NEVADA

Travel guide alerts Lake Tahoe to dangers of overcrowding

SAND HARBOR – Lake Tahoe tourism officials were surprised, and a bit miffed, when a respected international travel guide put the iconic alpine lake straddling the California-Nevada line on its list of places to stay away from this year because of the harmful ecological effects of overtourism.

But with an influx of visitors and new full-time residents due to the COVID-19 pandemic already forcing local leaders to revisit the decades-old conversation about overcrowding, “Fodor’s No List 2023” may have served as a wake-up call that some sort of change is necessary.

Since Fodor’s declared last November that “Lake Tahoe has a people problem,” some unlikely voices have expressed a new willingness to consider taxes or fees on motorists – a nonstarter not long ago.

Meanwhile, local business and tourism officials are lining up behind a new effort to persuade people to check out less trafficked parts of the lake and to visit outside of high season.

The idea is to preserve a $5 billion local economy built around the tourists who come to hike, camp, boat, bike, ski and gamble, while also easing their impact on the environment and communities. Roughly one-third the size of the Sierra Nevada’s also-crowded Yosemite National Park, the Lake Tahoe Basin gets about three times as many visitors – around 15 million each year.

July saw the unveiling of the Lake Tahoe Destination Stewardship Plan, a 143-page document backed by a broad coalition of more than a dozen conservation, business, governmental and private entities that prioritizes “sustainably preserving” the goose that lays the golden egg – the twinkling cobalt waters that turn blue-green near the lake’s 72 miles of shoreline.

The document has as one emphasis easing traffic gridlock, which causes not only parking nightmares but increased air pollution and lake sedimentation.

The plan also considers measures adopted by other tourist destinations, such as requiring reservations, timed-entry permits and capacity limits.

UTAH

Judge tosses challenge to age verification requirement for porn sites

SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah law requiring adult websites to verify the age of their users will remain in effect after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from an industry group challenging its constitutionality.

The dismissal poses a setback for digital privacy advocates and the Free Speech Coalition, which sued on behalf of adult entertainers, erotica authors, sex educators and casual porn viewers over the Utah law – and another in Louisiana – designed to limit access to materials considered vulgar or explicit.

U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart did not address the group’s arguments that the law unfairly discriminates against certain kinds of speech, violates the First Amendment rights of porn providers and intrudes on the privacy of individuals who want to view sexually explicit materials.

Dismissing their lawsuit on Aug. 1, he instead said they couldn’t sue Utah officials because of how the law calls for age verification to be enforced. The law doesn’t direct the state to pursue or prosecute adult websites and instead gives Utah residents the power to sue them and collect damages if they don’t take precautions to verify their users’ ages.

Stewart cited a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a Texas law allowing private citizens to sue abortion providers.

The law does not specify how adult websites should verify users’ ages. Some, including Pornhub, have blocked their pages in Utah, while others have experimented with third-party age verification services, including companies such as Yoti, which uses webcams to scan faces and estimate ages based on their features.

On Aug. 1, the Free Speech Coalition, which is also challenging a similar law in Louisiana, vowed to appeal the dismissal.

Environmentalists sue to stop mine that produces fertilizer

SALT LAKE CITY – Environmentalists filed a lawsuit on July 31 to prevent the construction of a new potash mine that they say would devastate a lake ecosystem in the drought-stricken western Utah desert.

The complaint against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest development in the battle over potash in Utah, which holds some of the United States’ largest deposits of the mineral used by farmers to fertilize crops worldwide.

Potash, or potassium sulfate, is currently mined in regions including Carlsbad, New Mexico and at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, where the Bureau of Land Management also oversees a private company’s potash mining operations.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance argues in the complaint that, in approving a potash mining operation at Sevier Lake – a shallow saltwater lake about halfway between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas – the Bureau of Land Management failed to consider alternatives that would cause fewer environmental impacts. They say the project could imperil the regional groundwater aquifer already plagued by competing demands from surrounding cities, farms and a nearby wildlife refuge.

Demand for domestic sources of potash has spiked since the start of the war in Ukraine as sanctions and supply chain issues disrupted exports from Russia and Belarus – two of the world’s primary potash producers.

MONTANA

Black bear shot and killed by man in his living room

BILLINGS – A Montana couple got a late-night wakeup call from a barking dog alerting them that a black bear had broken into their living room before the man shot and killed the animal with a handgun.

The confrontation with the large bruin happened in the rural community of Luther at the base of the rugged Beartooth Mountains, where Thomas Bolkcom and fiance Seeley Oblander live with their two dogs.

The couple awakened about 3 a.m. to their dog Maizey barking furiously upstairs from the house’s main floor, Oblander said.

Bolkcom, 27, a commercial painter and elk hunter, went to investigate and tried to coax the lab-pit bull mix downstairs when he turned around “and there’s this black bear standing in the living room five feet away,” Oblander said.

Wearing only a t-shirt and underwear, Bolkcom ran back downstairs, got a handgun and returned to the living room where he shot the bear. It ran into another room so he shot the bear several more times.

The animal had broken in through a screened window. Oblander, 26, said it had no other way out and was between Bolkcom and the door.

The couple and Bolkcom’s brother dragged the bear outside then called their fathers, who came to the house to meet with a game warden. The warden told them the bear was about 10 years old and 250-300 pounds, said Rocky Oblander, who returned to the house on Aug. 4 to remove blood-stained carpets.

The warden determined the shooting was justified in self-defense, said Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesperson Chrissy Webb.

SOUTH DAKOTA

Pine Ridge Reservation school renamed in Lakota language

PINE RIDGE RESERVATION – A parochial school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has been around for 135 years is being renamed in the Lakota language.

Red Cloud Indian School will be renamed Ma?píya Lúta — a translation of Chief Red Cloud’s name, South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported on July 25. The school was founded by Jesuits in 1888. It now has about 600 students.

Jennifer Irving, vice president of communications and marketing, said the idea for the name change came from the school’s athletes, who wanted the Lakota language name on their team jerseys.

“It inspired the rest of us to catch up with our young leadership here,” Irving said. “That’s really where that change happened.”

Irving said the name change is about more than rebranding and “really about honoring Chief Red Cloud and really committing further to Lakota language revitalization.”

The process of changing the name has begun and will continue through the 2023-24 school year.