Lake Tahoe shutting down to tourists Friday - San Francisco Chronicle

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Vacation travel to Lake Tahoe will be banned for at least three weeks starting Friday because of a regional rise in the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations. The state’s stay-at-home mechanism was triggered Wednesday afternoon for a vast region of 13 counties spanning from Sacramento east to the Nevada border.

Though not unexpected, the news that Christmas travel would be off-limits came as a blow to the state’s premier winter tourism destination, which first went into shutdown with the rest of the state in March.

“Unfortunately, yet again, Tahoe is closed,” said Chris Fiore, communications manager for the city of South Lake Tahoe. “If we can get things under control in the next three weeks, we can reopen just in time for New Year’s.”

The area the state is calling the Greater Sacramento region will join two other regions to the south — San Joaquin Valley and Southern California — already under stay-at-home orders, creating one huge, contiguous swath of California in the shutdown that stretches from the southern border up to the Bay Area and covers a large portion of the Sierra Nevada.

Outdoor dining must shut down, retail establishments can only operate at 20% capacity and non-essential travel in and out is off-limits.

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But whether those restrictions will actually stop visitors is unclear.

Discouraging tourists from visiting Lake Tahoe proved impossible during the statewide shelter-in-place mandate that started in March and expanded into summer. City dwellers hoping to escape the coronavirus in a less populated, natural setting fled to Tahoe en masse, stirring up tensions with locals that boiled over into public protests in August. Hoping to dissuade visitors, the city of South Lake Tahoe issued a small number of $1,000 fines to individual visitors breaking the shutdown.

Knowing that some winter travelers will probably flout the rules again, Tahoe officials said there’s little they can do to keep visitors out besides pleading with people to obey the lockdown order.

“We’re not putting up gates and checking IDs as you come over Echo Summit but please be respectful of people living here,” Fiore said.

Banning travel to Tahoe is especially painful given that tourism is the backbone of the local economy. Millions of people visit each year.

“It is just three weeks, but the most critical three weeks of the year for a tourism dependent economy,” Colleen Dalton, CEO of Visit Truckee-Tahoe, wrote in an email to the Chronicle. Missing out on holiday revenue “is devastating,” she wrote. “Many rely upon the holidays to make or break a year, and this year being the worst in our town’s history, already.”

The region’s hotels, which typically operate between 80-100% occupancy in the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s, are sure to be hit hard. Under the state’s shutdown rules, lodging operators are only able to serve essential travelers — people traveling for work, medical needs and critical infrastructure support.

Out-of-towners who own vacation homes in Tahoe are allowed to travel to their properties under lockdown. However, Tahoe officials are asking prospective recreational travelers not to book ski cabins or short-term rentals — even if people see availabilities on websites like Airbnb or VRBO.

Restaurants, already facing the challenge of seating diners outdoors in the snowy mountain climate, can only fulfill takeout and to-go orders. The town of Truckee has spent nearly $800,000 on outdoor-dining infrastructure to help small businesses stay afloat, said Dave Polivy, the outgoing mayor of Truckee. “With no outdoor dining, we’re at, what do we do now?”

Polivy said recent surveys of businesses in Truckee on earnings for the year showed that about 20% are doing well, 20% are on pace to break even, 40% are projecting some losses and the remaining 20% “are in full-on panic mode.”

“It’s a real mix of successes and challenges,” depending on the industry, Polivy said.

Tahoe’s ski areas, which have been opening for the winter season during the past three weeks, have been adamant about staying open even during the shutdown. Ski areas have put in place a range of safety protocols, including requiring skiers to buy tickets and book ski days online in advance as a means of thinning people out on the mountains. While traveling long distances has been discouraged since March, Polivy said it’s critical that ski areas remain open.

“When they shut down, we have backcountry areas where parking lots will fill up and smaller trailheads that will be inundated immediately,” he said. “Ski areas are incredibly important to keep open because they allow us to disperse the recreational activities that are going to happen no matter what.”

Complicating matters in South Lake Tahoe is that the city straddles the state line and extends into Nevada, where coronavirus restrictions are much more lax. Casinos there are operating at 25% capacity; lodging is fully open to recreational travelers and restaurants are serving diners outdoors.

“It’s confusing for guests,” said Carol Chaplin, president and CEO of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority. She recommended that anyone considering traveling to the area bone up on the particulars of what is open and allowed in each area at her organization’s website, LTVA.org.

“We’re really trying to get everyone on the same page and gently remind people that they should not be coming here,” Chaplin said. “When travel is allowed again, you can come back.”

Gregory Thomas is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas

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