The donation will support the Tahoe Fund’s Smartest Forest Fund and post Caldor Fire restoration efforts

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, casual footwear brand BEARPAW is donating $20,000 to the Tahoe Fund in support of its Smartest Forest Fund and post-Caldor fire restoration efforts. Founder Tom Romero, inspired to start the brand after a profound bear encounter on the shores of Lake Tahoe, is returning the brand to its Tahoe roots in honor of the anniversary.

The Smartest Forest Fund was created to invest in innovative projects that will significantly increase the pace and scale of forest restoration to help prevent catastrophic wildfire.

“We are very grateful for this partnership with BEARPAW that supports our mission to restore our forests,” said Amy Berry, CEO of the Tahoe Fund. “Now, more than ever, the forest needs advocates. Contributions like this help us do the work that is necessary to keep our forests healthy and prevent future catastrophic wildfires.” 

As a brand that creates products for active lifestyles, BEARPAW is committed to environmental stewardship and contributing toward the preservation and restoration of our natural world. This partnership with the Tahoe Fund aligns with the company’s goal to help to ensure that there will be mountains, forests, beaches, and oceans for generations to come.

“Lake Tahoe has been in my life since the 1970’s and was the birthplace of the BEARPAW brand 20 years ago.  Supporting the Tahoe Fund’s Smartest Forest Fund is the ‘pawfect’ partnership, especially after recent fires made their way into the Tahoe Basin,” said Tom Romeo, CEO & Founder of BEARPAW. “This is just one of many programs we look to support and develop with this important organization in my peaceful place, Lake Tahoe.”

About BEARPAW

Tom Romeo founded the BEARPAW brand in 2001 with the intention of redefining casual footwear by utilizing sheepskin, nature’s own technical fabric, to create comfortable and stylish shoes. Sheepskin naturally regulates body temperature so feet stay cooler and drier in the heat and warmer in the cold. From slippers and boots in the winter to sandals and flats in the spring, only the finest materials are used to produce BEARPAW shoes.

Now with an extensive line of footwear that covers multiple categories all year round, BEARPAW is available throughout the United States and in over 45 countries around the world. BEARPAW will continue to offer the utmost in comfort while new products leverage their philosophy of creating stylish designs in premium materials for women, men and children.

Learn more about bearpaw.com.

Vibrant Planet’s new cloud-based system “Land Tender” will help land managers evaluate forest health projects in months instead of years

As the 220,000-acre Caldor Fire still burns, we are excited to announce a grant from our Smartest Forest Fund to a first-of-its-kind digital tool, called Land Tender, that will provide land managers in the Tahoe Basin with the high-resolution data and modeling they need to make more agile and informed decisions. Land Tender has the potential to cut the time it takes to plan and execute projects that protect communities and forests from years to months. 

Land Tender is being developed for the Tahoe Basin in collaboration with the California Tahoe Conservancy, Basin land managers, fire districts, scientists, local NGOs and other stakeholders to update Lake Tahoe’s community wildfire protection and forest health plan for the entirety of the lake’s 500-square-mile watershed basin. This work will include thinning hazardous and overgrown timber, clearing fuels from roadsides, and conducting prescribed burns.

“The Caldor Fire made it into the Lake Tahoe Basin, and we narrowly averted catastrophe in part because of proactive fire prevention and forest health projects,” said Tahoe Fund CEO Amy Berry. “Land Tender is a unique tool that can help communities like ours dramatically speed up the timeline of critical forest management projects—some of which have previously taken up to 10 years to plan and execute. This is exactly the type of project we started our ‘Smartest Forest Fund’ to help accomplish.”

“We are facing concurrent climate, wildfire, biodiversity, water and health crises that cross jurisdictions and affect each and every one of us. Our future depends on how quickly we adapt, cooperate and take action. With Land Tender, we can harness the best science, technology and data to protect and restore forests. We can mitigate risk, quickly and at scale,” said Allison Wolff, CEO of Vibrant Planet, the creator of Land Tender. 

With Land Tender, parties across jurisdictions can collaborate and rapidly assess landscapes and communities to make informed, ready-to-implement decisions in near real-time. This planning is done utilizing LiDAR technology coupled with best-in-class infrastructure data. Remote sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence also enable land managers to continuously monitor project progress, and then shift priorities and resources based on evolving conditions and threats. 

Land Tender was designed with significant input from land managers, emergency responders, scientists, NGOs, and local and regional policy and decision makers. It was built by a team of seasoned technology, ecology and forest management leaders with decades of collective experience at the U.S. Forest Service, Lyft, Netflix, Guidewire, Facebook, and Omidyar Network. 

About Vibrant Planet
Land Tender is the first product launched by Vibrant Planet, a public benefit corporation and a 501(c)(3) Data Commons focused on adaptive planning and market-based solutions for restoring the biosphere and the climate, with $8 million in initial venture capital and philanthropic support. Vibrant Planet is backed by a broad group of investors and philanthropists including Facebook’s chief product officer; Netflix’s former chief product officer; Earthshot, an early-stage venture firm focused on climate solutions; The Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust; Halogen Ventures; and several private family foundations. Founder Allison Wolff was an early leader at Netflix and strategic advisor to eBay, Google, Facebook, Drawdown, Conservation International, GlobalGiving and other organizations on vision, strategy, culture change and user experience design over the past two decades. 

It has been an intense few weeks. Since canceling our annual Founders Circle Dinner on August 18th, we’ve seen wildfire come into the Basin and the complete evacuation of South Lake Tahoe. We can not express our gratitude enough for the amazing firefighters who helped keep the Lake Tahoe community safe.

Our board has been discussing how we can help and what happens now. We wanted to share a quick update with you on our thoughts on the post-fire work ahead:

FOREST RESTORATION

The Caldor Fire is still not out, but we have already learned a great deal from the intensive firefight that took place as the fire crested Echo Summit and entered the Tahoe Basin. The fire was unstoppable in its march to the Basin due to areas with unnaturally dense forests and dried-out vegetation. Simply put, we have too much fuel in our forests and we need to find solutions to get it out.

A key learning is how important the forest thinning and fuels treatments around South Lake Tahoe were in helping improve the odds for the firefighters. The treated areas gave the firefighters room to maneuver, dropping 100+ foot flames down to 15 feet. The great defensible space work of individual homeowners is also another important piece of the story. 

Through our Smartest Forest Fund, we are already investing in state-of-the-art technology to help decrease the threat of catastrophic wildfire around the Tahoe Basin. We recently granted funds to Vibrant Planet for Tahoe Basin stakeholders to use a first-of-its-kind land management tool, Land Tender, to help increase the pace and scale of forest restoration work. We are more determined than ever to expand upon this work in partnership with the public agencies. We hope you will support these efforts. 

TRAILS

While the fire was held outside of the community of homes in Tahoe, it scorched many favorite trails in Tahoe. In addition, the dozer lines used to help suppress the fire unfortunately also destroyed many trails. The Tahoe Rim Trail around Echo Summit and many trails built and loved by the Tahoe Area Mountain Bike Association (TAMBA) were heavily damaged. There is going to be a lot of trail restoration work in our future. We have pledged to our trail building partners that we will be ready to help fund this important work with our Caldor Trails Restoration Fund. We hope we can count on your support of this effort.

The Caldor Fire raged through an area containing some of the region’s favorite trails. The fire burned many parts of trails, bridges and trail infrastructure. Between damage from fire itself, as well as from dozers constructing suppression lines, more than 15 miles of trail suffered damage in the Tahoe Basin.

LAKE CLARITY

With weeks on end of heavy smoke and ash falling, we can’t help but wonder what the impact is on the Lake’s famed clarity. We recently pledged funding support in partnership with other Tahoe agencies for a RAPID response science proposal from the Tahoe Science Advisory Council to investigate the influence of the wildfire smoke on the Lake. This will provide important insights into the impacts and help drive future clarity improvement efforts. 

As we await these results, the Clean Up The Lake team is back in the water and continues to make progress in their scuba clean up of the Lake after a delay due to the fire. 

We hope this finds you all safe and breathing a little easier now that blue skies have returned to Tahoe. We are working on a series of post-fire events for our supporters to help better understand what happened and how we can help. We will be in touch shortly with details. 

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or observations.

In gratitude,

Amy Berry, CEO 

Allen Biaggi, Board Chair

As we are all watching the Caldor Fire situation, many people are asking how they can help. Although firefighters and first responders greatly appreciate the generosity and kindness of donations, firefighting agencies are fully supplied with everything they need. Donations from the public are logistically complicated to accept and firefighting agencies do not have the capacity to do so. 

If you would like to offer assistance to those affected by the Caldor Fire, donations are best directed towards evacuees. Here are funds that are helping victims of the Caldor Fire: 

El Dorado Community Foundation – The El Dorado County Community Foundation set up a Caldor Fire Fund. All donations go to families and individuals impacted by the fire. You can donate here. 

The American Red Cross – The American Red Cross is staffing evacuation centers and providing support for evacuees of the Caldor Fire. You can donate here. 

Placer Food Bank – The Placer Food Bank is on the front lines of emergency food response/distribution to those impacted by the River and Caldor Fires. You can donate here. 

Food Bank of Northern Nevada – The Food Bank of Northern Nevada is offering food assistance for Caldor Fire evacuees. You can donate here.

Monitor Incident Information – Stay up to date on the current acreage, containment statistics, evacuation information, and more by visiting the incident link tree. For the latest Caldor Incident information, attend a live CAL FIRE AEU community meeting daily at 5PM at www.facebook.com/CALFIREAEU.

Visit TahoeLivingWithFire.com and follow @tahoelwf on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more wildfire preparedness and prevention information.

TAHOE CITY, Calif. (Aug 24, 2021) – Thanks to a $10,000 match by an anonymous donor in addition to other contributions, the Tahoe Fund has exceeded its $25,000 fundraising goal to support Camp Wamp field trips. The funds will cover the costs to transport campers and their camp counselors from Camp Wamp, a sleepaway camp for children with disabilities, to the Tahoe East Shore Trail and Sand Harbor State Park in 2022. 

“We are so grateful to those who contributed to this effort and recognize the life-changing value that programs like Camp Wamp can provide to kids with physical disabilities,” said Amy Berry, Tahoe Fund CEO. “With this program, the kids will now be able to experience the magic of the east shore of Lake Tahoe.”

Camp Wamp founder Stephen Wampler, whose ascent of El Capitan continues to inspire people around the world, had his own life changed by a camp experience. He wants to ensure that others with physical disabilities have the same opportunity. Kids at Camp Wamp experience the joys and camaraderie of camp life and push each one to discover how capable they really are. Steve’s story is all about “what you CAN do!”

Camp Wamp offers six one-week sessions every summer in July and August for kids ages 10 to 18 with physical disabilities. Since 2002, the camp has hosted over 1,250 kids, and is focused on teaching campers about self-reliance and their own ambition. They sleep outdoors on the 129-acre property on cots under the stars, they hike, fish on 9-acre Deer Lake, climb a rock wall, participate in arts, crafts, and have competitions.

“On behalf of our entire Camp Wamp team, we are so appreciative of the support for our program,” said Stephen Wampler, Camp Wamp founder. “The opportunity the Tahoe Fund is helping us create on the Tahoe East Shore Trail and at Sand Harbor for the kids who come to camp is something they will never forget.”