A giant sequoia grove in San Diego County?
Hundreds of young Big Trees are thriving on Mount Palomar
Volume 1, Number 56 - Thursday, June 8, 2023
Now twice a week — Monday and Thursday!
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
THERE WAS A TIME, some scientists believe, that ancient ancestors of giant sequoia trees grew throughout much of the northern hemisphere. This was during the Mesozoic Period, tens of millions (or more) of years ago. Today, though, the native range of the Big Trees is restricted to the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
Even there, the trees grow only in places where conditions are just right. Sufficient water is among the requirements. According to the National Park Service, the trees were rare during a warm period about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, and their “present level of abundance in the Sierra Nevada dates back only about 4500 years.”
Today, the famous Big Trees that attract so much attention — the monarch trees that are thousands of years old — grow only on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
But Jim Hamerly, a San Diego County man, has learned that giant sequoias can thrive elsewhere and continues to plant trees he’s grown from seed on his 20 acres on Mount Palomar, a mountain ridge in the Peninsular Ranges in northern San Diego County that is best known as the location of the Palomar Observatory.
San Diego, on the southern coast of California, just north of the U.S. border with Mexico, is one of the oldest cities in the state, and just the name conjures up images of beautiful beaches and palm trees.
But at 4,200 square miles, San Diego County is the ninth largest of California’s 58 counties by land area. And not just beaches but also mountains and deserts are part of the county’s natural features. According to The Nature Conservancy, San Diego County “is the most biologically rich county in the continental United States.”
Here’s what else the conservation organization says about the county in the southwest corner of California:
“From its 70 miles of scenic beaches to its majestic mile-high mountains, bucolic grasslands and deserts abloom with wildflowers, both wildlife and people enjoy and depend upon the assets of this terrain. The most biologically rich county in the continental U.S. is, however, also the most threatened.”
Hamerly’s 20 acres on Mount Palomar are adjacent to Cleveland National Forest, the southernmost national forest in the country. He said he has pushed for years for the Forest Service to plant giant sequoias on that forest, but the agency not only won’t plant the trees anywhere on its 460,000 acres but would like Hamerly to stop planting them.
“They consider them an invasive species,” he said, “which is just ridiculous.”
Although he can’t prove it, Hamerly believes giant sequoias once grew in the mountains of San Diego County, where native cedar, black oak and white fir trees grow.
“What I have been able to prove is that the entire mountain … was burned sometime after 1897. My property was completely burned in 1924. So I don’t have any first-growth” forest on my property,” he said. He also knows that there was logging in the region during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“Most of the landowners here believe that there were sequoia trees here at one time, and they were either logged or burned out,” he said.
Hamerly, whose multiple degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University include a doctoral degree, is a forester by avocation. He’s semi-retired after a career that included decades leading tech company innovations and teaching, including seven years as dean of the College of Business Administration at California State University, San Marcos.
Retirement apparently doesn’t agree with Hamerly. His professional career began in 1968, and what he calls his “fourth retirement” was from the university in 2021. Since then, he’s had more time for his giant sequoias, but he’s still involved with his firm Paseo Technology and venture capital investment and counseling with an emphasis on energy savings and carbon sequestration from forestry. He’s also a member of the advisory board for the California Climate Exchange.
The trees
In addition to the trees on his property, Hamerly has located 232 other giant sequoias growing on Palomar Mountain. Some were planted by a former area resident in the 1950s and early 1960s.
“You can tell by the size of the trees,” he said of those planted by a caretaker at the observatory many years ago. “They’re all 80 to 100 feet tall.”
He has more than 70 on his 20 acres and has given between 100 and 150 other giant sequoias to his neighbors.
His baby trees go to nearby properties that also meet the requirements Hamerly has learned are essential — facing westward toward the ocean and above 4,000 feet elevation. His own home is just above 5,400 feet,* and the elevation of the observatory grounds — where at least 40 giant sequoia groves grow — is above 6,100 feet.
Among the first giant sequoias he planted were trees purchased from Welker’s Grove Nursery in Auberry, California. Located in the Sierra Nevada foothills northeast of Fresno, the nursery and home of its owners were lost in the 2020 Creek Fire. The company’s website, giant-sequoia.com, remains a rich trove of photos of giant sequoia trees growing all over the world.
More recently, Hamerly grows his own seedlings using seeds sourced from areas in California where the trees are native and from seeds produced by trees on his property.
Giant sequoias need a lot of water. The trees pull an estimated 40 percent of their water from the air, Hamerly said. His home on Mount Palomar is about 30 miles from the ocean, but the Pacific fog rolls in about 250 days a year, helping keep the trees happy. On his property, they also benefit from an underground aquifer.
“I don’t water my trees,” he said, except for the use of a drip system during their first two years in the ground. “They do incredibly well. I’ve never lost one. I have none that are sickly.”
Wildfire risk
As with giant sequoias growing in the Sierra Nevada, the trees on Mount Palomar are at risk from wildfire. About 1,230 acres — or 65 percent — of Palomar Mountain State Park burned during the 2007 Poomacha fire. Fifteen firefighters were injured in the fire that burned 49,410 acres and destroyed 138 homes.
In October 2010, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that there were parts of Palomar Mountain that hadn’t burned in recorded history.
“The eastern and northern slopes, as well as at the top where most people live, are filled with cedar, white fir, oak and pine trees. The brush beneath the trees is overgrown,” the newspaper noted.
“We are a high fire (risk) region,” Hamerly said. “For that reason, I have my land completely cleared around the house and around my sequoia groves.”
As he finds time, he also does what he calls “parking up” his trees, meaning that he cuts all the lower limbs up to about 12- to 15-feet from the ground.
This way, he said, if a fire comes through, it doesn’t ignite the base of the tree and carry flames into the crown.
His ‘why’
“I’ve always loved forestry,” Hamerly said. “I spend all my time outdoors now that I’m semi-retired. I love sequoia trees. I’m doing this for my great-great-great-great… grandchildren.
“One of the areas I planted I call the grandfather’s circle. It’s ten sequoia trees planted 50 feet apart in a perfect circle. The idea is for them to grow up and merge.”
He’s also working to put about half of his property in a conservation easement to protect the trees in perpetuity.
A video (HERE) about Hamerly produced while he was the Business College Dean at CSU San Marcos, shows him on his Palomar Mountain property.
More information about Hamerly, his giant sequoia trees and other interests is online at jim.hamerly.net.
Wildfire, water & weather update
It’s rather amazing, but weather in California remains cooler than we might expect at this time of the year, with even more thunderstorms and possible rain predicted in the Sierra Nevada in the next few days. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts can be found at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
Many news articles about El Niño have been published recently. You can read one HERE (Washington Post gift link).
Wildfire update: As of this morning, CalFire’s incident page reports it has responded to 1392 wildfires this season, with 2,670 acres burned. Fortunately, most wildfires so far have been contained with very little acreage.
The federal InciWeb system shows more HERE, mostly shows prescribed burns and flood response.
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Giant sequoias in the news
• The Calaveras Enterprise published an excellent article HERE about the Calaveras Big Trees Association taking a great role in advocating for increasing the pace and scale of fuels reduction by the state. Here’s an excerpt:
The nonprofit organized the Forest Resilience Committee about a year and a half ago. Its mission — “To advocate for preservation and protection of the giant sequoia groves and surrounding forests in Calaveras Big Trees State Park and adjacent communities from catastrophic wildfire.”
• Sierra Sun Times and others have published articles about CalFire asking forestland owners to take steps to prevent bark beetle outbreaks in California’s ponderosa pine woodlands where trees were damaged by winter storms. Read it HERE.
• “Climate whiplash” is the new normal for California, Yale Climate Connections reports HERE. An excerpt:
After the recent storms, drought maps for the area are looking better in the short term. Yet one year of relief is not a cure. Climate science is shedding light on how precipitation patterns are likely to change as the planet heats up, and recent studies indicate California must prepare for both worsening drought and more intermittent, heavier rainfall.
• SouthTahoeNow.com has an article HERE about the Ancient Forest Society’s partnership with the organization One Tree Planted to collect and store giant sequoia seeds. An excerpt:
“Fostering the next generation of giants is essential to the continued survival of the world’s largest trees. Giant sequoias are powerhouses of carbon sequestration, habitat provision, and human well-being. Ensuring that intact, healthy giant sequoia forests persist is critical to our fight against climate change.” said Wendy Baxter, program manager of the Ancient Forest Society.
And another excerpt:
The state has a five-year plan to burn approximately 2,900 acres of the 6,500-acre park, of which 1,300 acres in the South Grove is slated for this fall. It is unclear what the park’s plans are for the remaining acreage or what the plan is after the initial five-year effort.
A shocking new discovery — two iconic giant sequoias, known as the Orphans (as they are located away from the main North Grove), were scorched during a prescribed burn last fall. Several other sequoias were also damaged during the burn in the North Grove, possibly one or more of them mortally. The Forest Resilience Committee is advocating for thinning the forests prior to prescribed burns, which should reduce the risk of losing sequoias to planned burns.
Giant sequoia around the world
You can read HERE an article published by the National Park Service in 1955 about the artificial regeneration of giant sequoia trees. It includes a note about a tree grown from seed that is still living today at the Tyler Arboretum in Pennsylvania. The tree was planted in 1856 by Jacob and Minshall Painter and it’s still growing. Check out a video about the tree HERE.
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*The original version of this post incorrectly stated that his home is just above 6,000 feet.
I absolutely love what Dr. Jim Hammerly is doing. My career has some parallel to his and although still active in the AI field, study of conifers and their preservation have become a major part of my life. We have been looking for some land in the Palomar and Julian area to extend my collection of conifers. I would be very interested to see if coastal redwoods can also grow at Palomar. I have seen pics of coastal redwoods and giant sequoias side by side in Norway in the snow. So it appears that they can co-exist. Have always wondered whether they could hybridize. It would also be very interesting to plant Bristlecone Pines at Palomar.