Lake Tahoe’s Bear Boom

Lake Tahoe, “the jewel of the Sierra Nevada,” is an unusually clear, deep alpine lake that is twelve miles wide and twenty-two miles long. It straddles two states: California on the west shore, which is damper and greener, and Nevada on the east, which gives way, almost immediately, to high desert. “A kind of heaven,” John Muir called Tahoe, in 1878, after raving about the diameter of its snowflakes and “lusty exercise on snow-shoes.” Tahoe is about a third of the size of Yosemite National Park, yet attracts three times the number of annual visitors. During the pandemic, several thousand people, including a lot of Bay Area tech types, fully relocated to the lake, joining seventy thousand or so locals. Tahoe couldn’t handle it. The traffic, the noise, the illegal parking—the trash. Last year’s Fourth of July crowds left an unprecedented four tons of garbage on the beaches alone. Fodor’s named Lake Tahoe one of the world’s “natural attractions that could use a break in order to heal and rejuvenate,” and suggested that outsiders avoid visiting for a while. The other day in Tahoe, I learned a new word: “touron,” a combination of “tourist” and “moron.”

The Tahoe basin is also home to one of the continent’s densest populations of black bears, Ursus americanus. The species flourished after its chief predator, the grizzly, was extirpated there, in the early twentieth century. Grizzlies are not to be fucked with. Black bears, which can be brown, reddish, or blond, are defensive and lazy, smart and resilient, ravenous and opportunistic. All they really want to do is eat. They lived mostly on grasses, berries, and insects until humans showed up. Why spend all day dismantling a yellow-jacket nest for the paltry reward of larvae when there’s dumpster pizza to be had?

Even if something is not edible, bears will try to eat it—scented air fresheners, cherry lip balm. The black bear is the terrestrial equivalent of a shark, the sharpest nose in the ocean; its sense of smell is seven times better than a bloodhound’s, several thousand times better than a human’s. A bear that detects so much as a Tic Tac will remember the location of that score forever—and teach it to her cubs. “Think about the wrappers in your car, the candy in your pocket, in your backpack, in your tent, the stuff behind your garage door—they can smell all of that, even if it’s unopened cans, unopened wine bottles, beer bottles,” a California State Parks employee said in September, at Tahoe’s inaugural Bear Fest, a public event about how not to be stupid in bear country.

It is illegal to feed a bear, no matter how cuddly or sickly it looks, or how strong the impulse to Instagram. Unsecured trash exposes bears to the intestinal torments of metal and glass. One recent afternoon, a bear advocate named Kathi Zollinger and I were walking in the woods at the south end of Lake Tahoe when she pointed out what resembled a giant chocolate-oatmeal cookie with silver sprinkles—bear poo, flecked with tinfoil. Bear scat also often contains plastic. (Bears “aren’t opening the bag gingerly to get what’s in it,” Zollinger said.) Dozens of bears are hit by cars every year in Tahoe. A bear that gets comfortable around humans may become increasingly brazen—one day it’s at the hummingbird feeder, the next it’s at your fridge. Through no fault of its own, the bear could become a target for euthanasia. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” wildlife biologists like to say.

In autumn, bears enter hyperphagia: they must eat at least twenty thousand calories (the equivalent of thirty-six Big Macs) a day before they den. The females are on a deadline to store enough fat to sustain themselves, and a pregnancy, until spring, though in Tahoe, where there’s plenty of touron food year-round, bears hardly have to hibernate anymore. Bears have learned how to unscrew lids. They know how to open sliding glass doors. They’ll prowl from car to car, trying handles. Ryan Welch, the founder of Tahoe’s oldest bear-deterrent company, Bear Busters, told me about a woman who reported her Prius missing; the police found the car at the bottom of the hill that she’d parked it on, with a bear inside. Bears have learned that they can wander onto a crowded beach and help themselves to picnic food, with humans standing feet away, casually videoing, and that they can spook hikers into dropping their snack-filled packs. This spring, a bear snatched a construction worker’s cooler from the bed of a pickup and ate the man’s lunch in front of him. A Tahoe friend of mine once turned her back while unloading groceries and lost a fifteen-pound Christmas roast; the bear left nothing but a greasy scrap of butcher paper in the driveway.

A black bear’s short, curved claws function as miniature crowbars, capable of leveraging the slightest crevice to pry open a window or shred a garage door. An unsecured crawl space is an invitation. A bear will make confetti of a doorjamb. In vacant houses—which are plentiful in resort communities like Tahoe—bears turn on faucets and burners, usually by bumbling into them. Last year, a utility-company employee noticed a spike in water use at one home; bears had moved in. “They had defecated everywhere. The walls and carpet were covered in mold,” another state employee said at Bear Fest. Bears that den beneath homes and businesses can dislodge insulation and wiring, some of which keeps the pipes from freezing. Bears are “capable of breaking down anything they want” in their quest for calories, Welch told me. “There’s nothing bear-proof—I don’t care how thick a door is, or if it’s metal. I describe a bear as a five-hundred-pound police battering ram.”

The person who clued me in to “tourons” was Devon Barone, a Marin County native who recently finished her graduate studies in natural resources at Oregon State University, with a special interest in human-wildlife conflict. Barone, who is thirty, has mermaid hair and a tattoo of diving penguins. She wears balloon pants from Kathmandu and drinks yerba maté out of a handmade granite cup that she brought home from Chile, where she used to live. In May, Barone began working as the executive assistant to Ann Bryant, who co-founded a Tahoe nonprofit called BEAR League, in 1998, after a government trapper enraged the community by killing a mother bear and her cub and then lying about it. (The animals had not been “relocated,” as the trapper had claimed.) Bryant introduced Barone to the league’s hundred and forty-six thousand Facebook followers by saying that she had “studied and traveled all over the world, learning about people’s complex relationships with everything from elephants to mountain lions” and other “large and sometimes misunderstood (and often feared) animals.”

BEAR stands for Bear Education Aversion Response. Bryant, who is in her seventies, has spent the past twenty-five years showing Tahoans how to avoid attracting bears, and what to do if they fail. About two hundred of the league’s twenty-five hundred members are trained to respond to calls. “We answer twenty-four-frickin’-seven,” she told me. Bryant herself may show up: to fire a paintball gun, flush a bear from a crawl space, harangue a human to keep a clean grill and bring in the birdseed at night.

Bryant worked in wildlife rehabilitation before starting BEAR League, but these days she’s more likely to lean on her college studies in psychology. When someone sees a bear on their lawn, or at their door, or in their kitchen, it can be hard to remember, in the moment, that the average black bear can be treed by a Chihuahua, and that a bear’s huffing, bluff-charging, grunting, and teeth-clacking are usually nothing more than messages to back off. The correct human response is confidence and noise. Yell. Raise your arms—look big. Never turn your back on a bear. Stand your ground but also slowly retreat. Never block a bear’s exit—bears leave the same way they came in. Bryant tells people, “You gotta be aggressive, dominant, mean.”

Around Tahoe, Bryant is known as “the bear lady,” because she is always talking about bears or being talked about for talking about bears. She has appeared on PBS, the BBC, Animal Planet, National Geographic, and in countless local newscasts. Her bright blond hair, worn long, with bangs, is so distinctive that I wondered if it was a wig, until the wind blew and I saw scalp. (Bryant is a native Minnesotan of Scandinavian heritage.) Every time I visited her, she had on black leggings, a black hoodie, black Crocs. Even indoors, and always on TV, she wears gold-rimmed sunglasses and fingerless leather gloves—beige one day, black the next. They reminded me of bear paws.