Palisades and other Tahoe ski resorts should give you a weekday ski pass when you cut down a Christmas tree. It’s in their best interest after all.
Tree Thinning is very effective in reducing the intensity of wildfires and making them more containable. Fires grow slower because there’s less density of wood to light.
Kirkwood Ski Resort knows this better than most. The Caldor Fire’s embers landed on its grounds. The fire didn’t reach Lake Tahoe, or progress to the mega-resort Heavenly, because it was slowed by fuel treatment. In the graphic below, untreated areas had a flame height of over 100 feet compared to 20 feet or less in treated areas.
The problem is that are so many trees in parts of the forest because of historic fire suppression. Current tree thinning efforts are insufficient for the scale of need. Fire services are scaling efforts up, but they could use help.
What if the public could come in to cut down Christmas trees from the forest instead of buying them new?
It’s not a new idea. The Forest Service lets you pay $2.50 for a permit to cut down a tree. Compared to the cost of a $90 tree, that’s a 97% discount.
But only 1500 trees were cut in the Lake Tahoe forest district in 2021.
There’s theoretically potential for 1000x more trees to be cut1, considering 4.1M people visit Tahoe from the Bay Area every winter2. But it’s not happening yet.
Four reasons for the underperformance:
It’s a lot of work to go and chop a tree. It’s a 7H driving round trip from the Bay Area. Gas is expensive. And it’s serious manual labor. Even with the 97 percent discount, the savings is less than $10/hr. That’s lower than minimum wage.
You have to bring your own equipment. Your average Bay Area yuppie doesn’t have a sharp ax and work gloves hanging around.
You can only cut down one tree. What if you want to get one for a neighbor?3
The Forest Services aren’t sufficiently getting the word out.
This is where Palisades comes in to move the (pine) needle.
They can toss in a weekday pass for every tree cut down. You could redeem your tree-cutting permit for the pass. It’s not really revenue lost for them as weekday ticket sales are slow anyhow and this would increase food sales during weekdays. In turn, it furthers the incentive beyond the savings on Christmas Tree prices.
Ski Rental shops could loan tools to customers. It brings customers in the door for the shops and makes it easier for the public to go
Lastly, Palisades could get the word out very effectively. They have 213k Instagram Followers compared to 95k for the entire California State Park system. This heightened awareness would create more participation and potentially collaboration with other ski resorts too. Heavenly and Northstar have another 230k Instagram followers if they come in.
Altogether this would result in more trees cut down for Christmas, and more widespread thinning. In turn, this better preps the land for the eventual wildfires that will come through and affect everyone - including the ski resorts. Aligned incentives are powerful.
Presuming there’s that much need.
This is my estimate considering 8.3M people visit Tahoe to ski annually. I’m assuming 50% come from surrounding regions.
We don’t want this to turn into a logging loophole, but the amount of people who will do this are limited anyhow. Why not get two or three trees for one visit and more trees thinned?