Living with Fire, 4 Years After Caldor
August 30th, 2025By Kelsey Stalker, Tahoe Resource Conservation District
For many Tahoe residents, August 14th, 2021 lives in infamy as the start of the devastating Caldor Fire, a 68 day-long megafire that left swaths of the southwestern Tahoe Basin and Sierran western slope scarred. Environmental conditions were primed for even a small spark to get out of control, resulting in the suspected illegal ignition and subsequent high winds to consume close to 220,000 acres of forest and over 1000 structures.
Despite fire agencies simultaneously fighting the second largest wildfire in California, the Dixie Fire, wildland crews performed heroic efforts to contain the fire before it reached the city of South Lake Tahoe. Christmas Valley in Meyers, located southwest of South Lake proper, provided fire personnel enough defensible space to contain the fire when the weather shifted in their favor, ultimately allowing them to stop the spread.
The Caldor Fire is just one of many large, high intensity fires that are becoming more prevalent with each passing year. Wildland fires this devastating often bring up the complicated question, “Is this normal?”
Historically, Tahoe’s forests evolved with the presence of fire. Its high alpine microclimates used to be significantly more fire adapted, dominated by large, old growth pines and fewer ladder fuels. Periodic, low-intensity ground fires kept forests from getting too crowded, which conserved resources for older trees that grew thick, fire-resistant bark and held more water. This kind of beneficial fire transforms forest floor-crowding ladder fuels into available nutrients for the soil, promoting diversity in vegetation and creating crucial habitat for wildlife.
Those original forests are now replaced by younger vegetation that competes for resources and takes up more space than it did in the past. Add fire suppression, drought, and rising temperatures to the mix, and you get an especially vulnerable ecosystem. Severe impacts of wildfires are not exclusive to Tahoe, nor California for that matter. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, wildfires in the U.S. have been burning earlier in the year and for longer periods, extending the historical fire season prior to 2001. Data also suggests that reduced snowpack, hotter and drier warm months, fire suppression, insect and invasive grass infestations, and land management practices all contribute to wildfire frequency and intensity.
While the reality of wildfire in California can be overwhelming at the best of times, Tahoe’s fire agencies and conservation partners continue to address the factors that put our forests and communities at risk. A recent press release from the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team (TFFT) quotes an impressive 78,000 acres of forest treatments and 85,000 residential defensible space inspections since 2007. And according to Lake Tahoe’s Environmental Improvement Program, close to 13,000 acres of the Basin have been treated with prescribed fire since 2005.
Cultural burning is also making a resurgence in communities that have traditionally used beneficial fire for a variety of reasons. The Washoe Environmental Protection Department (WEPD) has recently assisted in pile burning at Eagle Point and fuels reduction at Meeks Meadow, while also helping tribal members navigate the 2024 California bill SB-310, which allows for cultural burning on tribal ancestral lands.
Kyle Tabor-Cooper, an Air & Fire Environmental Specialist with the WEPD, shared the following insights about living with fire after Caldor:
“Four years after the Caldor Fire, we’re reminded that fire is not just a destructive force—it’s an inevitable part of the landscapes we call home. The fire also revealed deep inequities: suppression lines held strongest just before the blaze reached multi-million-dollar properties and resort areas, while Washoe tribal lands and working-class neighborhoods were left to burn. Rather than trying to eliminate fire—or protect it selectively—we can learn to live with it by restoring the relationship Indigenous Peoples have upheld for millennia, using it to renew forests and protect all communities.”
Restoration efforts, grassroots action, and Basin-wide conservation partnerships will continue to make Tahoe’s forests and communities more fire adapted. There are currently 100 (and growing) Fire Adapted Communities around the lake, meaning more defensible space to help fight future fires and more wildfire prepared residents. These communities have developed partnerships with their local fire districts, created evacuation plans, and cultivated crucial fuel breaks in Tahoe’s wildland urban interface.
While fire personnel and conservation partners continue to protect our forests in the Sierra Nevada, it is up to everyone who calls Tahoe home to do their part to be good stewards. We may not have the fire adapted forests of the past, but the breathtaking natural beauty that is still here and cherished by so many desperately needs our advocacy and protection.