The El Dorado County Department of Transportation and El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department are applying to the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division for the 2010-11 grants program for funding of projects on the Rubicon Trail.

The grants applications will be posted on the OHMVR website on March 8. To review the grant applications submitted, go online.

The 30-day public review and comment period for the 2010-11 Grants and Cooperative Agreement Program begins March 7 and ends April 4.

Better get out there ahead of the storm.

Here is the ski report from Curtis Fong, the Guy from Tahoe.

Fill up the gas tank on the snowblower because the white stuff is coming back.

The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter storm watch for the Lake Tahoe Basin from Thursday afternoon through late Friday night. Forecasters are calling for moderate to heavy snow Thursday evening through late Friday night, with the heaviest snowfall likely Friday morning.

More snow is coming to Lake Tahoe this week. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Expect 1 to 2 feet at lake level, with 2 to 4 feet above 7,000 feet.

Winds will be out of the southwest, with gusts up to 40 mph and ridge gusts up to 70 mph.

By Matt Weiser, Sacramento Bee

Buried in the Obama administration’s $3.7 trillion federal budget proposal is a gem for the Sacramento region. It would provide $2.7 million for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to continue managing lands in the footprint of the long-dormant Auburn dam project.

The money is more than double this year’s funding.

In the 1960s, the bureau purchased about 40,000 acres in the north and middle forks of the American River to build an Auburn dam – later scuttled by cost and earthquake concerns.

For decades, the bureau has paid the California Department of Parks and Recreation to operate the Auburn State Recreation Area on those lands as an interim public benefit.

Read the whole story

Adaptive Action Sports hosting disabled military personnel and veterans at a three-day “Pipeline Learn to Ride and Race” Feb. 24-26 at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

The goal is to develop their snowboarding skills.

The camp, built on the framework of past successful AAS camps, is intended as the first in a series of AAS snowboard camps to be in South Lake Tahoe on an annual basis for Wounded Warriors.

One of AAS’s goals is to expand the series to include non-military disabled individuals, eventually resulting in development of a permanent home base for Adaptive Action Sports and adaptive snowboarding in the South Tahoe community.

With the expectation that Adaptive Snowboarding will soon be accepted as a Paralympic event, AAS hopes to provide adaptive veteran and other adaptive athletes a training pipeline with a potential end-goal of inclusion on a future US Paralympic Snowboard Team.

Seven disabled veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will be attending the weekend camp.

To learn more about the AAS mission and our upcoming program at Sierra-at-Tahoe, go online.

By Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times

When it comes to water management, California Assemblyman Jose Solorio focuses on three C’s: capture, conservation and conveyance. Of those, the state has been most successful with conservation, Solorio says, but it hasn’t been nearly as adept at capturing rain and snowfall and conveying it to where it needs to be.

In an effort to reduce California’s demand on limited drinking-water supplies and to minimize the amount of polluted storm water that flows into the ocean, Solorio has written AB 275, also known as the Rainwater Capture Act of 2011. Introduced last week, the bill would authorize property owners to install different types of rainwater-capture devices, including rain barrels that could provide water for outdoor gardens and other systems that would allow captured water to be used indoors for non-potable uses, such as toilet flushing.

“California has traditionally relied on expensive and large public works projects to capture and store water, such as dams and groundwater basins and other forms of above-surface water-storage projects, but those projects are large and expensive,” Solorio said. “It’s time we start thinking about what we can individually do in our own residential properties, as well as what businesses might do, in terms of capturing water on property voluntarily.”

Read the whole story

By Dan Hinxman, Reno Gazette-Journal

Alpine skier Nicole Brill should be swooshing in silence down a Slovakian slope today.

She knows it’s loud when her skis get going fast. Deaf since she was about 1, hearing aids give her the ability to pick up sounds. She combines the aids and her partial ability to read lips to turn sounds into words. She asks only that you enunciate clearly.

But when she skis in the Deaflympics — at speeds of more than 60 mph in the downhill — she and her fellow competitors hear nothing. No wind, no skis grinding on ice. In competition, athletes are not allowed to wear hearing aids.

It’s a sensory experience that able-hearing skiers can only imagine.

And in this quadrennial Deaflympics, it’s something Brill can only imagine, too. On Feb. 11, three days before she was scheduled to fly to Slovakia, the 17th Deaflympics (formerly the World Games for the Deaf) were canceled.

Brill, a 35-year-old from Reno who works for the U.S. Forest Service in South Lake Tahoe and was the only U.S. woman scheduled to compete (along with three U.S. men), found out in an e-mail she received on her phone while training at Mt. Rose.

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Cold and sunny with lots of snow on the slopes throughout Lake Tahoe.

Here is the ski report from Curtis Fong, the Guy from Tahoe.

By Matt Weiser, Sacramento Bee

California wildlife officials seek public comments on a proposal to add the mountain yellow-legged frog to the state endangered species list.

The request comes in response to a petition last year by the Center for Biological Diversity. A similar petition under the federal Endangered Species Act resulted in the species becoming a candidate for listing in 2003.

The state petition covers both the northern and southern variants of the species, which the center maintains has been eliminated from 93 percent of its habitat. It blames the state Department of Fish and Game’s historic practice of stocking Sierra Nevada lakes with non-native trout, which eat young frogs.

Read the whole story

Presidential seal of approval for today being a great day on the slopes.

Here is the ski report from Curtis Fong, the Guy from Tahoe.