Steph Curry is ready to add to his hardware. Coming off this week’s NBA championships, the Gold State Warrior has committed to play in the annual American Century Championship next month.

Joining Curry at Edgewood Tahoe will be his father, Dell; just like last year.

Also returning is entertainer Justin Timberlake.

This will be Curry’s fifth time to play the ACC. His best finish was in 2013 when he placed fourth. Harrah’s Lake Tahoe sportsbook has him at 20:1 odds to win this year.

The tournament is July 11-16 in Stateline.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

Tahoe Institute for Natural Science and the U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit will host Wild Tahoe Weekend, June 24-25.

The sixth annual Native Species Festival is that Saturday from 10am-4pm. This festival is a  way to spend the day outdoors and learn about the many native plant and animal species of the Lake Tahoe Basin. Attend walks led by field professionals and explore educational booths from various public and nonprofit agencies.

Participants will experience frequent visits from Lulu the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout and Smokey Bear.

On Sunday, TINS will host the seventh annual Lake Tahoe Bird Festival from 10am-3:30pm. The event includes hourly guided bird walks along the Rainbow Trail, information and presentations on migratory birds, bird crafts and games, bird house building, live birds, and more. 

The event is at the Taylor Creek Visitor Center on the South Shore just off  Highway 89.

The pier installation at Ski Run Marina was finished June 14. Photo/Kathryn Reed

By Kathryn Reed

A new era in the tourism boat industry at Lake Tahoe starts today with the Safari Rose’s maiden voyage from Ski Run Marina.

Marina owner Elie Alyeshmerni has paid for a new, longer dock in order to accommodate the vessel that until now had been based at the Tahoe Keys Marina.

For years he has been looking to install a pier that would be unique to Tahoe in terms of being environmentally superior, aesthetically pleasing and functional.

Work started earlier this spring, with everything being completed on June 14.

“It’s like a Lego set. You put it together and it can be changed,” Alyeshmerni told Lake Tahoe News of the new dock. “The nice thing about this is that it’s floating and goes where the water is.”

Arnold Finn of Global Dock Marine System approaches a finger float that was place in the lake in May. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Global Dock Marine System designed and installed the dock. It’s a green system, as in being environmentally friendly for the water and shore. It is made from recycled material. It’s polyethylene plastic that should last 50 years. (The company had been based in Florida, but is relocating to Reno.)

Twelve steel beams were installed to accommodate the 126-foot-long, 12-foot-wide pier. A 40-foot-long bridge connects the old dock to the new floating pier. It shoots to the west at a 30-degree angle.

There are no hinges. Three-quarter-inch steel rods tie it together. It was all assembled with hand tools.

Special bollards are on the dock that are better for boats. Photo/Kathryn Reed

“Once it’s in the water it is inert. Nothing can leach out and go into the lake,” Arnold Finn, part owner of the dock company, told Lake Tahoe News as he started work in May.

Each vertical float can support 3,600 pounds, so it would be possible for a vehicle to drive on it. Each float is 8 feet by 4 feet.

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency granted a permit for this project on a temporary, one-year basis. A one-time extension is possible for another six months.

This recycled plastic is what is floating in the water after being put together like a puzzle. Photo/Kathryn Reed

The Tahoe Queen had operated out of this South Lake Tahoe marina since 1983. During the drought when the lake level got low it could no longer dock there. Aramark, the owners of the paddle-wheeler, turned it into scrap after it caught fire last August.

When the boat no longer existed Alyeshmerni told Aramark its lease would not be renewed. That company had not honored its contract to dredge the marina nor did it operate the required number days.

“As you know, the Tahoe Queen was damaged beyond repair due to a fire last year while it was being renovated. We are in the process of looking at future vessels to replace the Tahoe Queen and hope to look at future opportunities at Ski Run Marina,” Dave Freireich of Aramark told Lake Tahoe News, even though he acknowledged the company no longer has a lease with Ski Run. 

Steve Dunham now has a 10-year lease at Ski Run, with an option for another 10 years. He brought the Safari Rose to Tahoe in 2003. It is an 80-foot-long mahogany and teak yacht that will operate in the summer season. 

Dunham will be using a steel boat year-round, which will be docked across from the Safari Rose later this summer. One can carry 70 passengers, the other 110. Both will operate during peak times.

The floating dock on June 13 before being put in its “permanent” home. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Ski Run is permitted to have 1,950 passengers a day, but does not intend to even reach half that number.

The hull of these boats is V-shaped, unlike the Queen’s.

“Basically most boats other than the Tahoe Queen (could not) operate off of the (old) Ski Run pier because it is short and the shelf is relatively shallow. The Queen was able to pull up to the existing pier head to allow for loading and unloading, where most other boats have to pull up to the side of the pier for loading and unloading and is not feasible,” Tom Lotshaw, spokesman for TRPA, told Lake Tahoe News. “In order to make the pier serviceable, without an extension, dredging would have been requested by the applicant.”

If dredging is required in the future, that is now the marina owner’s responsibility.

The extension makes the marina as a whole less congested when it comes to boat traffic

Alyeshmerni hopes to make the pier a permanent addition to his marina.

By Simon Worrall, National Geographic

When we first see Elizabeth Bennett, in the 2005 film of “Pride and Prejudice,? she is walking through a field, surrounded by birdsong and trees. Nature, for Jane Austen’s heroines, is always a source of solace and inspiration. And as Florence Williams shows in her new book, “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative,” modern technology is now revealing what goes on in our brains when we step outdoors—and why nature is so good for us.

When National Geographic caught up with Williams by phone in Washington, D.C., she explained why even a house plant can make us feel good, why the practice of “forest bathing” is now supported by the Japanese government, and how trees can lower the murder rate in our cities.

The Mappiness project was developed in the U.K. by a happiness researcher called George MacKerron. It’s a brilliant idea, which tries to capture in real time what people are doing and how it makes them feel. I downloaded this app onto my phone and used it for about a year.

The way it works is, it pings you at random times a couple of times a day and gives you a list of options. Are you driving, doing childcare, cooking, hanging out with friends? Are you outside or inside and how are you feeling? Like, “I feel happy, not so happy.”

Read the whole story

By Colette Harris, Outside

In 2017, Adrian Ballinger of Olympic Valley was determined to stand on the top of the world without the help of supplemental oxygen. He had spent the better part of a decade guiding people to their Everest dreams as founder of Alpenglow Expeditions and had already summited six times with supplemental oxygen. But, Ballinger says, Everest is all about finding your limits, and for him, that meant making the ascent sans oxygen bottles.

He and his climbing partner, Cory Richards, first attempted to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen in 2016. Richards was successful. Ballinger was forced to turn back just 200 feet shy of the top. But 2017 was different. Ballinger and Richards, both Eddie Bauer-sponsored alpinists, summited Mount Everest together, and this time it was Ballinger who made it without supplemental oxygen.

Ballinger had started training for that moment six months in advance. But how, exactly, does one prepare for arguably the most daunting physical challenge on the planet? We asked him.

Read the whole story

Playing tennis in Lake Tahoe can be challenging because it’s not a year-round sport in the basin. This means taking lessons – private or group– is the best way to get the rust off from winter. Instruction is also going to help those who want to advance their game. 

Dave Nostrant, who has been teaching for decades, is in his first year as the head pro at Zephyr Cove Tennis Club. He is filling up the calendar with an array of clinics for various levels.

Also giving lessons at ZCTC is Ginny Unger.

Here are highlights on what is being offered at Zephyr Cove:

·       Mondays – 9-10:30am, women’s 3.0-3.5 drill clinic – Ginny Unger

·       Mondays – 10:30am-noon, women’s 3.5+ drill clinic – Unger

·       Tuesdays – 9-10:30am, 3.0-3.5 women’s and men’s drill clinic – Nostrant

·       Wednesdays – 10-11am, 4.0 and up, women’s and men’s super drills – Nostrant

·       Thursdays – 9-10:30am, all levels women and men, cardio tennis – Nostrant

·       Saturdays – 9-10:30am, men’s clinic, all levels – Nostrant.

For more info, go online.

Private lessons also are available from Nostrant (970.496.6277 or davenostrant@yahoo.com) or Unger (775.901.6713 or ginnyunger@yahoo.com). Nostrant also offers video analysis, same-day stringing, and multi-day camps. For camp information, go online. For youth schedule, check this link.

Membership to ZCTC is $85 for the year. For more information, go online.

By Regina Garcia Cano, AP

The casino industry’s largest lobbying group in the U.S. is ramping up its efforts to repeal a 25-year-old federal law that bans sports betting in most states.

The American Gaming Association on Monday announced the creation of a coalition involving organizations of attorneys general and police, policymakers and others to advocate for the repeal of the ban that the industry says has fueled the $150 billion illegal sports betting market.

The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 bans sports betting in every state except Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Oregon. Legal sports gambling is allowed in those states because they had approved some form of wagering before the federal law went into effect.

Read the whole story

Summer is a great time of year to explore the cosmos. Photo/Ryan Berendsen

By Tony Berendsen

In early June with the last gasp of spring anticipating summer at Lake Tahoe a hazy band begins to show near the eastern horizon in the early evening. At first its presence is only noticed by veteran star gazers, but by the arrival of mid-summer, the glorious milky path of our galaxy is undeniable and stretches from the southern horizon across the zenith to Cassiopeia in the northern night sky.

The immensity of the view of our galaxy fills the heart and mind with the amazing wonder of the cosmos. To see it for the first time is as breathtaking as the next time. To comprehend its grandeur perplexes our perception of our existence. Carl Sagan once said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know its self … we are star stuff.” When gazing at the Milky Way on a summer night at Lake Tahoe you are seeing the visual proof of his statement with your very eyes.

The Milky Way is a huge collection of gas, dust, planets, and stars. It is a stellar birthplace and graveyard, so large it would take a spaceship 100,000 years at light speed to travel from end to end. One galactic day, the amount of time it takes to spin once on its axis, is 250 million years.

If we were to travel in a spaceship to its center from the planet Earth, we would head toward the stars of the constellation Sagittarius just above the southern horizon, pass by them, and continue for another 25,000 years.

As mind boggling as wrapping your head around the view of our galaxy’s hazy band is for us, so is the fact that all the single stars we see – every one of them – is within the Milky Way. They are still incredibly distant, but close enough for our eyes see them a single points of light.

The closest star to the sun is a mere 4.25 light years away. In miles, that’s a distance of 25 trillion miles, so distant that there is no disk to see, only a small thin stream of photons.

I’ve always been fascinated by the blinking on and off of the single stars as seen while walking through the trees of Tahoe at night. Imagine, thin little pine needles blocking the light a star.

I wrote a poem the morning after a Star Tour at Northstar a few years ago remembering how the stars disappeared and reappeared during my walk among the pine trees. For star gazers the trees of Tahoe can be annoyance, blocking the view of stars, galaxies, moon, and planets, but they stand to demonstrate the immense distances to the stars.

Elders

I have from time to time

Walked amongst the pine

Not by warmth of Sol

But of lights of old

Those twinkling points up there

I see them every year

Like elders overlooking

And, yes I know how we are

To put in groups

Lay boundaries as to say

They may wander, ever stray

But we have seen them

Yes we have

Wander very far indeed

And still they seem to stay

I wonder if they play

A game we’ll never see

For a hundred lives of ours

Will barely catch a million miles

So I let them out of bounds

While I walk amongst the pine

And call them by their single names

Sometimes I play an elders’ game

I’ll block their sight with a single limb

And let them see when I move again.

Tony Berendsen runs Tahoe Star Tours. He may be reached at 775.232.0844 or tony@tahoestartours.com.

Wilderness enthusiasts, healthcare professionals, first responders, outdoor educators, and medical students can put their emergency medical knowledge to the test in the second annual Tahoe MedWAR Challenge on Sept. 9. 

MedWAR, which stands for Medical Wilderness Adventure Race, is a daylong adventure race that combines physical challenges and wilderness medicine. In teams of four, participants navigate, trek, mountain bike, and kayak on an adventure course in the national forest of the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. Along the way near Fallen Leaf Lake and Emerald Bay, teams encounter “victims” in mock wilderness medicine scenarios. Before moving on, teams must work together to assess, stabilize, and as appropriate, treat their victims.

Barton Health medical staff create the course and organize the event.

The race is designed for participants with or without a medical background.

The challenge costs $350 for a team of four people and includes a pre-event lecture, kayak rental, gift bag, team shirt, and a post-race dinner. Space is limited to 20 teams. Go online for more info or to register.

By Matt Hansen, Powder

When news surfaced recently that K2 and several of skiing’s most popular brands would be sold from a publicly traded corporation to a private equity firm this month, it ended months of speculation and uncertainty about the future of some of the sports’ most storied companies.

But it also created a shift in the wintersports market. According to fresh numbers from Snowsport Industries America (SIA), 10 percent of all wintersports sales now go to private equity firms, versus 60 percent held by private companies and 30 percent by publicly traded corporations.

At the end of May, Kohlberg and Company, a private equity firm specializing in “middle market investing,” entered an agreement to pay Newell Brands $240 million for K2, Volkl, Marker, Dalbello, Madshus, Line, Ride, Full Tilt, BCA, Atlas, and Tubbs. As such, it becomes the largest private equity holder in the snowsports market, according to SIA. Not part of the deal was Marmot, which earned $100 million in retail last season and continues to be part of Newell Brands.

Read the whole story