Fire damages Lake Tahoe Pizza Company in South Lake Tahoe. Photo/LTN

Men were on the roof of Lake Tahoe Pizza Company in South Lake Tahoe this morning assessing the damage from an overnight fire.

The doors to the restaurant were covered with caution tape on Aug. 20 and no one could be reached for comment.

Lake Tahoe fire officials said the blaze started at 11:09pm Monday. The fire was contained to the attic area. The extent of the damage is unknown.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

 — Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Darryl Slater, Star-Ledger

South Lake Tahoe is a charming place. But it loses a great deal of appeal when you spend days pouring concrete, as Garrett McIntyre did six years ago.

McIntyre was still seeking his big break in professional football in 2007, after he finished his first season with the Arena Football League’s San Jose SaberCats. He went undrafted in 2006, signed with Seattle, bounced in the preseason to Arizona, then Tennessee, and landed in the AFL, one of the sport’s last stops before a player accepts a 9-to-5 life.

Garrett McIntyre should see plenty of playing time with the Jets this season. Photo/William Perlman/Star-Ledger

McIntyre majored in construction management at Fresno State, and as he began to ponder his real world options, he decided to pour foundations back home. He hated it.

“It made me not want to get a real job,” he said. “Working with concrete is not fun, man. It is not.”

The Jets gave McIntyre a chance in 2011, signing him to a three-year, $1.41 million contract, with a $15,000 signing bonus. He made the team and has stuck, with three starts in 2011 and four in 2012, when he made 3½ sacks.

With rush outside linebacker Quinton Coples now sidelined indefinitely because of a right ankle injury, McIntyre is getting another chance in a career that he refused to let die.

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• Phyllis Shafer, Lake Tahoe Community College’s art department chair, is featured in Western Art and Architecture magazine.

• This is the weekly Sierraroadwork schedule for Caltrans.

• The El Dorado County Grand Jury is looking for things to investigate. Submit an idea to: Grand Jury, P.O. Box 472, Placerville, CA 95667.

• Ready for snow? Check out 12-year-old Aspen Spora of Truckee who lives and rides at Northstar. Next up, Spora will be joining the Wasatch Project snow support program, skiing Colorado and Utah during early season, then headed back to Mt. Hood for more epic jump and rail sessions.

More than half of the American Fire burning in the Tahoe National Forest is contained.

Firefighters expect to have the fire fully contained on Sept. 1. It has burned 14,822 acres in rugged terrain near Foresthill.

Efforts have held the fire in place along Deadwood Ridge and the Foresthill Divide Road on the western flank of the fire. The fire remains active on the eastern and southern ends.

Cloud cover on Monday helped firefighters, but a red flag warning remains in effect until 11pm Wednesday.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

 — Lake Tahoe News staff report

The inaugural Kiwanis Community Fair will be Aug. 30-Sept. 1.

The idea is to create a family event to bring the community and visitors together to support the youth of the South Shore.

The Community Fair will take place in the lower parking lot of Heavenly Mountain Resort. Activities include carnival rides, craft fair booths, cooking contest, jam contest,floral displays and more.

There is no entrance fee.

The event is hosted by Kiwanis, Optimist, Boys & Girls Club, Choices for Children, Live Violence Free and Tahoe Turning Point to benefit local service clubs and nonprofits that provide services to families and children in South Lake Tahoe.

For more information and to purchase advance carnival tickets, call (530) 541.4594.

By Kathryn Reed

INCLINE VILLAGE – Under skies as clear as the near shore, nearly 700 people gathered Monday at Sand Harbor for what was essentially a bipartisan rally to keep protecting Lake Tahoe.

Former Vice President Al Gore returned to the Lake Tahoe Environmental Summit after having launched the initial one in 1997 with then President Bill Clinton.

Former Vice President Al Gore talks climate change Aug. 19 at the Lake Tahoe Environmental Summit. Photo/Kathryn Reed

While speaker after speaker touted how the lake is clearer – having improved 11 feet since the first summit – what was not addressed was the near shore. Much of Tahoe’s shoreline is murky. And the smoke in the air from the American Fire that is 30 miles away was adding to the degradation as particles filtered down.

Sudeep Chandra, professor at UNR, was on Capitol Public Radio the morning of the summit. He spoke of how clarity is measured in the middle of the lake, not at the water’s edge.

He told CPR the health of the near shore has declined dramatically in the last 15 years.

“We are also talking about the dramatic loss of biodiversity at the bottom of the lake,” Chandra told CPR. “It could be an early warning sign for the overall health of the lake.”

He added, “We don’t have good monitoring for the near shore.”

Chandra told the radio station there has been a 72 percent decline of all native species on the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Reasons are related to climate change, less light coming through and more invasive species in the lake.

Climate and biological related projects are planned to get a better handle on the near shore problems.

He and others believe climate change is here to stay. And Gore believes it can be stopped.

“Today we will put 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere as though it’s an open sewer,” Gore told the audience of nearly 700. (Usually a couple hundred people attend these summits.) “Here in Lake Tahoe an increase in air temperature means more precipitation that falls as rain and not snow. Snowsports are threatened. Ski resorts all over the world are threatened.”

He noted that the centerpiece of Lake Tahoe’s economy is tourism and that without snow and a pristine lake, that economy evaporates along with the snow and clarity.

Scientists predict the air temperature in the basin could increase by as much as 10 degrees in this century.

Gore said as temps increase in the West the number of wildfires will dramatically rise.

“Eleven states are fighting 35 gigantic fires as we meet here today,” he said.

While Gore said Tahoe should invite the world for a summit to show what it is doing, he never offered solutions for global warming. Nor did anyone else.

What the senators and governors from California and Nevada all pledged was to work together and keep spending money for the sake of Lake Tahoe. Nearly $2 billion has been spent in 15 years on projects to improve Lake Tahoe’s clarity, with another $415 million sought through the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act.

The Cash Only band is going to defend its title of South Shore’s Best Sunset Band on Aug. 23 at Lakeview Commons in South Lake Tahoe. The local band will take the stage between 7 and 7:40pm.

However, the competition will begin at 3pm with Black Star Safari, followed by Little Town at 4pm, Deep Fried Mojo at 5pm, and 4 Piece Puzzle at 6pm.

This is the 2nd annual South Shore’s Best Sunset Band Fundraiser for CASA El Dorado.

But it costs nothing to listen. The money raised comes from people voting with their wallets to determine the winning the band. The cash collected then goes to CASA.

There will also be a live auction, raffle, beer and wine, and food.

Bike valet and parking at the recreation center are all free.

To the community,

I wanted to thank Liana Zambresky for her eloquent article in the August Tahoe Mountain News about healthy forests (thank you Carla Ennis, too, for your letter-to-the editor). I lack the scientific expertise to back Ms. Zambresky up, but I share her sentiments.

I have just come back from walking through the latest destruction zone that I used to call the sacred land of Fallen Leaf. I shed many tears, got sick to my stomach, shed some more tears and came home. I am cried out for the moment, but my heart is heavy and hurting. I sorrow for the friends that I will never see again and exchange the joy of being alive with, the once stately grove of trees. I sorrow for all the countless birds and animals that were nourished and sheltered by those trees. I feel sorry for my own loss, the shade, the peace, the sense of secret paths though you were close to a road. I sorrow deeply for the earth that misses her children and has had Her land savagely destroyed.

I have heard this called fuel reduction with the idea that it will save it from a future fire and improve its health. I walked through the Angora area after the fire, I live across from Seneca Pond on the other side of North Upper Truckee and my parents lost their home on Mule Deer. I understand the deep pain that fire cost our Tahoe residents and I mourned the forest then, too. But I sure don’t understand getting rid of a whole forest because you want to prevent it from burning in the future or think you are making it healthier by doing that.

I have heard there are good reasons for this practice, but I can’t seem to wrap my mind around them in the face of the visual evidence of what is left behind.

I am a minister at Unity at the Lake and it is very important to me to be a bridge builder and see/hear someone else’s point of view. When I can’t see the other side, then I know I have work to do … to remember that there are people behind the point-of-view and that those people have dreams, fears and people they care about … just like me. So I’m trying here. And yet my heart still cries and asks who will speak for the trees, the birds, the animals when they can’t.

I know that when people are on opposite sides of an issue it often is hard to find common ground; everybody just feels they are so “right”. And I certainly feel that way now but that doesn’t help the situation or our community.

Ms. Zambresky wrote that we are two years into an eight-year cycle of these kinds of projects. What I would love to do is take a walk with everyone in the Forest Service who believes in this plan (and still says it was carried out properly) and walk though the few remaining of my favorite walks and then walk through the newly created “healthy” forest. I believe we could get beyond words, agendas, computer models and plans and perhaps the sacred heart of the forest, although It beats in fewer places now, would talk to us … be the bridge between us. Perhaps you would light up from the inside in a way you’d never experienced before. We could share something special, and then I could listen to your concerns. And together we might be able to work at a solution, probably not totally to my satisfaction, probably not totally to yours. But maybe, just maybe we could come away knowing we worked on something together, perhaps a way that is less extreme and that doesn’t leave a divided community and a dead (OK my opinion, so, at the very least uninviting) forest.

Hillary Bittman, South Lake Tahoe

By Berne Broudy, Outside

If you’re worried about your knees or setting a new personal record, first take a look at your pack. For every pound of weight you cut from your body, you reduce the pressure on your knees by 4 pounds, a 2005 study in the Journal of Arthritis and Rheumatism found.

Lose 10 pounds of weight, and you’ll reduce the load on your body by 48,000 pounds of pressure per mile you walk. Translation: cut weight from your pack and your knees will thank you.

Luckily, weight loss doesn’t have to come from your waistline. Reduce your pack weight and not only will you place less stress on your joints but you’ll cover more ground with the same amount of effort and feel better when you roll into camp.

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Political leaders from California and Nevada gather at Sand Harbor on Aug. 19, 2013, for the annual Lake Tahoe Environmental Summit. Former Vice President Al Gore, who was at the initial summit in 1997, was the keynote speaker this year.