by
Kyril “Ky” PlasKon
... G IN H T . .. D E IN A L P x E AN UN AND S U IO R E T S Y M IN S K LUR FORESTS R E T A W R E D N U T N IE ANC NEAR LAKE TAHOE
A
professor and his boat are just a speck on the surface of frigid Fallen Leaf Lake west of Tahoe. The line attached to his experimental vibrating fishing lure cuts the glassy water, trolling the deep blue for a big, hungry and unlucky fish.
It catches, the professor leans closer, the pole bends, but the line snaps, and his hopes sink into the dark water. But this isn’t about the one that got away. It’s a true tale: How John Kleppe, a retired University of Nevada, Reno electrical engineering professor, caught the big one, and how he is still wrestling his controversial catches to shore. It began 30 years ago. He would toss out his line and troll around the lake and hit snags like any fisherman would. Until one day, “I looked up and triangulated that I was at the same spot over and over again when it [hit the snags], and I said, ‘I need to figure out what this is.’” OPINION
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He turned to his high-tech fish finder for answers. The water below was 150 feet deep, his line was down only 40 feet, and the screen showed the water was as dead as space. What invisible force might be clutching his experimental lures and trying to steal them away into the Tahoe abyss? Kleppe will never forget the day he took the bait: “I need to get a diver and figure out what it is.” It was 1997 before he got a diver to go down into the fishing lure Bermuda Triangle. The diver splashed in with his black rubber wet suit, tanks and mask, breathing compressed air in long loud heaves like Darth Vader. The bubbles of breath rose toward Kleppe as he watched the diver kick and fall into the high-altitude lake. “At that altitude, they can only stay down for about 20 minutes,” Kleppe said. “He went down.” And just a few minutes later, “He came up shaken.” Since that day, Kleppe says what he found has stirred the pot of scientific debate and sparked the realization that mysterious legendary things of the deep do exist—just not as we
FEATURE STORY
ever imagined. Finding mysterious things and telling people about them is fraught with snags, and he’s had to be careful. “People are likely to put you in a boobie hatch,” he said. “You lose your credibility if you move too far beyond the existing box. You have to be patient, you stick to your guns and you still might be wrong.” He didn’t start to talk to his neighbors about the strange snags in the mysterious lake until after he had evidence in front of his very own eyes.
hundreds of years and dated back to A.D. 1215. But that submerged tree was just skimming the surface of scientific mysteries. “When I heard it was medieval, I knew we had to search for more,” Kleppe said. Sixteen years later, his work has gained acceptance. In November 2011, he co-wrote and published an article in Quaternary Science Reviews. It’s the story of these forests that are still standing, dating back up to 3,232 years. That story represents 200 years of growth during mega-droughts that were possibly happening every thousand years. With the last one in 1215, it could mean we’re approaching another one now. “The magic number is 60 percent of normal precipitation, and it is like what we are going through this year,” Kleppe warned. “So you will see the
They look huge on the screen and in pictures, but they’re really just the size of a golf ball.
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“He [the diver] said, ‘There is a tree rooted right under your boat.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘You can probably see the top if you lean over, and I leaned over, and I could see the top down about 25 feet, and I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ [I said to] saw a piece off, and let’s carbon date this to see what we got.” The discovery was 120-feet-tall Ponderosa pines that had grown for |
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reservoirs being depleted. We plan buildings to withstand an earthquake. We need to do the same thing for a megadrought. The best solution is to store water.” He suggested finding natural chasms in the ground and to start storing water so that it just doesn’t just evaporate into thin air as it did during these historic megadroughts. So, why are we finding out about the forest now? “Oh, they are huge, and they don’t show up on a fish finder. That’s why no one has discovered them,” Kleppe said. There have been some rough seas, battling skepticism, which is fine, he said. But there was also jealousy. Others dismissed the upright forest, telling him Moses drowned the trees. “There couldn’t be such a drought,” he recalled someone telling him. “That was denial.” “Not discovered here! How could that be? No way in hell!” He recalled people questioning him. He said now there are two other detractors of the warning presented by these monoliths of the deep.
“THE BloB”
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MAY 30, 2013
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