SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, CALIF.—Travelers have started asking hotels a different kind of question—not just what’s on offer, but how the place actually runs. For years, the answer came in the language of good intentions: broad “eco-friendly” goals and green pledges that laid a vital foundation. What both guests and hotels are reaching for now is the next step: pairing those intentions with real numbers.
That shift doesn’t happen overnight, and no single property has it all figured out. But in a place like Lake Tahoe—where busy summers and longer wildfire seasons keep the environment top of mind—small, steady progress is worth paying attention to. Often it looks less like a sweeping pledge than one building, one system, one number at a time.
At HiMark Hotel in South Lake Tahoe, one of those numbers just hit a milestone. As of June 24, the solar array on the property’s roof has completed its first full year of operation.
In that year it generated 114 megawatt hours of clean electricity—keeping an estimated 177,000 pounds of CO₂ out of the air, the equivalent of roughly 201,000 miles driven on sunshine—and covering about 16 percent of the hotel’s power.
The roughly $35,000 it saved has gone back into guest-facing improvements, a reminder that doing right by the environment and doing right by guests can be the same line item.
Being Part of the Solution
“One of the reasons we installed solar is because we want guests to feel good about choosing to stay with us,” said Mitchell Murray, CEO of PlayPark Hospitality, HiMark’s parent company. “Nobody should feel guilty about a trip to Tahoe. Rather than being part of an overtourism problem, we’d rather help people choose a place that’s working to be part of the solution.”
The array was installed by Reno-based installer Simple Power Solar keeping the project within the region’s own clean-energy economy—one piece of a longer effort across PlayPark Hospitality’s independent Lake Tahoe hotels, paired with the Stay With Purpose program that directs a share of every reservation to local community and environmental causes.
A single solar array won’t save the lake. But HiMark’s first year of solar offers a small but concrete model for what responsible travel can look like when a hotel decides to walk the walk: measurable, local, and built to last well beyond a single season.
