On these hot summer days, families and dogs find cool respite on the 200-yard sandy shoreline of Lake Tahoe’s Kiva Beach. Swimmers head out to floating docks on Fallen Leaf Lake. And backpackers and hikers weave down forested paths into the high alpine, along the shoreline of Echo Lake. 

Come winter, chairlifts at Heavenly and Palisades’ Alpine Meadows grant thousands of skiers and snowboarders access to Tahoe’s public lands, while backcountry skiers hike for their turns on snow-covered slopes that seemingly dive into the crystalline blue water above Rubicon Bay and Emerald Bay.

In the Lost Sierra, a group of steadfast, devoted mountain bikers are currently building a trail network to connect 15 California mountain towns in the rolling hills.

Folks from Southern California flock to Mammoth’s Lakes Basin for hiking, camping and fishing — in Mammoth, outdoor recreational tourism contributes more than 70% of the dollars in the town’s general fund, according to Mayor Chris Bubser.

Elsewhere in the Eastern Sierra, the Whitney Portal, the doorstep to the highest point in the continental United States, and Mono Lake, a refuge for thousands of migratory birds, are some of the nation’s most unique landscapes.

All of these places are more exposed than ever to private interests, development and resource extraction due to a proposal in the reconciliation bill moving through the Senate that would sell up to 3 million acres of public land in the West — including land in California.

“Given this administration’s war on California and the fact that it mandates a process for certain millions of acres to be sold, California is really going to be in the crosshairs,” said Wendy Schneider, executive director of public lands advocacy group Friends of the Inyo.

Maps published by nonprofit groups the Wilderness Society and Outdoor Alliance show land managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management that is eligible to be sold, according to a bill that Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, included in the Senate’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

The bill does not specify which public lands would be sold, but it also does not include any public process that would allow local leaders, advocates or residents — the people who know these lands best — to provide any input in the decision. 

“It bypasses existing protections, and it sells off huge swaths of land without proper process to get public input,” said Katie Hawkins, California program director for Outdoor Alliance. “That is very different from anything that we have ever experienced before.”

Instead, the bill calls for both federal agencies to sell or transfer up to 3 million acres of public land. The bill could potentially impact 11 states across the West — with a notable exception made for Montana. 

“We think they’re going to be taking a long, hard look at California,” Schneider said, adding: “Any public lands that are not protected by a wilderness boundary or are not designated as a national monument or a national park are on the auction block, and there is no public process, no way for there to be local input.” 

Public lands advocates are sounding the alarm on the bill, calling for constituents to call and email their congressional representatives with urgent pleas to stop the sale. Last month, an overwhelming outcry successfully pushed the House of Representatives to remove at the last moment an amendment that wanted to sell off more than 500,000 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah. Activists and outdoor recreation groups hope the backlash will stop the Senate, too.

“We need to keep the pressure up,” Hawkins said. Outdoor Alliance is encouraging constituents to reach out not just to their senators but to their House representatives, too. In California’s Sierra Nevada, three Republicans could be key to stopping this sale: Reps. Kevin Kiley, Doug LaMalfa and Tom McClintock. Kiley, whose district spans across the Sierra, including Lake Tahoe, spoke out against selling public lands last month.

“The communities most affected by our decisions must be willing partners in any plans made by the federal government,” Kiley said in a speech he gave on the House floor in May.

Across the Sierra, local communities are still unsure what this sale could mean for some of the state’s most beloved, iconic outdoor destinations. 

Congress has protected the Tahoe Basin for decades, most recently with the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act, which Congress reauthorized last fall with $300 million for environmental restoration work in the Tahoe Basin. Congress also created the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to oversee land-use decisions in the basin.

“Congress recently reauthorized the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act (LTRA), which conserves land and sends the unambiguous message that Tahoe is not for sale,” said Julie Regan, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, on Instagram. “Decades before that, Congress ratified the bistate compact that governs land use planning at Lake Tahoe. Altogether, the Senate proposed language would reverse 50 years of standing land policy at Tahoe.”

Noa Banayan, government affairs manager for the League to Save Lake Tahoe, said it’s not clear how the Senate’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” would affect those protections, but according to the maps from the Wilderness Society and Outdoor Alliance, some very popular places in the Tahoe Basin are eligible to be sold.

“There's a lot of uncertainty, honestly, about what it can mean,” Banayan said, “because it seems like there’s some unintended consequences in this bill for Tahoe.”

One thing Banayan underscored, however, is that “public lands are what make Tahoe Tahoe.” The Forest Service manages about 75% of the land in the Tahoe Basin. 

In the Lost Sierra, most of the trails that make up the vision for Connected Communities — the idea to link 15 rural towns by multiuse trails — are on public land that would be eligible to be sold in the bill, said Michelle Abramson, director of grant management for the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship. The bill impacts popular trails that already exist, too, including trails on Mount Hough near Quincy, in the Lakes Basin near Graeagle, and parts of the legendary, historic mountain bike trail that descends into Downieville. Despite this uncertainty, trail-building efforts are continuing to move forward, Abramson said.

“Our Forest Service partners have been really dedicated to continue to do hard and good work,” Abramson said. “I feel lucky that we have good people on the Forest Service side who are trying to help us as much as they can.”

For communities in the Eastern Sierra, the threat of selling public lands is no less than existential. 

The Mammoth Lakes Basin is a treasured area that sees a couple of million visitors every summer, said Chris Bubser, mayor of Mammoth Lakes. The town is surrounded by public lands that would be eligible for sale under this bill. 

“It threatens everything for us,” Bubser said. 

Bubser said she’s unnerved by the legislation’s vagueness about what potential buyers could or couldn’t do with the land. If land were sold for logging or to private landowners, that could cut off public access. “It would destroy our economy. I mean, our town could die,” she said. 

Schneider said the bill would allow interested parties to buy public lands: “So who are the interested parties? That literally could mean anything, and we just feel like lands could be identified and put up for auction that are super important to this local area, with no local input,” she said. 

Mammoth Lakes is part of Mono County, and 94% of Mono County is public land. One thing is certain about the push to sell off public lands: It’s making residents all over the Sierra feel anxious, said Mono County Supervisor Paul McFarland, who lives in Lee Vining, a gateway town to Yosemite National Park. 

“So much of what we see coming out of our leadership is purposeful disruption, and purposeful disruption, it deeply bothers people, and it makes it impossible to have rational conversations and come up with solutions,” McFarland said. 

“I’ll be honest: I am not super worried about Mono County because we know our land, we know our places, and we have people who are willing to work for them and ensure that they stay wild and public,” McFarland said. “It’s the places that don’t have someone to fight for them, but that are critical to wildlife, like pronghorn [antelope], things that need long expanses to move through. Or cutthroat trout — those are the things, the places that I worry about, that don’t have someone to speak for them.”