Homewood Mountain Resort environmental stewardship reaches milestone

Homewood Mountain Resort is getting green to keep Tahoe blue.

The ski resort, perched high above Lake Tahoe’s West Shore, has completed this summer work on 80,000 square feet of land restoration, thanks to 0ver $700,000 (much of the money matching funds) of California state grants for both the restoration and forest fuels management.

The resort announced today it had reached its milestone goal of restoring a total of  240,000 square feet of decades-old abandoned work roads to a natural state.

Homewood is actively reducing overall land coverage at the resort, with a particular focus on removing old mining and logging roads – known to be one of the largest contributors to sediment in the Tahoe basin. Key to this effort, Homewood is monitoring the sediment reduction that is a direct result of the land restoration work and in combination with modeling, can clearly demonstrate significant reductions in sediment yield after restoration.

Since inception of the land restoration work in 2006, Homewood’s restoration efforts have resulted in a reduction of over 60 metric tons of sediment runoff.  Within restored areas, sediment runoff has been reduced by more than 97 percent, meaning that water is largely being absorbed into the ground as opposed to running off into streams and the lake.

With the land restoration completion date originally set for summer, 2010, Homewood is ahead of schedule.

This fall, an additional five acres of fire prevention efforts are to be completed on particularly steep sloped areas at Homewood.  Due to challenges of thinning forest fuels on steeper slopes, the planned forest fuels management work will further help Homewood with the goal of forest fuels management on all 1,200 acres of the resort by 2012.  To date, over 450 acres (or slightly more than one-third of the mountain) have been treated.