Reprieve for big trees around Tahoe

Thursday, May 28, 1998 | 11:49 a.m.

The policy, adopted unanimously Wednesday by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, bars logging of trees 30 inches in diameter or greater - typically 150 to 170 years old - unless they pose an imminent danger.

The standard, suggested by the Tahoe Basin Forest Health Consensus Group, applies to live and even dead or dying trees in conservation and recreation land use classifications and areas immediately surrounding creeks or rivers.

Exceptions include trees that pose an unacceptable risk to people, structures or personal property. Also, severely insect-infested trees can be cut down.

Not covered by the policy, the product of more than five years of work, are trees in residential, commercial, public service or tourist areas.

TRPA staffers and the forest health consensus group opted for a two-year ordinance pending research on the extent and condition of old-growth forests in the Tahoe Basin.

The consensus group will get $50,000 a year for five years to assist in its efforts to update a comprehensive forest management strategy.

"We have looked at old growth and the history, and decided the first step was to protect old growth," said John Cobourn, a member of the consensus group and a forest hydrologist from the University of Nevada, Reno.

While the policy may not apply to residential, commercial, tourist accommodation and campground trees, it's significant because most of the trees at Tahoe are in conservation and recreation land use areas or riparian zones, Steve Chilton added.

Jeff Cutler of the League to Save Lake Tahoe, which also participated in the consensus, said the ordinance may be the first of its sort to protect old-growth timber across an area as large as the Tahoe Basin.

He also said the U.S. Forest Service had tagged more than 1,000 old-growth trees for logging on the lake's north shore this summer, but the policy will block that project.

Most of the Tahoe Basin's old-growth trees, many of them several feet in diameter, were clear-cut during the Comstock mining era of the late 1800s, but some logging has continued through the years.