NEWS | BAY AREA & STATE
Thousands of college students trashed a California lake last weekend

By Alec Regimbal, Politics Reporter
May 30, 2024



A wide shot of Shasta Lake with Mount Shasta in the background in Siskiyou County, Calif., on April 11, 2024. A group of roughly 3,000 college students from UC Davis and the University of Oregon trashed the lake over Memorial Day weekend.
Photo Courtesy by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

A group of roughly 3,000 college students from UC Davis and the University of Oregon trashed Shasta Lake over Memorial Day weekend, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Debbie Carlisi, a recreation officer with the agency’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest division, told SFGATE in an interview that the students left bottles, cups, wrappers and cans behind when they left for home, so much so that crews spent six hours this week picking up trash. She said some students even threw their trash in the lake itself despite being given trash bags by forest service employees. … “The problem is there was a lot of stuff that was left in the lake,” Carlisi said. “That's going to cause a problem with our fish and wildlife, and it decreases the recreation experience for our next visitors.”

The forest service will have to wait for the lake’s water level to recede to retrieve some of the trash, which likely won’t happen until late June or early July, Carlisi said. The students, who told Forest Service officials where they attended university, rented roughly 130 houseboats and camped out on Slaughterhouse Island in the lake’s southwestern region. … When asked what she would tell the students now, Carlisi said, “If you were bringing your family out here with you, would you want to find this mess when you were camping?”

Carlisi said the Forest Service had a much different experience with another large group of students from Oregon State University, who camped out on the lake over Mother’s Day. … Carlisi said 40 of those students, out of an original group of roughly 1,600, rented five houseboats and stayed behind an extra day after the rest of the group left to ensure that the area was clean. She said the students from UC Davis and the University of Oregon had assured park service employees that they would do as good of a job cleaning up after themselves as the Oregon State University students did.

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Alec Regimbal
POLITICS REPORTER
Alec Regimbal is a politics reporter at SFGATE. He graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor's degree in journalism. A Washington State native, Alec previously wrote for the Yakima Herald-Republic and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He also spent two years as a political aide in the Washington State Legislature.