https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/31/caldor-fire-why-lake-tahoes-forests-face-so-much-fire-danger/

The Caldor Fire threatening communities and breathtakingly scenic landscapes around Lake Tahoe — a destination that Mark Twain once called “the fairest picture the whole earth affords” — is a dramatic, unfolding disaster.

But the conditions that led to the evacuation of more than 50,000 people around the famed alpine lake’s south and western shores — where embers rain down on rustic communities and soot chokes the normally pristine mountain air — didn’t spring up this week, this month or this year. They are the culmination of more than 150 years of decisions that people made to unwittingly set the stage for today’s catastrophe, experts say.