The El Dorado County Planning Commission will consider the Meyers Area Plan on Nov. 9 at 8:30am.
The meeting will be in Building C at 2850 Fairlane Court, Placerville.
The El Dorado County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on the plan Dec. 12. That meeting begins at 9am in Building A, 330 Fair Lane, Placerville.
Agendas for the meetings will be available online 72 hours before the meetings.
TRPA will take up the Meyers plan in 2018.
To the community,
A gracious thank you to those who participated in the Faces of Homelessness on Oct. 26 at Valhalla, especially our primary event sponsors Temple Bat Yam and the Tahoe Chamber. It was warm inside the great room, with a fire roaring behind our presenters; however, their accounts of being homeless were quite chilling. Six adults and local middle school and high school youth provided touching accounts of their personal stories of homelessness to an audience of strangers. A common theme the adults echoed was the desire to be recognized and seen, and to find assistance with understanding what caused their homelessness.
The Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless’ mission includes promoting awareness related to the causes of homelessness. We know that homelessness can affect anyone, homeless individuals are people who matter, 26 percent of warm room guests from the 2016-17 season were employed, and 87 percent of our warm room guests from the 2016-17 were Lake Tahoe residents when they became homeless.
Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless is appreciative of the donors and sponsors of this event, including: Tahoe Chamber; Temple Bat Yam; Liz Muckerman; Dr. Kandra Yee and Mr. Andrew Zachary; William A. Downey, OD; Tiffany Hetherton Grimes, Chase International Real Estate; William B. Cherry, attorney at law; Bonnie Driscoll and Dave Carneggie; Sacramento Homeless Speaker’s Bureau; David T. Mori, photographer; Valhalla Tahoe; Chimayo’ Street Grill; Tahoe Party Rentals; Harrah’s and Harveys Lake Tahoe; and Girl Scout Troop No. 143. Special thanks to the Boys and Girls Club for use of their van to shuttle guests to the Valhalla event.
TCH is a 501(c)3 charitable organization. Donations are welcomed to aid in funding the warm room 2017-18 season. Checks can be made payable Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless and mailed to PO Box 13514, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96151. Donations can also be made on our website.
Marissa Muscat, Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless
Alpenglow Sports will host the 13th annual Winter Wildlands Alliance Backcountry Film Festival on Dec. 1 at 7pm.
It will include an award winning lineup of short films celebrating adventure, environmental consciousness, youth involvement in the outdoors, and more.
The Backcountry Film Festival is produced by Winter Wildlands Alliance as a celebration of the human-powered winter wilderness experience and a gathering place for the backcountry snowsports community. Winter Wildlands Alliance is a national nonprofit organization that partners with groups like SWEP and Tahoe XC at the local level to inspire and educate the backcountry community to protect and care for the winter landscapes. Funds raised at each screening stay in the local community to support human-powered recreation and conservation efforts, winter education and avalanche/safety programs, and to raise awareness of winter management issues.
The $10 tickets are available online. Doors open at 6:30pm. Alpenglow Sports will host the event in its newly designed in-store theater in Tahoe City, with all proceeds benefiting Sierra Watershed Education Programs.
Publisher’s note: This is one of a series of stories about Lake Tahoe area athletes who hope to compete in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea.
By Susan Wood
PARK CITY, Utah – With 16 medals under his belt, it’s difficult to imagine this self-assured family man who snowboards for a living insisting on needing to fill a void in his life.
But Nate Holland isn’t your ordinary athlete.
The Truckee snowboarder wants an Olympic medal – sooner than later. He will be 39 on Nov. 8. So, as he prepares to work toward the PyeongChang Games in South Korea in February, he’ll aim for the podium when he roars full-throttle down the snowboard cross track for the one thing that’s eluded him.
Truckee’s Nate Holland is eager to add Olympic medalist to his resume. Photo/Kathryn Reed
Even with eight X Games gold medals and three Winter Olympics appearances behind him, he came up empty-handed in 2006, 2010 and 2014. In Vancouver, he even came in fourth, with toes almost reaching the bronze podium. To this day, he laments about having control in the first three turns, then missing the notorious Turn 4.
This time, the steely look in his eyes matches his good health. And if a sense of humor contributed to the medal criteria, he’d win gold hands down.
He pokes fun at his youthful competitors’ ages, believing being the elder statesman is actually an advantage despite the sport attracting more and more young bucks.
When they’re staring at their Fitbits and describing their intakes and outtakes with energy concoctions that sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, he shrugs it off.
“I just have Advil, coffee, a hot tub and a good breakfast, man,” he quipped. Of course, a workout that inflicts some pain is incorporated in that routine. The fierce athlete knows he’s of a certain age to where he can’t “roll off the coach” and tax his body without solid conditioning.
But what his competitors may not know is the competition for Holland can be waged in a verbal exchange to psyche them out.
“One of my strengths is my mental warfare. They know that when I was competing, they were eating popsicles,” he joked during an Olympic media summit roundtable discussion earlier this fall.
He gains insight from other older athletes.
“Look at Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers,” he listed the New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers quarterbacks as examples.
The athlete who traded in a freestyle career for snowboard cross in 2006 is banking on his “closure” ability. This is huge based on the physics of his sport. A handful of snowboarders race alongside one another on a track with jumps and banks. Collisions and mishaps are frequent. And like a bike race, successful riders will draft on each other until they make their move like a slingshot around the competitors.
Besides the strategy, there’s the sheer thrill of it all.
“When you’re going 60-plus miles per hour, there’s nothing better than big air,” he said. It’s also a risky time to land wrong and blow half a year’s or half a lifetime’s training.
But that’s Holland – all or nothing.
Nate Holland, center, is the senior snowboarder for the U.S., with Alex Deilbold, left, eight years younger and Ryan Stassel 15 years his junior. Photo/Kathryn Reed
This may be it for the longtime rider from Idaho, who grew up practicing then honing his craft on a small hill near Sandpoint with his buddies.
From there, Holland said their mothers got tired of “driving us around” and hired a ski coach “as a chaperone.” The rest is history.
He moved to Squaw Valley in 1999 to pursue his snowboarding career, and has called Truckee home ever since.
“I’m taking it one day at a time, one year at a time,” he said.
So far, he likes what he sees in his chances in South Korea. The track is big to his liking, as witnessed with his test run there last year with other Olympic athletes.
“My biggest challenge is getting there and making the team,” he said. “Once I’m there, I know that track suits me.”
Plus, some could argue the adrenaline may build off the course as well.
Given the tensions with the United States between South and North Korea, he wonders whether the Games will be secure. During the test run, F16 military jets were “flying over every 15 minutes.” He made light of the spectacle then by telling his teammate: “Dude, I love you man – if it’s all over.”
These days, he questions whether his daughter should be there at the grand global event. His wife, Christen, insists their daughter see her dad compete.
“Then, I thought if we’re going down, we’re going down together,” he said. Holland was sarcastic, but honestly blunt.
He’s also sentimental when it comes to his family.
“Fatherhood is the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” he said of his 2-year-old daughter, Lux.
Still, despite the bout of parental responsibility, Holland has shown he knows how to have fun.
He not only looks forward to his time on the course. He is eager to immerse himself in the culture, informing Lake Tahoe News at a press conference that he plans to “brush up on a few more songs” for the local karaoke bar.
Holland thoroughly relishes his time with the South Korean people.
“There’s no other place like it. Every time I get on a (chair) lift, they give me a double hand wave and a big smile,” he told LTN.
By Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle
All that is left now are ashes and ruins. The terrifying walls of fire and smoke that rolled over the region are gone. The North Bay fires have almost dropped out of the news. But 42 persons are known dead, and many are still missing. We may never know what happened to them.
It’s important to remember the people who lost their lives in the fires. They were people we might well have known, maybe someone’s mother, or an uncle who moved up north of the Golden Gate to places with the beautiful names: Mark West Springs, Journey’s End, Redwood Valley, Silverado. They were all part of our family.
They say no one is really gone as long as someone remembers them. These are people we should not forget.
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post
People escaping light pollution where they live have forded an icy creek and are rediscovering the night, wandering around on mystical moist sand in the near-total darkness of this wilderness.
They covet silence and stars — splayed across a moonless sky revealing the Milky Way Galaxy — increasingly popular assets at national parks nationwide.
Darkness is increasingly rare. And land managers at U.S. national parks — joined by more and more towns — are trying to set themselves up as preserves by obtaining official “dark sky” designations. They’re hoping these will serve as protection against an onslaught of light pollution.
By Ryan Sabalow and Phillip Reese, Sacramento Bee
Victoria Vaughn doesn’t have a killer’s heart.
The 59-year-old artist and former substitute teacher, whose eyes well with tears when she gets upset, loves animals. It’s why she started raising alpacas for wool for her weaving projects in the first place.
She certainly never thought she’d want to kill one of California’s most charismatic mammals.
That changed last year when a mountain lion started coming around at night, savaging her alpacas. Vaughn and her neighbors in the rugged mountains behind Malibu’s beaches blame this single lion for wiping out more than 100 goats, alpacas, sheep and other animals, sometimes dozens at a time. He rarely ate anything from their corpses, instead leaving them to rot in their pens.
Vaughn had had enough. She obtained a permit from the state of California allowing her to kill the lion. Hers was one of about 218 such “depredation permits” issued in California every year, though typically less than half result in a kill.
Last year, livestock owners and professional trappers, houndsmen and sharpshooters killed 120 mountain lions, including five each in El Dorado and Placer counties.
By Associated Press
Governors of 19 Western states are pressing the federal government to do more to prevent the spread of damage-causing invasive mussels from infected federally managed waterways.
The Western Governors’ Association last week sent a letter urging Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to put in place by spring 2018 controls to prevent the spread of zebra and quagga mussels.
The governors are also asking that federal agencies conduct mandatory inspections and decontamination of boats leaving infected water bodies. The mussels can attach to boats and trailers and travel long distances, clogging water pipes, damaging boat motors and affecting other aquatic life.
By Ally Gravina, Moonshine Ink
It’s no secret that mountain bikes are expensive, especially for a teenage boy who grows like a weed. For Luca Robillard, 14, and his mom Annie, who live in Truckee, a June trip to Coffeebar turned into the opportunity of a lifetime when the single mom and her son ran into professional mountain biker Katerina Nash.
Annie had worked on the Mountain Bike World Cup Tour for more than 10 years, so she and Nash had mutual friends. At Coffeebar in Truckee, the three got to talking about, what else, mountain biking. Luca, who was riding his mom’s old bike at the time, had been bit by the biking bug last year when he first started competing in the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) mountain bike league for Truckee. Like teenage boys do, Luca grew out of his bike in just one season and was in desperate need for a new one as he was already signed up for the 2017 season. Nash, a decorated athlete who has competed in the Olympics five times, twice as a Nordic skier and three times as a mountain biker, had a solution — the $10,000 Orbea Oiz she raced on in the 2016 Rio Olympics, on which she placed fifth.
“I wanted this super fancy bike to be used and not sit in the garage or hang in a bike shop,” Nash said of the bicycle collecting dust in her Truckee garage. “I had a great ride on that bike in Rio and wanted to hold on to it. Since I’m still a sponsored athlete and under contract, I wasn’t really able to ride my Olympic bike due to some new sponsorship. So my Olympic bike was sadly sitting in the garage and not being used.”
The shooting Saturday in Kings Beach has been ruled a murder-suicide by Placer County sheriff’s deputies.
“The manager showed up at the woman’s room, they exchanged heated words, and he pulled a gun and shot her. The woman’s boyfriend was present in the room, and as he ran to the bathroom window to escape, he was also shot at, but wasn’t hit. A moment later, the suspect shot himself,” investigators said.
The shootings occurred the afternoon of Nov. 4 at a motel on Trout Avenue.
The names of the people involved have not been released.