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Hey, California fourth graders – there’s a FREE State Parks pass just for you!

8/14/2026

What? California State Parks’ Free Fourth Grade Pass provides free entry for fourth graders and their families at 54 amazing state parks throughout the state as part of the Outdoors for All Initiative. Get your free pass today at ReserveCalifornia.com!

Who? You (a fourth grader from California attending a public school), your family (up to three adults and other kids) and friends (everyone in your car) can enjoy all sorts of adventures at 54 state parks from the August when you start fourth grade until August 31 of the following year.

How? To get your free pass, have your parent or guardian go to ReserveCalifornia.com (account required). All they have to do is set up a profile by providing their name, address, phone number and email address, and we will send them your Free Fourth Grade Pass to their email right away!

Where? Once you have received your Free Fourth Grade Pass you can use it by either printing it out or keeping it on your phone to show a uniformed State Parks staffer at one of these 54 state parks.

Get your free pass today at ReserveCalifornia.com!

Other Free Passes

Expand Empire Mine trails! Donate to BYLT for Cedar Ridge Preserve.

8/13/2026

Some opportunities only come around once.
Just minutes from downtown lies one of the last large undeveloped landscapes within Grass Valley—a remarkable 137-acre property in Cedar Ridge, next to Empire Mine State Park. Towering oaks, mixed-conifer forest, more than half a mile of the South Fork of Wolf Creek, and nearly three miles of beloved trails have quietly served as a place where people walk, ride, watch birds, and reconnect with nature.
Today, that place stands at a crossroads.
The property is currently on the market. While the sellers have long supported conservation, they are actively considering development proposals, and another buyer is prepared to make an offer if we don’t act soon.
Our community is stepping up.The response has been remarkable.
Together, community members have now pledged more than $600,000 toward protecting this special place.
That milestone demonstrates something powerful: our community believes Cedar Ridge is worth protecting.
Pledge your support to this effort by August 25 to ensure BYLT can act quickly to purchase this property and permanently protect it.

I can make a financial pledge to protect Cedar Ridge

Questions about the project or making a pledge? Contact:
Erin Tarr, BYLT Executive Director
(530) 272-5994 ext. 205
[email protected]

Note: this effort is to permanently protect 137-acres adjacent to Empire Mine State Park.
BYLT is soliciting pledges to ensure community support before making an offer on the property. Once the offer is accepted, BYLT will follow up with you to make your tax-deductible donation to protect the property. We anticipate this will be in the next few months.

https://www.bylt.org/protect-cedar-ridge/

The ticks are winning. It doesn’t have to be that way.

8/2/2026

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all.

The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks.

Climate reporter Jonthan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You know some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.

In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger, at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is both of these ticks — and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America — they can deliver all kinds of pathogens.

They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too — Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?
Related

Ticks are spreading Lyme disease across America, but we can beat them. Here’s how. A universal tick vaccine!

And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?
Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

Ninety percent?
Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.

Even though people are dying?
We’re just kind of taking for granted that, “Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots and that’s all you can do.” It’s like, “Well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes.” Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.
It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.
The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations.
What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.
Related

Why we don’t actually want a world without mosquitoes

So why is it that we’re not doing anything?
What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency, they go out and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools the water and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort.

We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds that it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.

Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?
Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home, do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check.

So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you.

CLI CK HERE to see complete article and photos in VOX magazine.

Tevis Cup 100 Mile One Day Ride this weekend

7/31/2026

The most famous endurance ride in the world is happening Aug 1-2, 2026 and it's right in our backyard. For everything you would like to know, CLICK HERE. There are rider/horse lists, judge and vet names, where you can see the ride live streamed, and of course the finishers.
Here is just one of the many YouTube videos - this one of the swinging bridge - yipes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZI5rGa5xtA

The website is here, and everything you would want to know - history, riders, horses, maps, videos, etc. https://teviscup.org/

And - for safety, unless you are a rider or Tevis crew, stay off the Western States trail this weekend!

Folsom Lake SRA Beach Trail is above water - enjoy it while it lasts

7/19/2026

(Photo credit Deanna J.)
The Folsom Lake SRA Beach Trail (also known as the the historic 1854 North Fork Ditch when visible along the Beach Trail between Sterling Pointe and Beeks Bight) is now accessible as the lake is rapidly receding. There are several places to access this scenic hiker-horse trail (no bikes allowed). This trail (on the west side of Folsom Lake) is only accessible for part of the year, so take advantage of this beautiful trail now.

If you would like a GPX file for this trail CLICK HERE for the Gold Country Trails Council Resource page. Scroll down to Folsom Lake SRA and the Sterling Pointe Ride folder.

If you would like to keep track on the water level for Folsom Lake, CLICK HERE.

Tahoe National Forest and Gold Country Trails Council work on new hiker-equestrian trail

7/17/2026

Submitted by Julie McManus, Gold Country Trails Council President, "We had an early start at 8:30 a.m. to try and beat the heat on Tuesday. It was hard work to keep up with all those 20+ year olds but we did it. Judy was awesome with her chainsaw. Donna raked after the trail was cleared by the crews. I used my new EGO pole saw to limb and clear everything up to horse/rider height. Helen procured lunch for everyone and hiked out to meet us on the trail. She even surprised us with the best watermelon when we got back at the end of the day. It was a great experience sharing the work with such dedicated, enthusiastic members of the Tahoe National Forest. Then it was off to the Gold Country Trails Council general meeting and Ice Cream Social that evening."

Nevada County’s newest National Monument—the Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels at Donner Summit—free walking tours

7/12/2026

Join local historian Terry McAteer on one of three summer walking tours of the Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels constructed in 1867 which he is providing free of charge this summer.

The Department of the Interior proclaimed in December 2024 that the site is now listed as a National Monument — the second such designation for Nevada County. The tours will start at 10 a.m. on Friday, July 10; Tuesday, August 4 and Sunday, September 13 from the dirt parking lot across the street from Donner Ski Ranch located at 19320 Donner Pass Road but you must register with McAteer and spaces are limited to 75 per tour. Email terry at: [email protected] and provide him the number of attendees and which date you will attend.

Each tour will describe the process of the Chinese workers who blasted and mucked the 16 tunnels in order for the completion of the railroad which opened the West. “This work was the most dangerous, complicated and back-breaking of the entire construction of the Transcontinental Railroad,” said McAteer, the retired Nevada County Superintendent of Schools. “It is an amazing site since no power tools were used to construct the tunnels.”

On the tour, which is relatively flat, participants will walk through the 500-yard tunnel (flashlights needed), view the 1849 covered wagon gold field route, the Lincoln Highway and the amazing workmanship of the Chinese Wall constructed with no mortar.

All ages are welcome. Please wear sturdy shoes and bring a bottle of water. The total length of the historic walk will be around one mile and will conclude by 11:30 am. Donner Ski Ranch is open for lunch service following the walk.

CLICK HERE to see photos and read the complete article in The Union newspaper.

Sierraville Ranger District and Gold Country Trails Council volunteers cleared 56 trees from Pacific Crest Trail

7/7/2026

Little Lasier Work/Camp/Ride Report by Mary Johnson -
This year’s outing at Little Lasier Meadow was amazing! Delightful weather, beautiful views, abundant vibrant wild flowers, wonderful cooperation with the Forest Service and amazing volunteers who accomplished a tremendous amount of work.

The camp was reserved for Gold Country Trails Council (GCTC) by the Sierraville Ranger District. The hard working Forest Service crew had cleaned the camp and chipped the piles of branches and since it was a light snow year, none of the corrals had been damaged! The only camp work consisted of unclogging the drain at the water pump which became a get down and dirty job .... and that water is COLD!!

Early arrivals hiked the connector trail/first road loop to check for clearing needs and also hiked, established cairns, and cleared the pass trail sections, as well as the stock crossing through Pass Creek. The large tree that came down at the creek crossing on the Blue Trail was cut up, along with a couple other small ones. And for excitement the disappearing tail end of a small bear was sighted as it crossed the road near camp!

With all that work accomplished early, the stage was set for the "real" work: tree clearing on the PCT. Earlier this year, Stephen Fisher, a volunteer for the PCTA (Pacific Crest Trail Association) had reached out to GCTC in order to work with our group. He had done preliminary hikes for tree clearing inventory so we knew we had a big job ahead of us.

In the late 1980's GCTC adopted the section of the PCT near Little Lasier Meadow and has continued to clear the PCT long after the "official" adoption was forgotten. In recent years the PCTA and GCTC connected again so that the "mystery" trail workers from GCTC were no longer a mystery to the PCTA.

After a light rain Friday night, Saturday dawned clear and cool: perfect working weather. Stephen arrived at Little Lasier Meadow along with the amazing GCTC volunteers, many who also arrived on Saturday morning just for the work day. Everyone was organized into groups to clear certain sections of trail.

Tom Alling with his mules and Tom Fletcher on horse back, headed north on the PCT with a chain saw on the pack mule. The mechanical “mule”, courtesy of Mike Peckham, carried Mike, Jeff, Toni, Laurie, Bev and Debbie up the first road to the PCT to work south, while Stephen, Milt and Alison headed out by car to Road 70-40 to the PCT to work north.

Jamie, Bill, Stacey, Mary and Gail hiked up the connector trail to cut back the notorious white thorn that was encroaching on the passage way. Katlin and Ross used horse transportation to clear trees and trim high branches on the 70-50/60 loop. Keith held down the fort at camp while covering the previously cleared drain line at the pump.

Last but not least, GCTC President Julie McMannus, arrived for support and provisions for the pot luck dinner.

Trail crews returned early afternoon, relaxed a bit, with lunch and headed out again, some riding, some driving home, some relaxing, and some heading out to work again!

Stephen, Milt and Alison were on a mission to drive to the PCT via Webber Lake Road to try and finish Stephen's section of the PCT. Well, lets just say they missed a delicious pot luck dinner, but arrived back at camp (shortly after we sent the search team out), with big smiles on their faces having accomplished most of what they set out to do.

The total after everyone's hard work: We cleared 30 trees over 5 miles of trail and 26 trees over 3 miles of access road.

A job WELL DONE!! Thank you everyone!

- Submitted by Mary Johnson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P. S. CLICK HERE to join the 700+ equestrian members of GCTC to help support 100 miles of non-motorized trails in Tahoe National Forest and Little Lasier Horse Camp and Skillman Horse Camp.

Good news - 446 volunteers. Bad news - 1,300 lbs. of trash on Tahoe's beaches

7/7/2026

From SF Gate newsletter: Picking up trash the morning of July 5 is becoming as big of a tradition in Lake Tahoe as the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

On Sunday, 446 volunteers — locals and visitors alike — showed up to six major beaches surrounding Lake Tahoe to pick up trash the morning after the Fourth of July festivities, equipped with reusable bags and grabbers, the nonprofit Keep Tahoe Blue said. They scoured the sand and the water’s edge for litter and worked their way up into the parking lots, trails, roads and neighborhoods.

(From Mother Lode Trails: Everyone should pick up their own trash and not depend on volunteers to do it for them. It's unacceptable that the pristine beaches of Lake Tahoe are inundated with disrespectful July 4th party goers. It's time for citations. Thank you to Keep Tahoe Blue!)

By noon, the volunteers had removed an estimated 1,300 pounds of litter from Tahoe’s environment and communities, according to tallies kept by Keep Tahoe Blue. That’s slightly less litter than average for the nonprofit’s annual post-Fourth cleanup.

Last year, Keep Tahoe Blue said 650 volunteers showed up to gather 1,375 pounds of trash. While more than a half ton of beach trash isn’t nothing, the trajectory is an overall positive one. In 2023, the nonprofit reported 8,558 pounds of litter collected. That year, volunteers compared the normally beautiful beach at Zephyr Shoals to a “landfill,” full of beer cans, inflatable rafts and abandoned sandals.

This was the 13th annual Keep Tahoe Red, White & Blue Cleanup, a partnership with more than a dozen local organizations and businesses. Every year, volunteers carry clipboards to track the types of litter they find. That information goes into a database that Keep Tahoe Blue uses to identify trends and push for solutions to tamp down on littering, like banning single-use plastic water bottles and polystyrene foam in South Lake Tahoe and sending out a beach-cleaning robot that digs deeper in the sand and collects litter that’s been long forgotten.

“We’re incredibly grateful that so many people are doing their part to protect Lake Tahoe,” Marilee Movius, Keep Tahoe Blue’s sustainable recreation manager, said in a statement. “When we leave the beach better than we found it, we keep this place swimmable, hikeable, and enjoyable for future generations.”

Lisa, a volunteer from Sparks, Nevada, who grew up in Incline Village, was walking down the beach when she passed a young couple. The couple stopped and asked her what she was doing and she told them she was cleaning up the beach with Keep Tahoe Blue. “They both nodded and looked at each other, and I could see them realize, ‘we should be doing that too,’” Lisa said, according to the Keep Tahoe Blue news release.

On Saturday afternoon, Placer County sheriff’s deputies shut down multiple beaches at Lake Forest, a neighborhood near Tahoe City on the north shore, citing “large groups of teens, many from outside the area.” The sheriff’s deputies reported underage drinking, widespread littering and significant traffic impacts in surrounding neighborhoods.

Crowds overflowed to other beaches, too. At Meeks Bay Resort, on Tahoe’s west shore, large groups of beachgoers clad in stars and stripes and red, white and blue bathing suits walked down the middle of the highway, holding up traffic.

By Sunday morning, things had returned to normal in Tahoe. As volunteers cleaned up from the partygoers the night before, the beaches reopened at Lake Forest and a stream of traffic exited the Tahoe Basin.

To see the original article and photos in SF Gate CLICK HERE.

E. coli Detected at Folsom Lake Recreation Area, Visitors Urged to Use Caution

7/3/2026

Visitors to Folsom Lake are being urged to use caution after elevated levels of E. coli bacteria were detected at several popular recreation areas, according to California State Parks.

The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board found

...elevated bacteria levels at Willow Creek Day Use Area, Nimbus Flats, and Black Miners Bar Day Use Beach after water samples collected in late June showed higher concentrations near the shoreline.

Elevated E. coli levels can indicate fecal contamination in the water and may increase the risk of illness for people who accidentally swallow contaminated water. While most strains of E. coli are harmless, state officials said elevated levels warrant extra caution.

California State Parks and the water board are also continuing to monitor for harmful algal blooms, also known as cyanobacteria. Harmful algal blooms are a separate water quality concern and can pose health risks to people, pets, and wildlife.

Officials recommend visitors take the following precautions while recreating at lakes and rivers:

Do not drink water directly from lakes or rivers.
Avoid swimming with open cuts or wounds.
Shower after swimming or other water activities.
Rinse pets with clean water after they have been in the lake or river.
Keep dogs from drinking lake water or ingesting algae, as they are especially vulnerable.

Water quality testing will continue throughout the summer. Weekly results are available through California's recreational water quality monitoring program.

Click HERE to see complete article and photos at Yahoo News.

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