• Alpine Meadows sold
• Kings Beach makeover
• Royal Gorge battle brews
• Truckee downtown office ban
• High school soccer battles
  

Looking Back: 2007

A review of the top Truckee-Tahoe stories from the past year:

Fire ... and Ice
Frigid Arctic air froze Donner Lake into an enormous sheet of ice in early 2007. The cold was coupled with a snowless January and then a warm, dry summer punctuated by wildfires in Truckee and Tahoe.

Weather routinely makes headlines in the Sierra Nevada. But 2007, even compared with the area's typically fickle weather, was a year where Mother Nature was news.

In January, Donner Lake became a beehive of activity, as ice skaters and hockey players took advantage of the frigid temperatures that turned the Truckee lake to ice.

Unfortunately the recreation turned tragic when one Sacramento ice skater, George Sommerdorf Jr., ventured too far onto thin ice in late January, fell through and drowned.

Despite the cold, Tahoe-Truckee suffered from a dwindling snowpack by spring. And then a long and hot Sierra summer left forest tinder dry.

The conditions spawned aggressive and destructive blazes in Tahoe and Truckee. The wind-whipped Angora Fire, the largest in Tahoe's history, burned more than 3,000 acres and 250 homes.

But fires in Truckee and on Tahoe's North Shore burned homes and spurred evacuations. The Washoe Fire burned five homes near Tahoe City, and for many Tahoe residents jittery after the Angora Fire, the flames seemed dangerously out of control before aircraft and fire crews were able to douse them.

In Truckee, a blaze near Interstate 80 licked up toward the Tahoe Donner subdivision before it was knocked down by fire crews.

The fires shaped policy in 2007, as the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency bent some of its tree-cutting rules to help homeowners protect their homes from fire.

--David Bunker, Sierra Sun