cal neva

by Guy McCarthy

One of the oldest operating casinos in the western United States stands on the California-Nevada border above the northeast shores of Lake Tahoe. First built in 1927, the original Cal Neva Lodge burned to the ground a decade later, on May 17, 1937. Local historians note that with another busy summer season coming, owner Norman Blitz had 500 men work around the clock to rebuild in 30 days. Business had boomed during Prohibition. The remote Cal Neva was already popular with regulars that included an Irish-American inside stock trader, liquor supplier, and Hollywood investor from Boston named Joseph Patrick Kennedy.
Cal Neva's owners over the years included some of Kennedy's liquor customers, who enjoyed entertaining the patriarch of such far-reaching business ventures. Kennedy and his sons, including the charismatic and photogenic John Fitzgerald, were frequent guests at the Cal Neva.
Framed photos of the 1937 blaze still adorn the 70-year-old walls of what used to be the Cal Neva's main gaming room. The space is divided by a gold-and-silver line painted on the floor, through a fireplace, and up the stone chimney to show where California ends and Nevada begins. I was there one morning in late May, before a visit to Tahoe's south shore. I don't bet on cards or craps or slots. I just wanted to see this place where gamblers used to push their tables back and forth across the state line, depending on which cops came calling, and where the leader of one of the most powerful families in U.S. history liked to unwind with organized crime bosses, movie stars and prostitutes. Frank Sinatra owned the place for a time in the early 1960s. The rest of the Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe partied here too. I came for a whiff of the Kennedys.
A man and his wife were taking turns posing for photos by the fireplace, so I offered to take their picture together. We chatted a bit and it turned out they were Irish, from Dublin, staying at the Cal Neva for their son's wedding that very day at the resort. The old casino still has games of chance, but it also does a tidy business hosting weddings above the steel-blue lake. I mentioned my dad's side of the family is Irish-American. Next thing you know we're talking about Donegal and Galway and what a coincidence it is to meet here where the Kennedys came to relax.
The groom's mom pointed into another room and told me in hushed tones she'd been told there was a secret chamber or passageway that gamblers of yore could use for escape if necessary. In the next breath she invited me to the wedding reception. "Sure, you'd be welcome you would. Be here at 7. It'll be grand."
I thanked her profusely. But I had things to care of, and I was exhausted. I'd just finished driving overnight from San Bernardino. The main reason I'd come was to check with the Forest Service at the Tahoe Basin Management Unit. I wanted to ask about the light snowpack this year, and to see whether they had any heightened concerns about fire season.
I'd visited the management unit three years earlier, to report on controlled burning near Baldwin Beach on Tahoe's southwest shores. The same drought and infestation that's killed millions of trees in the San Bernardino National Forest has wrought similar damage in Tahoe forests over the past decade. This past winter had been one of the driest on record in Southern California, and the thin Sierra snowpack had already raised concerns among state water officials as far away as Los Angeles. It seemed fair and prudent to ask for a fire season update in a mountain community similar in so many ways to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear.
Later that day -- about seven weeks ago -- a Forest Service spokesman agreed the dry winter and light snowpack to date were factors in ongoing concern for fire danger. But he stressed that portraying the threat in strong terms can be counter-productive, leading to hand-wringing that could paralyze fuel reduction efforts. It sounded like he didn't want to scare people. In a sense, he was right. Residents had been warned for years. Why start a panic? The spokesman gave me a copy of a document titled "Stewardship Fireshed Assessment."
I didn't have time to stay. I had people to see in Las Vegas. My last glimpse of the lake was before sundown, in my rearview mirror.
A month later, a wind-driven blaze destroyed more than 250 homes and businesses near the south shore. Officials called it the worst disaster in the Tahoe basin since whites first settled there in the mid-19th century.

http://lang.sbsun.com/projects/fireflood/P4/BN30TAHOE.asp

san gorgonio wilderness

by Guy McCarthy

It was pitch-dark just after 3 a.m. when I started up a trail near the south fork of the Santa Ana River. Dim light from my headlamp guided my way on the path.
In my pack I carried snowshoes, a shovel, and an avalanche probe - just in case. It was mid-March, several months ago. Winter and spring had been dry. Even in high country above 10,000 feet, snow was sure to be thin compared to recent years.
I’m no scientist – just someone who spends time in the mountains. I figured one way to see how dry it’s been would be to visit a place where snow two years ago was 12 feet deep. Whatever it looked like now, it would mean something.
In a pocket I carried photos from a day in early May 2005. One showed a colleague standing in a vertical pit he’d dug in snow below Little Charlton Peak. In the picture, he reached over his head as far as he could with the shovel. The blade barely touched the edge of the pit.
The pictures also showed a twisted pine rising out of the snow next to the pit. The lifeless tree would be my landmark.
It was still dark when I headed off-trail into a tangled meadow littered with scores of downed trees. A lot of snow had fallen on slopes above in the winter of 2004-05 - enough to unleash avalanches that snapped thick trees more than 40 feet tall.
In the distance I could make out a profile of ridges and summits that form the highest mountain spine in Southern California. I headed for what looked like the shoulder of Little Charlton Peak. By first light, three hours from the trailhead, the low-angle slope steepened.
Staying off slick patches of ice and snow, I leaned into the grade and used steel-tipped poles to keep traction on shattered rock and loose dirt. Gasping for breath as the altitude increased, stepping slowly from tree to tree, I looked up occasionally to where tall evergreens gave way to shorter, gnarly limber pines.
Relief came about 9 a.m. when the slope eased to a level knoll, a few hundred feet below the summit. The map indicated roughly 10,300 feet above sea level.
A twisted tree stood where I thought it would, though it looked taller. I pulled out the photos. Details matched. It was the same tree.
The ground at the base of the tree was bare rock and dirt. A tiny patch of snow covered a few pinecones. I looked up at where the soles of my boots had trudged on snow 22 months before.
State water officials stopped measuring snowpack in the Santa Ana River watershed in the 1990s. Comparing May 2005 and March 2007 at the same spot just shows there was a lot of snow two years ago, and little snow now.
Whether snowpack this year has anything to do with global warming - and what it means for mountain forests still blighted by drought and infestation - is for scientists and politicians to debate.
Simpler observations indicate what we might see this summer and fall.
Fire season nearly covered the calendar the past 12 months. At lower elevations this spring, from Hesperia to the Hollywood Hills, wind-driven fires have already chewed through acres of chaparral.
Earlier in March near Lake Arrowhead, San Bernardino County officials celebrated cutting down a symbolic millionth “hazard” tree. No one knows for sure how many more millions of dead trees are still out there, in the nation’s most urbanized mountain forest.