Catch up on the current issues the Tahoe Area Group is watching and addressing through our ongoing protection of the natural environment and resources of the Lake Tahoe basin and Truckee River drainage. 

Laurel Ames: It is with great sadness that we report the death of our dear friend, mentor and longest running Executive Committee member, Laurel Ames, at the end of May, 2025. The following is a tribute to Laurel:

A Tribute to Laurel Ames

We mourn and celebrate the most important conservation advocate of Tahoe's 20th century: Laurel Ames.

From her earliest days living in the Tahoe Basin, Laurel was captivated by the Lake and anything to be done outside. Growing up in the Alpen Sierra House on 89, Laurel studied, loved and learned each of the conifers, shrubs and wildflowers. In her eight decades living here in South Shore, she walked every trail, some of them hundreds of times. She climbed all of the Basin’s summits, including Tallac and Freel, many times. Laurel knew the peaks and the passes like “the back of her hand”.

Each step she tread and ski run she made was a learning and loving experience that she could bring to her mission when the time came: dedicating her professional endeavors to preserving the quality of environment and life in Lake Tahoe. Her work entailed engagement with dozens of entities, employment by (and nurturing of) several key environmental protection groups and hundreds of issues spanning 60 years. These included active leadership roles with the League to Save Lake Tahoe, the Sierra Nevada Alliance and the Tahoe Area Group of the Sierra Club (TAG).

Early on she helped bring public attention to the environmental challenges facing Lake Tahoe as a young journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle during the formation of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA). She when on to serve as a planner for TRPA and later led the League to Save Lake Tahoe for 12 years, where her leadership help shape lasting conservation policy.

Her environmental advocacy first emerged as a reaction to development of the Tahoe Keys, dredging and filling the essential and largest wetland on the Lake. Over the past twenty years, Laurel was central to the work of the TAG, chairing its Conservation Committee. In this capacity she sought to protect the lake by limiting logging in stream environment zones, advocating for a strong TRPA Basin Plan, resisting use of herbicides in Basin waterways and the Lake, mitigating environmental impacts of proliferating piers and buoys……and many more initiatives. In recognition of her advocacy, the Mother Lode Chapter of the Sierra Club celebrated Laurel while she was alive by presenting her the Tahoe Guardian Award at their Awards Banquet in August, 2024. She received this award in recognition of her sixty years of being “a persistent and fearless activist and representative of Sierra Club values as she promoted exploring, enjoying and protecting the Tahoe Basin”.

The community offers love and tremendous thanks to Laurel Ames. If she had lived in an earlier millennium she would surely have been known as the Great Warrior. May the Spirit of Laurel journey safely to her next life undertaking.