HOMEWOOD — As Michael Hogan walks down a ski run at Homewood Mountain Resort, he follows the course where water previously flowed, water that used to carry sediment down to Lake Tahoe with it.

The once bare, hard-packed earth is now soft under foot, with grass and brush taking hold — only days after heavy rain in the basin, the difference in erosion is apparent.

“We haven't seen this kind of rain in five years — it was extremely informative, and the treatment did its job,” said Hogan, a soil scientist and president of Integrated Environmental Restoration Services, during a walkthrough last Friday. “This is truly sort of an adaptive process, we're always looking for better, more cost-effective ways to treat.”

Hogan has been contracted by Homewood to restore stretches of old dirt road, no longer needed and eroding into the lake, and has completed 240,000 square feet as of this year.

The approach has been holistic, Hogan said, taking water quality, forest health and even climate change into consideration.

By using wood chips from Meeks Bay Fire Protection District's thinning operations to till into the earth, Hogan said his crew is creating a cheap disposal for the fire hazard reducing process, improving erosion at Homewood and even sinking carbon stores into the soil, a benefit for global warming.

“If we don't incorporate climate change into every project we are going to miss the boat,” Hogan said.

While the standard anti-erosion technique has been to spray hydromulch — a slurry of seed, hay and mulch — to cover up eroding hillsides, Hogan has taken a variety of tactics, from filling in old, worn-down roads to tilling the earth and mixing in organic material.

From there, Hogan said, the next critical step is monitoring.

Using a rain machine, crews are able to simulate rain on untreated and treated patches of land, and collect the sediment running off.

“We can typically see a four-to-ten times reduction in sediment,” Hogan said.

In some places, he said crews have been able to reduce the erosion to zero, in one case taking erosion from 10,000 pounds of sediment per acre inch of rain to nothing.

The work is funded by Homewood and a $650,00 state grant that came in last summer; work has been ongoing since 2006.

“A lot of people talk about keeping Lake Tahoe blue, but this is actually doing something about it,” said Art Chapman, president of JMA Ventures, which owns Homewood, as well as Alpine Meadows.

Growth at Homewood

As for Homewood Mountain Resort's development plans, David Tirman, executive vice president of JMA Ventures, said an internal environmental review draft should be ready by spring.

“If all goes well we could see project approval about this time next year,” Tirman said.

Plans for the north side of the resort include a hotel with up to 75 rooms, 56 condos, 12 workforce housing apartments and 25,000 square feet of retail, while the south side could include up to 99 condominiums and 11 homes.