In the News

Thirty-Five Years of Service
date posted: December 5 2005

Lake Tahoe Report #120
June 6, 2005
By John Cobourn and Heather Segale

There are probably not many people who have spent as much time out on the waters of Lake Tahoe as Bob Richards of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. Year in and out, throughout the seasons, sun, rain or snow, Richards has been conducting research on Lake Tahoe. Richards has been the boat captain and field lab research director since the beginning, when the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) was called the Tahoe Research Group (TRG). In fact, Bob started with the Tahoe Research Group back in 1969 before the field station even had a name. “I came up here for what I thought was a temporary job in 1969, and here we are in 2005 and it’s a career,” says Richards.

U.C. Davis has had a presence at Lake Tahoe since the early 1960s and Bob Richards has been a researcher with the group nearly from the beginning. Back in those days, the research at Lake Tahoe was led by Dr. Charles Goldman and conducted in some pretty run down boats. In fact, the first research boat, Research Vessel (RV) Toio, met its demise after a nasty windstorm.

The winter of 1968-69 was a huge snow year and houses were caving in from the snow loads. Richards was hired to reduce the need for “tunneling” up to Tahoe every three weeks to collect field data. After a few years of intensive field work at Castle Lake with no plowed roads, only a snow cat for transportation and frost bite, Tahoe was a welcome change for Richards and his new bride Kit.

Richards captained the RV San Giuseppe from 1969 to 1976. This boat began to dry rot and literally fall apart on the lake. Richards used roof tar to try to patch up the planking, but the boat eventually had to be replaced. OSHA would never have approved of the working conditions.

In 1976, the RV John LeConte was put into service. Richards was the boat captain until his recent retirement at the end of 2004. Looking back at his life studying Lake Tahoe, Richards remembers all of the graduate students that have come through the various UC Davis programs, all of the researchers and fascinating research projects, and all of the great views of Lake Tahoe.

“The advantages of the job is that we get to see the lake in all of its moods and at all different times of day and night. There is nothing like being in Emerald Bay in the middle of winter when the snow blankets the entire canyon around Emerald Bay under a full moon. It’s spectacular.”

In addition to taking regular water samples, Bob has hosted President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore on his research boat. He’s taken literally thousands of schoolchildren for tours out on the lake over the years, and he’s worked with researchers from around the world. He has assisted the implementation of research on bacteria, plankton, fisheries, geology, subterranean geology, chemistry, toxicology, remote sensing, and water quality… just to name a few.

Richards deserves a medal for his many years of dedicated service. Richards continues to live at Lake Tahoe with his wife Kit, and will be occasionally working part-time with UC Davis. Retirement is allowing Richards to “work on home repairs, catch up on the honey-do list, and spend time with grandkids and two daughters.” If you see him around Tahoe, stop him to say thank you for his 35 years of service.

Watch for the “Lake Tahoe Report” in the Tahoe Daily Tribune each Wednesday, and tune in to KOLO-TV News Channel 8 Tuesdays at 5 p.m. to learn more. Next week learn about this year’s Contractors BMP Workshop, to be held in Incline Village on June 1. “The Lake Tahoe Report” is a collaborative effort of the Lake Tahoe Environmental Education Coalition, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center and the California State Water Resource Control Board. For more information, contact Heather Segale, UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, (530) 583-3279, or logon to www.lteec.org.