This California lake is seeing ‘apocalyptic' overcrowding — and officials are cracking down

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

A drowning. Heavy traffic. Trash everywhere. Cars parked in fire lanes. Fistfights on the beach. Last summer at bucolic Pinecrest Lake was rough.
The scenic getaway, tucked in a forested granite basin in Tuolumne County off of Highway 108, has been a summertime escape for generations of Bay Area and Central Valley residents — some of whom own cabins at the lake. There's a market and restaurant, a marina that rents pontoon party boats, an amphitheater that shows movies under the stars, a campground and a wide sand beach.
Like other outdoor destinations in Northern California that have seen surges in visitation since the pandemic, Pinecrest becomes overcrowded and unmanageable on busy summer weekends, as thousands of people pack the beach.
'There have been some apocalyptic weekends,' said Tuolumne County Supervisor Anaiah Kirk, whose district includes Pinecrest.
Parking spaces fill up early, traffic backs up onto the highway, and the single road to the lake becomes jammed with cars parked illegally on the shoulders. At the beach, people flaunt the rules by smoking pot, firing up barbecue grills and letting dogs run around off-leash, while hard-bottom boats motor through the swim area. Some people camp illegally on the sand. Bathrooms are covered in graffiti. Law enforcement is scarce, some property owners say.
The chaos used to hit mostly on holiday weekends, but now it's becoming more frequent, according to some residents.
'Personally, I rarely go to the lake on weekends anymore because we know what a mess it is,' said Martha Geiszler, a Los Gatos resident who owns a cabin near the lake and manages the Friends of Pinecrest group on Facebook. 'There's very little visitor information given and very little law enforcement presence, so every rule is broken.'
This summer, after an off-season of public discussion, the county is laying in new measures to curb nuisance behavior. But if they don't work, a round of stricter rules and regulations would probably follow that would make it harder for locals and visitors to access their favorite lake.
'I'm ready to go full-bore and do a lot more things,' Kirk said. 'But we're slowing down and going to implement a few things at a time.'
Cracking down on illegal parking seemed like the obvious place to start, Kirk said. Last summer had at least a few emergencies when ambulances could barely navigate the morass of unattended cars gumming up the sides of Pinecrest Lake Road, according to Tuolumne County Sheriff David Vasquez. Sheriff's deputies wrote hundreds of citations at the lake last year, mostly related to parking violations, he said.
In March, the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors approved a fee hike for parking violations by the lake. What was a $35 ticket is now $100 for a first offense and $200 for a second offense. Also, the county redesignated a stretch of Pinecrest Lake Road as a fire lane and has installed dozens of new 'No Parking' signs on the roadsides.
'People were looking at a $35 citation as an acceptable tradeoff,' Vasquez said. 'We need to create a psychological deterrent.'
Some supervisors, including Kirk, have said they'd like to increase the penalty for a first offense to $250. That could happen if the parking issues continue this summer, Kirk said.
Some locals would like to see more beach patrols and rule enforcement, but they say it's been a mixed bag so far this summer. The lake is under the purview of the U.S. Forest Service, and Geiszler says there's been a noticeable downturn in staffing, which she attributes to recent cuts to federal lands workers.
Two workers with Stanislaus National Forest are assigned to patrol Pinecrest and clean bathrooms there, according to Shawn Winstead, district ranger for the Forest Service's Sugar Pine District who's currently on a temporary assignment elsewhere in Stanislaus National Forest. But some locals say that's not enough for a place overrun with summer visitors.
On Memorial Day Weekend, the six or so bathrooms at the lake 'were absolutely disgusting,' Geiszler said. 'You can't have just one or two people patrolling the beach every weekend with all those people.'
Vasquez said staffing at his office has been increasing over the past year and his deputies are prioritizing calls from Pinecrest this summer in an effort to tamp down disruptions and create a law enforcement presence at the lake.
'I stand behind everyone's constitutional rights to access that land,' Vasquez said, 'but we were receiving astronomical amounts of complaints about overcrowding and illegal parking.'
A question that has come up in community town halls and county supervisors meetings is whether there should be a set carrying capacity at the lake — which both Supervisor Kirk and Sheriff Vasquez say might be worthy of further discussion. It would be a dicey proposition given that Pinecrest is on public land, but it has sparked all kinds of hypothetical solutions — from installing cement parking barriers in certain places to implementing the kind of controversial day-use reservation system in place at Yosemite National Park.
'Right now, we're not looking at restricting access in any way,' he said. 'We're trying to keep everything open for everybody. But if there were some kind of restriction in that area, we'd have a carrying capacity and that would affect everybody — cabin owners, visitors, everybody.'
If issues at Pinecrest don't significantly improve this year, Kirk said, more changes are likely.
Laying in metered parking spots in the beach area is an option. Installing a gated tollbooth at the entrance to the lake area that would turn cars away when parking fills up is another. Offering a parking shuttle to the beach from the paved lot at Dodge Ridge Mountain Resort, about 4 miles away, could help as well.
'There are a lot of potentials,' Kirk said. 'We'll have an evaluation after this summer.'