Laurel (Wakeman) Ames, seventy-seven year Tahoe resident and fierce environmental advocate for the Lake Tahoe Basin, quietly passed away in May surrounded by family. Born in Hollywood, California in 1939, she moved to Lake Tahoe with her family in 1947. Laurel grew up in what more recently was the Alpina Coffee House on Highway 89 – the Wakeman family home was right on the highway, as were most year-round residents’, at a time when only the highways were plowed. Growing up in Tahoe back then meant attending school in a roving, one-room school house, riding horses through forests and glades now filled with busy neighborhoods, working in the Wakeman Lumber yard just out the back door and renting tools to cabin owners when most people only came to Tahoe in the summer.
An avid reader from a young age, Laurel was fortunate that the South Lake Tahoe Branch of the El Dorado County Library was located in her family’s living room and her mother was the librarian. Summers at Tahoe always included going to the beach, though in Laurel’s case, this meant visiting her best friend Annabelle. And Annabelle lived in the caretaker’s apartment at Valhalla – now the upstairs of the Boathouse Theater. Winters were spent alpine ski racing, often at one of the many tiny ski hills in the Sierra that are now long gone. One of those hills, The Nebelhorn at the top of Echo Summit, sponsored Laurel’s team, the Nebel Hornets – before they moved to The Edelweiss, where Camp Sacramento is today, and they became the Red Hornets!
Like many locals who’ve grown up in Tahoe, Laurel left the basin for a while, attending the University of Colorado at Boulder (close to skiing) before obtaining a degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley. Laurel never really stopped studying after that. In later years, she would pursue courses from political science to Italian and earned a Master’s in Public Administration. But true to her heart, after college, she returned to Tahoe where she would live, love, raise a family, and ski and hike everywhere she could.
Growing up in Tahoe surrounded by snow-covered mountains and the beauty of the Lake, Laurel experienced a life here before the four-lane highway and before the endless crowds. She understood how extraordinary this area was, and she knew it was worth saving. Not surprisingly, she was perhaps best known throughout the basin for her unceasing commitment to preserving Lake Tahoe. From an early loss trying to stop the destruction of the Truckee marsh to create the Tahoe Keys, to contributing to the San Francisco Chronicle on environmental issues, to working for the California TRPA and eventually leading the League to Save Lake Tahoe, she was always focused on the beauty and fragility of the lake. And that’s just the short list. She spent years fighting off a freeway from plowing straight through the neighborhoods and meadows of our town and across Emerald Bay, served on the Lahontan Regional Quality Control Board, helped create the California Watershed Network, was a founding Director of the Sierra Nevada Alliance, participated in countless hours of advocacy work through the Tahoe Area Group of the Sierra Club and more. Along the way, she supported and was supported by countless others. And she continued to fight to protect Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada for as long as she could. She never became complacent with the persistent pressures for development in the Tahoe Basin, nor began to believe that Tahoe was safe from it. In fact, her one regret in life was feeling that she had lost the battle to preserve the beauty and clarity of Lake Tahoe from the excesses of development. But she never lost hope that she could make a difference for the future of the Lake, and she took the fight to the end. Given the chance, she would do it all over again, only more.
Laurel’s spirit and commitment to protecting the lake were deeply shaped by growing up in Lake Tahoe, by going to school here, working, skiing, hiking, backpacking, sailing and swimming in the lake in a time before Tahoe was “discovered.” She loved Lake Tahoe and considered herself incredibly fortunate to have lived in such a magnificent place for most of her life. She learned the flowers, she knew the trees. There wasn’t a trail, stream or mountain top that she did not treasure. And in these places, she found her peace and found herself.
Laurel lost her younger sister, Jamie Casey, a few years back. She is survived by her brother David Wakeman, a former Hornet himself, wonderful nieces and nephews and her daughters Leslie and Jessica, who will cherish every minute spent with their mom. After all, Laurel shared many of her adventures with her daughters, for which they will always be grateful. In lieu of flowers, please donate to an environmental cause that benefits Tahoe or the Sierra. A celebration of life will be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on November 1 at Valhalla. Please bring your memories and stories of Laurel to share.