California’s historic wildfire season continues to find ways to get worse. Due to dry weather and wind, wildfires across the state are abundant, especially around Lake Tahoe. One ski resort in California has already shut down its summer operations(Mt. Shasta), and more mountains joined that list yesterday. The latest wildfire to threaten California homes and towns is the Caldor Fire. According to CNN, the wildfire has exponentially grown in a couple of days to over 60,000 acres. Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for Eldorado County, which encompasses Southern Lake Tahoe. With the Caldor Fire inching closer to Lake Tahoe by the day, the Eldorado National Forest has issued a closure and evacuation from now until September 30’th. Two ski resorts in the national forest have been affected by this closure: Kirkwood Mountain Resort, and Sierra at Tahoe. This means that summer operations at these two ski resorts are effectively over. At Squaw Valley, construction of their new base to base gondola has been halted due to the needed helicopters being used for wildfire mitigation.

Since other resorts around Tahoe don’t operate in Eldorado National Forest, no other ski areas have had their summer operations impacted. Based on how this wildfire season has gone though, along with staff shortages faced across the country, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more resorts shut down their summer operations. In the meantime, check out this depressing Caldor Fire timelapse below.

Image Credits: Kirkwood Mountain Resort, Pierre Markuse

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