Areas around the region from Donner Summit to Tahoe Meadows to Spooner Summit suffer from overcrowding, cars parked
illegally along roadways and trash left behind by a day of snowplay.
Broken sleds left behind
The two most highly trafficked sled areas in the Tahoe Basin are Spooner Summit near the intersection of Highways 28 and 50 and Tahoe Meadows along Highway 431 (Mt. Rose Highway). Tahoe Fund, along with League to Save
Lake Tahoe and Take Care Tahoe, created a Slediquette Campaign in 2021 to combat the debris left behind by broken plastic sleds. The campaign urged people to clean up and recycle their broken sleds or snow tubes and not leave any trash behind. Even with messaging the problem of sled trash still exists. “There are a lot of people that come to visit and recreate [to Tahoe]. Sledding confounds us every year. We don’t have the resources to manage it and there are no official designated sled hills,” says
Amy Berry, Tahoe Fund CEO. A list of 30 local sledding and tubing areas runs in every print edition of Tahoe Weekly and on TheTahoeWeekly.com to provide visitors and locals with information about places in which to enjoy tubing. Of those 30 locations, however, only seven are public Sno-Parks, stretching from Kirkwood to Donner Summit. Only two are in the Tahoe Basin, at Blackwood Canyon on the West Shore and at Taylor Creek on the South Shore. Sno-Parks require a parking permit of $5 per day or $25 for the season. Parking permits, however, are only available for purchase online or at a local vendor. The remaining tubing areas are privately run and require a fee to play in the snow. As well, Sugar Bowl is investing $2 million to build a new tubing area along Sugar Bowl Road to open in the 2022-23 season. Along Mt. Rose Highway, Tahoe Meadows looks like the perfect sledding area but on any given weekend, hundreds of cars park along the side of the road blocking traffic and creating unsafe conditions. In early January, a young child was injured when his sled went into Mt. Rose Highway and he was stuck by a vehicle. Nevada Highway Patrol officers routinely use megaphones to tell people
they will be ticketed if they park on the road. Hundreds of tickets have been issued yet the problems remain with parking and litter in the area.
There are no public parking areas available in the winter in the area nor are there any public trash cans or restrooms. Debris from broken plastic sleds are left behind by day visitors to the popular sledding area. The U.S. Forest Service parking areas and restrooms at Tahoe Meadows and the Mt. Rose trailhead that are open in the summer are closed during the winter months. Similarly, there are U.S. Forest Service recreation sites with parking areas spread throughout the Tahoe Sierra around Lake Tahoe and in Truckee, but the majority of these sites are closed in the winter, as Tahoe Weekly identified in our 2021 story “Winter Recreation Access Pushed to Limit.”
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