A small dive team spent an entire year cleaning trash from every mile of Lake Tahoe’s shoreline. Now you can see the whole story on the big screen.
“72 Miles,” the first feature documentary from the nonprofit Clean Up The Lake, is having its North Lake Tahoe premiere on Tuesday, May 12 at Tahoe Art Haus and Cinema in Tahoe City. The film screening starts at 8 p.m., with a release party at Tahoe Tap Haus in the same parking lot from 6:30 to 8 p.m. beforehand.
Filmed in 2022, the documentary follows the Sierra Nevada-based dive team as they work their way around the lake’s entire 72-mile shoreline, removing submerged litter and debris from the lakebed one mile at a time. By the end of the project, the team had pulled more than 25,000 pounds of trash from beneath the surface.
What makes the film compelling beyond the numbers is what the team went through to finish the job. The cleanup stretched across seasons, and the crew dealt with frozen shorelines, record-breaking snowfall and wildfire evacuations, all while conducting physically demanding underwater work in cold, high-elevation conditions.
What they found beneath the surface revealed a side of Lake Tahoe that most people never see. Trash and debris accumulate quietly on the lakebed, out of sight and out of mind for the millions of visitors who come to the lake every year.
The film captures the persistence required to see a project like this through and makes a case that a small, committed group of people can create measurable change in one of the most iconic lakes on the planet.
Tickets are available now at the Tahoe Art Haus website. The screening is at 475 N Lake Tahoe Blvd in Tahoe City.
