On August 17th, the Mother Lode Chapter of the Sierra Club held their annual banquet to celebrate all the work the chapter and their groups have been doing and accomplishing. During this banquet, our very own Laurel Ames was awarded one of the Chapter Awards named the Tahoe Guardian Award. We would like to congratulate and give a big thank you to Laurel with all the amazing activist work she has done for our group! 

For sixty years, Laurel Ames has been a fearless and persistent activist, and representative of Sierra Club values as she promoted exploring, enjoying, and protecting the Tahoe Basin. Laurel arrived in Lake Tahoe in 1947, in the days when not many lived there. She grew up in Lake Tahoe where she inevitably grew to love the pristine beauty of the area. Her environmental advocacy began as a response to the development of the Tahoe Keys, a repurposing of the largest wetland in the Sierra to a suburban neighborhood. So in 1965, she jump-started her environmental activity career by leading a group of local advocates who gained local control by incorporating a city for protecting the area and became stewards of the Tahoe Basin. Some notable successes of this group were stopping a proposed freeway through South Lake Tahoe going through every meadow in town and rerouting the Upper Truckee River, and stopping a plan to put a bridge and a highway across Emerald Bay. In the late 60's and early 70's, she worked as an environmental journalist with the San Francisco Chronicle covering the Tahoe Basin, informing on the many plans and designs for development. Showing no hesitation for the battle to save Lake Tahoe, she worked as a planner at the California Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. She served as Executive Director of The League to Save Lake Tahoe and Founding Director of the Sierra Nevada Alliance. Laurel also helped found the California Watershed network and has performed countless hours of advocacy work through the Sierra Club, using her extensive experience to support the Sierra Club's goals, including working as the Conservation Chair for the Tahoe Area Group, attending agency meetings to comment on policy and development proposals and being a mentor and coach to Sierra Club teams and members.