COLUMN ONE : Tahoe’s Rural Tone in Danger : Easy access has crowded one of California’s celebrated resort areas. The rustic region is divided over how to cope with a future of traffic, environmental anguish and urban woes.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. —  Cockeye Johnson’s dusty wagon trail through the Sierra Nevada is now a highway to Lake Tahoe beaches and casinos. Miners paid a fee to use the trail a century ago. Today there is talk, serious talk, of collecting fees again.

“You pay $5 to get into Yosemite--why not Tahoe?” said Jim DiPeso, a local activist.

Encircled by peaks, and carpeted edge to edge with pine and fir forests, the Tahoe basin is beautiful and wild, but it is no park. It is a volcanic valley shared by five counties in two states. Charging admission would be radical, like collecting a buck to visit Carmel or Palm Springs.

But with 30 million people crammed into California--10 million more than when today’s college juniors came into the world--side effects of the huge population are inducing changes in rural life even at 6,228 feet in the Sierra.

Lake Tahoe is no longer remote. An exclusive playground once for wilderness travelers, then for wealthy Bay Area society, the shore is now within a two-hour drive of 2.1 million residents in California and Nevada. Teen-agers from the suburbs come to the lake for Friday night dates.

Almost 9 million souls live within a four-hour drive, the 1990 census found, a fact with implications--for traffic, pollution and Tahoe’s rustic tone--that make people here gasp. As many as 167,000 people already flock to the Tahoe basin on the busiest days of summer and winter.

“They can come up here for breakfast,” said Laurel Ames, executive director of the League to Save Lake Tahoe, and a south shore resident since the 1940s. “They are changing the face of Tahoe.”

On a beach near the ruins of the first shoreline resort, built in 1898 as “the Saratoga of the Pacific,” a winter morning’s peace gives no hint of the human mass down the hill. The reality is that all those people with easy access have imposed a future of traffic, environmental anguish and urban woes on one of California’s celebrated rural places.

Traffic is so bad on winter weekends, and for most of the summer, that plans are being drawn for the country’s highest altitude mass-transit rail line, near the route of Cockeye’s old wagon trail. Tactics once unknown in the Sierra--such as car-pool lanes and one-way streets--are being thrown at the problem.

In South Lake Tahoe, the lake’s only official town, urbanization has set in. Bulldozers have cleared a swath of old motels for a high-altitude urban redevelopment project, and a barrio of Latino service workers has sprouted up in the shadow of Harvey’s and Harrah’s, the lake’s original Las Vegas-style casinos.

A drug culture thrives, long hinted at by fancy cars and ready cash in the hands of local residents with no apparent source of income. Its existence burst into view in 1989 when a big federal drug sting snared then-mayor Terry Trupp and his wife. Abbie Hoffman’s book “Steal This Drug Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America” is displayed at Sierra Bookshop in the local-interest section, beside books on Mark Twain and the Donner Party.

“If somebody opens a new restaurant, you say to yourself ‘drug money,’ ” Ames said, only partly in jest. “It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody--and there’s a lot of screwy stuff going on.”

When the old money families of Northern California--the Huntingtons, Kaisers, Crockers and others--began summering at Tahoe in the 1920s and ‘30s, their dockside estates and classic boats, dubbed Woodies, became fixtures on the thickly forested west shore. The trip up from San Francisco took time, but naturalist John Muir wrote that among Sierra lakes, “Tahoe is king of them all, not only in size, but in the surpassing beauty of its shores and waters.”

The lake’s depth of 1,645 feet, and relative infertility because of the lack of enriching organisms, gave Tahoe’s water a celebrated clarity. From hiking trails on the basin rim, the potato-shaped expanse of water defines the concept of blue.

Today, the water is still very clear, but clouding from algae is “a genuine cause of concern,” according to UC Davis scientists who monitor the lake. Soil eroding from slopes torn up by development nourishes the algae. So do nitrates that settle in the water from the smog, which some days obscures the 22-mile view from Tahoe Keys on the south shore to Kings Beach on the north shore.

Tahoe’s remoteness began to vanish in the highway boom that followed World War II, which made the lake accessible to the middle-class. Interstate 80 from San Francisco lets BMWs and Jeeps leap Sierra ridges to Truckee, the old lumber town 10 miles from the north shore, close to where the Donner Party met tragedy in the winter of 1846 trying to cross the range the old-fashioned way.

U.S. 50 from Sacramento is more snaky through the Mother Lode canyons, but delivers motorists past old motels, discount wedding chapels and new factory outlet stores right to the front entrance of the south shore hotel casinos.

In the last decade, whole cities of new homes and suburbanites chased the highways across the Central Valley and up the Sierra foothills. There, in Sacramento and Auburn and Vacaville, live the suburban legions who threaten Tahoe’s rural demeanor.

They come for the qualities that have always lured people to Tahoe. In summer, the beaches, boat docks and resort campgrounds jump with families, despite the lake’s cool-to-chilly water. A dozen ski areas lure winter athletes, drought willing.

Industry titans and entertainment figures cloister behind gates on the “gold coast” along the heavily wooded west shore, or at Glenbrook on the Nevada side. The merely well-to-do stay at vacation homes in tracts called Tahoe Keys or Al Tahoe, the latter named after himself by early developer Al Sprague.

The lake’s best-known man-made features are the seven casino-hotels at Stateline, Nev., that rise through the trees, as high as 18 stories. Giant neon marquees announce stage shows from Dolly Parton to Lou Rawls to Playboy’s Girls of Rock and Roll.

There is plenty of room at Tahoe for the people, but not always enough for them to drive or park their cars, most local leaders grudgingly admit. Things got so ugly on the north shore two years ago that a national team of architects was invited in to give advice and pronounced “an agony of traffic congestion.”

“The automobile is possibly Tahoe’s greatest threat,” said Kerry Miller, city manager of South Lake Tahoe. On holidays, “if we’re not at capacity we’re pretty close.”

To fight cars, $7 million was included in a statewide referendum to begin buying land for a rapid transit line between South Lake Tahoe airport and the casinos. Some dreamers hope that the line, which could be light rail as in Los Angeles and San Diego or a Disneyland-style monorail, will connect someday with Amtrak at Truckee.

North shore congestion is being attacked by a traffic management association--a creature of urban planners usually found in suburbs and industrial parks--to coordinate shuttle buses and try other tactics. After years of controversy, home mail delivery at the lake was started to reduce driving by local residents.

Local growth is a minor cause of Tahoe’s ills. The 1990 census said South Lake Tahoe’s year-round population crept to 21,586, up fewer than 1,000 from a decade ago. The city contends that many residents were missed in the count, mostly Latino casino and hotel workers who gave some lake neighborhoods a new ethnic flavor. South Lake Tahoe is now 19% Hispanic, the Kings Beach area 33% Hispanic, the census found.

Tahoe has been spared rapid local growth because of a 1969 compact between California and Nevada aimed mainly at preserving the lake’s environment. Building in the lake basin is strictly controlled by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which wields extraordinary powers.

In the 1980s the agency declared 9,000 private land parcels unsuitable for development, dashing the dreams of countless city dwellers who hoped to retire to Tahoe, and sending developers to court. The controversial act withstood a major legal challenge last year, but faces others.

The agency issues only 300 permits a year for new homes on the 3,000 vacant lots that still qualify, and hopeful vacation homeowners and building contractors line up in the snow every January for a coveted permit.

The agency rules as absolute overlord of the shoreline, imposing some of the nation’s strictest rules of behavior for private land.

“Moving one rock without a permit is a violation,” said spokeswoman Pamela Drum.

With local growth in check, everyone agrees that Tahoe’s future will be shaped by tourists. Which kind of tourists to serve and how to accommodate them are points of some controversy.

One wing of local opinion wants to remake the basin as a world destination resort, with luxury lakeside hotels, a busy jetport and fashionable boutiques. All the better to lure conventions, Japanese skiers and anyone else who will stay a week, get out of their cars and spend their money.

“That’s critical at Tahoe--to upgrade our product,” said Steve Teshara, executive director of the Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, which fights growth rules on behalf of property owners and businesses.

The new look also would transform Tahoe City, a casual north shore village of marinas, eateries, and the landmark “Fanny Bridge,” named for tourists who bend over to peer at the lake’s outlet gates into the Truckee River. Some merchants want Tahoe City to become an efficient tourist hub with sidewalks, shuttle buses and more lodging.

“We want to bring it into the ‘90s,” said Teshara, who also represents Tahoe City interests. “If we keep thinking in the past, time is going to go right past and Tahoe City is going to become a slum.”

In South Lake Tahoe, city officials with visions of Japanese yen razed a block of cheap motels--the staple tourist accommodation for many years--to make way for a $210-million urban redevelopment project. Plans include the first new south shore hotel in more than a decade, a seven-story, 400-room Embassy Suites.

If construction money is found, the fledgling mass transit rail line will be built to anchor the project.

“We need a mode of transportation that will attract tourists,” said Miller, the city manager. “I would also like to see direct flights from Los Angeles, from Dallas-Fort Worth. It would help us market Lake Tahoe as a world destination resort.”

The other school of thought says Tahoe should forget the world-resort idea. The future customers already live nearby in Northern California, the argument goes, and they are coming whether invited or not. So every effort needs to go into saving the lake’s environment from the onslaught.

That ball is carried by the League to Save Lake Tahoe, formed in 1965 by west shore society figures and environmental-minded vacation homeowners. The group takes credit for blocking new casinos, killing a freeway around part of the lake, and shutting down most new home construction in the 1980s.

Now the league wants mandatory shuttle buses for the casinos and ski areas, no new parking lots, a total ban on free parking and rental cars, and swift construction of the rail line to get tourists out of their cars.

“What is our alternative?” said Ames, executive director since 1989. “There’s no room for more roads.”

The league is also the prime mover behind the idea to collect an entrance fee, a concept discarded in the 1970s. Its role would not be to discourage tourism, Ames said, but to raise the $500 million needed for the transit line and environmental repairs.

A decade ago, business leaders screamed that a fee would be tourism suicide, but their view has softened. The Tahoe environment suffered from yahoo-style rip-and-slash development in the 1970s and early ‘80s, they concede, and a fee may be the only source of money to fix things.

Even so, a fee on visitors is at best a remote possibility. Tahoe’s location on the border between California and Nevada complicates governance, with both states and a handful of counties--and maybe Congress--needing to agree on anything so sweeping.

“It’s an issue we’re willing to discuss,” said Teshara. “We understand more of what it takes to be a resort area now. We don’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”

LAKE TAHOE BASIN: A PROFILE

The once remote Sierra Nevada vacation area is now within 4 hours’ drive 8.9 million residents in California and Nevada, the 1990 U.S. Census found.

Area: 480 square miles, larger than Rhode Island. About 2/3 in California, 1/3 in Nevada.

Government: Five counties, plus the Tahoe Regional Planning agency, a regional agency created by federal compact.

Incorporated city: South Lake Tahoe, 1990 population of 21,586.

The lake: Surface elevation 6,228 feet. Lake is 22 miles long by 12 miles wide, with 71 miles of shoreline, and maximum depth of 1,645 feet. Only major outlet is the Truckee River.