Fires are always devastating and the Castle Fire destroyed several small mountain communities including Sequoia Crest, Alpine Village, and Cedar Slope in about two days…. What was hard to comprehend is that the fire sat down in the Kern Canyon for a month and little was done to extinguish the fire completely…. Even more amazing to me is that the Belknap and McIintyre Sequoia groves were left completely unprotected and sustained major losses…. If you walked down there today you would be horrified at the sight…. If cutting hundreds of trees down and piling them up then leaving them unburned to rot in hundreds of piles around the Sequoia groves someone’s idea of restoration, I say we need to find someone else to manage the forest, maybe a nonprofit…. When I was there last summer they were indiscriminately dropping trees amidst thousands of Sequoia seedlings trampling through the areas without any regard to the destruction they were causing…. When I pointed to the trees and asked the cutters what they were doing they said “What seedlings?” Then the boss came by and said they wanted to bring bulldozers in to drop all the trees around the grove. True story! Don’t look to the forest service to restore, manage, or steward anything in our precious monument…. I have pictures of everything, so no excuses please! Just as a side note, there has been no work done one our trails either for years to decades…. I can’t imagine anyone giving USFS the privilege of managing the wolves or any other animals in our mountains! They won’t even help us in Camp Nelson with the hundreds of bear break-ins this summer destroying many cabins in our community! 🤯
It is a delicate balance. Needs a lot of thought as to how best care for the trees and the wolves.
Fires are always devastating and the Castle Fire destroyed several small mountain communities including Sequoia Crest, Alpine Village, and Cedar Slope in about two days…. What was hard to comprehend is that the fire sat down in the Kern Canyon for a month and little was done to extinguish the fire completely…. Even more amazing to me is that the Belknap and McIintyre Sequoia groves were left completely unprotected and sustained major losses…. If you walked down there today you would be horrified at the sight…. If cutting hundreds of trees down and piling them up then leaving them unburned to rot in hundreds of piles around the Sequoia groves someone’s idea of restoration, I say we need to find someone else to manage the forest, maybe a nonprofit…. When I was there last summer they were indiscriminately dropping trees amidst thousands of Sequoia seedlings trampling through the areas without any regard to the destruction they were causing…. When I pointed to the trees and asked the cutters what they were doing they said “What seedlings?” Then the boss came by and said they wanted to bring bulldozers in to drop all the trees around the grove. True story! Don’t look to the forest service to restore, manage, or steward anything in our precious monument…. I have pictures of everything, so no excuses please! Just as a side note, there has been no work done one our trails either for years to decades…. I can’t imagine anyone giving USFS the privilege of managing the wolves or any other animals in our mountains! They won’t even help us in Camp Nelson with the hundreds of bear break-ins this summer destroying many cabins in our community! 🤯