This past Sunday, I found myself walking across the snowless ski runs of Sierra-at-Tahoe in California, which sits on public land in the El Dorado National Forest. I had come to chase down a rumor.

Numerous Tahoe-area residents had told me the Forest Service’s plan to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate—part of the agency’s forest restoration plan for about 75,000 acres scorched by the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire—had been delayed until 2028. A local news site, along with a major local environmental group—Keep Tahoe Blue—were telling people some version of that.

But I had my suspicions. I dug up maps from the Forest Service’s website, and headed to a spot where one of them indicated spraying might already be happening. It was strange to be standing in the middle of a ski run, with neither snow nor skiers around. But I knew if spraying were happening, it would be obvious.

Public uproar has echoed across the Tahoe area since April, when our yearlong Mother Jones investigation revealed that, in California, the fastest-growing use of glyphosate—the main ingredient in Roundup—is to spray forested areas, including this massive new project around Lake Tahoe. Everyone from environmentalists to an Olympic snowboarder and a prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have since condemned the Forest Service’s plan.

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A petition on Change.org gathered about 10,000 signatures in less than two weeks. And people have taken to social media to call for action, generating hundreds of thousands of views, with companies and organizations like Patagonia and Greenpeace sharing information about the spraying. “Pesticides have no place in our forests!” Greenpeace wrote on its Instagram.

Snowboarder Hannah Teter, who won gold in the half pipe at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, and Silver at the 2010 games in Vancouver, has voiced her opposition on Instagram, where she has 275,000 followers, as well as on her Facebook page.

“It’s so stupid. Everyone in Tahoe is so bummed,” she told me. “How the heck did they get this approved?”

The Forest Service did allow for public comment back in 2023 on its initially smaller proposal for herbicide use in the Caldor Fire scar, which most people in the area seemingly never heard about. Then a 2025 executive order by President Trump to expand timber harvesting on national forestland allowed the Forest Service to more than double its proposed herbicide use within the Caldor Fire scar without soliciting public feedback.

As the outcry grew over the past few weeks, news begin circulating on social media that the Forest Service was backing off. “They cancelled the plan!” one person wrote. “People showed up to meetings, called our representatives and it’s finally cancelled. OUR VOICES MATTERED ON THIS ONE.”

The Forest Service began spraying glyphosate in the Tahoe area last year, including directly on the slopes of Sierra-at-Tahoe.

But that wasn’t true. At Sierra-at-Tahoe, I stood on a mountainside that clearly had been doused in........

© Mother Jones