What’s lurking in Lake Tahoe? The answer: A ton of trash

Lake Tahoe is one of the deepest lakes in North America. At its most cavernous, it plunges to 1,645 feet. The only other lake in the US that reaches those depths is Crater Lake in Oregon. But Tahoe is not only deep. It’s also enormous. 

It’s 12 miles wide, 22 miles long, and has 72 miles of shoreline. The lake, which spans across the California-Nevada state line and is surrounded by snow-capped mountains, is known as the Jewel of the Sierra, one of the clearest and most stunning alpine lakes in America.

I felt that magnitude while swimming out there. This massive body of water, filled with an estimated 37 trillion gallons of water—enough to cover the state of California in over a foot of liquid—and me, a tiny specimen floating alone in the middle. But it turns out, I wasn’t alone at all.

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In his book, Tahoe Beneath the Surface, author and educator Scott Lankford writes, “Peer too deeply beneath the mirrored surface of Lake Tahoe, breathe some life into those old lake legends, and the secrets that you’ll find hidden in its depth may amaze you. Or frighten you. Or both.”

There are tales of an archaic Loch Ness-like creature, nicknamed Tahoe Tessie, that lurks at the lake’s deepest depths. There’s also Indigenous lore of “water babies,” which Lankford describes as “long-haired, mermaid-like beings,” that are believed to “be among the lake’s most ancient, dangerous, and seductive denizens.”    

But it was the lake’s litter problem that frightened Colin West enough to motivate him to commit a few years of his life to cleaning up these waters.

“When I first started diving in Lake Tahoe, I was easily pulling out 50 to 100 pounds of litter,” says West, the founder and executive director of a Tahoe-based nonprofit called Clean Up The Lake. “That showed me that there was an underwater litter problem in Tahoe.”

So, in 2019, West announced plans to clean up all 72 miles of Lake Tahoe’s shoreline. It was an ambitious undertaking, far bigger than any cleanup that had been done before. “When Colin said, ‘I want to clean up the whole lake,’ we said, ‘You’re crazy,’” recalls Amy Berry, CEO of the Tahoe Fund, which raises private and public funds for environmental improvement projects on Lake Tahoe.

“Nobody had ever tried to do that before, so we were nervous,” she says. “They hadn’t even done one mile and they were like, ‘Let’s do 72.’” But then West and his team cleaned six miles of shoreline as a sort of pilot project, and it went well. So, Berry’s organization decided to help fund the rest of the cleanup.

“You can crush a place. There’s no big factory dumping pollution in the lake. The problem is in the mirror. It’s you. It’s all of us.”

- Jesse Patterson

But then COVID hit, and the clean-up got delayed. West and his crews were finally able to start steady work around the shoreline in May 2021, using a team of scuba divers, freedivers, jetskiers, boaters and kayakers. They utilized surveying software to GPS pinpoint heavy items and trash hotspots. 

This spring, the crews are expected to complete their circumnavigational cleanup of the lake, a year-long process that removed more than 21,000 pounds of submerged litter from Lake Tahoe as of April 11. The debris has ranged from the expected plastic water bottles, beer cans, cell phones and sunglasses to more surprising items, including a six-foot-tall lamppost, a metal statue, an engagement ring, a BB gun, a barbecue, poker chips, a chair and an international driver’s license.

“This the first major cleanup that’s ever happened underwater, which took place after decades of people recreating on and around Lake Tahoe,” Berry says. “The message is that there are a lot of people who visit Lake Tahoe, and everyone’s behavior has an impact. This issue of litter below the lake has been very hidden, until now.”

The first inhabitants of the Lake Tahoe area, members of the Washoe Tribe, called the lake Da ow ga. Dating back at least 6,000 years, the Washoe people would travel from their winter dwellings in the surrounding lowland valleys to the lake each summer, spending the warmer months hunting, fishing and collecting plants.

The shores of Lake Tahoe were bountiful back then—berries, wild rhubarb, sunflower seeds, wild onions, mustard, wild spinach, potatoes, turnips, and many other edible and medicinal plants. The culmination of their gathering season was the pine nut harvest. To them, Da ow ga was sacred and held many powers.

The first white settlers arrived in Tahoe around the 1850s. In 1872, American writer Mark Twain arrived at Lake Tahoe and penned, “The lake burst upon us—a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! … As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”

But within 30 years of their arrival, the newcomers had clear-cut the forests, overfished the lake, and ousted the Washoe. When famed naturalist John Muir arrived in Lake Tahoe in the late 1880s and saw the disastrous evidence of an unregulated timber industry, he set about attempting to create a national park at Lake Tahoe. A bill for a Tahoe National Park was introduced to Congress in 1900, but ultimately, Muir failed to get national park designation for the area. 

By the 1960s, tourism was flourishing in Lake Tahoe, following the Winter Olympic Games held at what is now called Palisades Tahoe. In 1969, US Congress formed the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), a government entity designed to handle cross-state regulation of the lake.

But even with regulation, development was rampant around the lake, causing long-term impacts on the natural environment and affecting the water quality and clarity. The League to Save Tahoe printed its first—later to become iconic—“Keep Tahoe Blue” stickers in 1973. 

“Overdevelopment was the big threat to the lake even into the 1980s,” says Jesse Patterson, chief strategy officer for the League to Save Lake Tahoe. “A lot of that has been regulated or stopped. But now, the new threats are coming from loving the lake to death. The millions of people who love Tahoe and come every year are making an impact. You can crush a place. There’s no big factory dumping pollution in the lake. The problem is in the mirror. It’s you. It’s all of us.”

These days, visitors flock to Lake Tahoe for its year-round playground, coming for everything from gambling to skiing to boating. An estimated 15 million people visit Lake Tahoe each year.

“That’s three times more people than Yellowstone, and we’re not a national park,” Patterson says. “We don’t have park rangers everywhere. Individuals have to pick up after themselves and leave places better than they found it. We have to outpace the impact. The beauty of Lake Tahoe hides its threats. People say, ‘It’s blue. What’s the problem?’ But a lot of the problems are hard to see.”

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Unlike the litter and human-caused pressure on Tahoe’s natural resources, some of the problems are sensationalized. There’s a morbid legend around the lake that bodies get preserved in Lake Tahoe due to its cold temperatures and deep depths, with tales of mobsters and mafia depositing their victims in the emerald-blue water. 

Take, for example, the admittedly unverified account that French scuba pioneer Jacques Cousteau once dove into Lake Tahoe and stumbled across a cadre of fully-clothed Victorian corpses, and he ran from the lake never to return. To date, no other divers nor scientists have found these ill-fated Victorians, nor is there any record of Costeau ever visiting Tahoe. 

Clearly, most of the macabre tales are largely false, but not entirely: In 2011, divers found the body of a deceased scuba diver wedged into a crack 270 feet down. He’d died 17 years earlier and his body was mostly intact inside his wetsuit.

Seth Jones grew up near the ocean in Oregon, the son of two marine biologists. He’s always loved collecting the stray items that shouldn’t end up in the water, but do. He has photos of himself as a toddler picking up beer cans from the beach. 

When I email Jones to ask him about what’s underneath Lake Tahoe, he is, naturally, under the water doing a clean-up using scuba gear. He emails me back when he comes up to the surface. We speak a few hours later.

In January, Below the Blue helped extract a sailboat filled with over 3,000 pounds of garbage, fuel, paint, and other chemicals that had been abandoned and submerged near South Lake Tahoe since last summer. 

“I was so surprised the first time I dove in Lake Tahoe,” Jones, a PADI-certified SCUBA diver and marine consultant, tells me. “Tahoe is so pristine, so beautiful. But there was so much trash. The trash issue isn’t unique to Tahoe; it’s everywhere. But I was taken aback: How could this happen? Some of it is by accident—your hat blows off on the boat into the lake. But some of it is blatant dumping.” 

In 2012, Jones and his dive crew discovered eight miles of a decrepit telephone cable from AT&T’s PacBell subsidiary submerged under Lake Tahoe. The cable has been leaching toxic lead into the lake for decades and, despite many efforts, it still hasn’t been removed. “That damn cable is still in there,” Jones says. “There’s 150,000 pounds of lead in that thing.”

Over the years, Jones began seeing one major trend under the water: the debris from shoreline construction projects, everything from electrical wiring to wood decking to nuts and bolts. “How can that be a thing? Where is the oversight?” Jones says. “I don’t want to point fingers at any agency for not doing their job. But there are rules: You can’t throw things in.”

As long as TRPA has been around, intentional dumping in Lake Tahoe has been prohibited. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still happening. A new TRPA ordinance, which went into effect this January, is now requiring shoreline construction projects to take ‘before and after’ underwater photos to make sure construction debris from the building of structures like lakefront homes, boathouses and piers aren’t ending up in the water. “It’s not a perfect solution,” Jones says. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

In 2020, Jones and fellow scientist and diver Monique Rydel Fortner formed Below the Blue, a non-profit that works to remove foreign debris from bodies of water, including Lake Tahoe. Over the years, Below the Blue has removed more than 100,000 pounds of foreign objects from the lake. In January, they helped extract a sailboat filled with over 3,000 pounds of garbage, fuel, paint, and other chemicals that had been abandoned and submerged near South Lake Tahoe since last summer. 

That kind of trash is big and highly visible. But some of the trash in the lake is so small, you can’t even see it. In 2018, the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center got funding for an exploratory research project looking at the existence of microplastics in Lake Tahoe. Microplastics are shreds of plastic smaller than a grain of rice. Think items like beach toys or plastic bottles that get broken down over time or by UV rays and end up as tiny traces. Research has shown that microplastics can enter the food chain, leach chemicals, and show up in our soil and drinking water. 

“We know there are microplastics in Lake Tahoe, we’ve confirmed that,” says Katie Senft, staff research associate with the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. “So now we want to know where are they going? Are they sinking to the bottom? Are they getting consumed by clams and fish? Are the microplastics in our municipal drinking water?”

Senft is still in the midst of the microplastics research project—which, again, was halted due to COVID—but she anticipates completing the project by the end of 2022. “The levels of microplastics in Lake Tahoe are nothing to be concerned about at this point, but it should motivate people,” Senft says. “If we’re not creating trash, if we’re using reusable items, then those pieces can’t get into the landscape.”

Ask Jones for the solution to this problem and he’ll tell you it’s pretty simple. “There will always be input from humans in Lake Tahoe,” Jones says. “But we can curb that through awareness and changing our mentality. There’s a garbage can right there. Use it.”