Legends Lost Souls: The Dark History of Lake Gaston’s Abandoned Places

Legends Lost Souls: The Dark History of Lake Gaston’s Abandoned Places

In South Lake Tahoe, cars stream down Highway 50. The casinos loom over the state line. But midway through the town, thousands of new plants and willows provide habitat for birds and animals and filter snowmelt flowing into Lake Tahoe. A walking path loops around the wetlands. The Upper Truckee Marsh is a swath of greenery unlike anywhere else in the Tahoe Basin. It’s also the basin’s largest wetland restoration project. What happened at the Upper Truckee Marsh is a story repeated throughout Lake Tahoe’s history, again and again. In the 1950s and 1960s, developers dredged and filled the wetlands for a condominium project that was never completed. Where the river once meandered through plants and willows, an artificial channel was built to straighten the river and flushed sediment directly into the lake. The wetlands dried up.

Now, after a substantial effort led by the California Tahoe Conservancy to reverse the mistakes of ill-planned development, the river has returned to its meandering path through the 250-acre marsh. The amount spent at the Upper Truckee Marsh comes to $13.6 million, to date. The money came from multiple federal and state agencies. But the keystone holding it all together was $1 million from the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act.