Re: Camp 70 Foresters photo caption, I don’t think Hanson and the Club considers that little seedling to be the equivalent to what is identified in the photo as the “dead" giant sequoia. While looking at the photos we can’t tell whether or not those trees are, in fact, dead. Loss of green needles in the fire doesn’t necessarily mean the tree is dead. Other than observing that “Oh, my God, they’re black and their needles are gone . . .” how was their demise determined?
Closer examination of the tree is needed to make that determination as a live tree can loose its leaf canopy and come back. The question can be answered by examining the cambium buried deep behind that thick layer of bark that appears to remain on the trees in the photos despite being blackened on the surface.
Referring to the content of the Camp 70 story, Hanson explained the impact of high intensity fires on the seed bearing sequoia cones. (Hotter fires, more seeds release) I didn’t see Hanson’s comments as meaning only high intensity fires can facilitate regeneration of sequoias but that hotter fires engender greater seed release from cones did he not?
Camp 70’s Vladimir Steblina rather glib and disingenuous statement that Hanson does not understand how the forests in the Sierra Nevada have changed and that he should “walk into what is left of the giant sequoia forest at Homer’s grove and Baird Camp" is a leap of logic. Admittedly he did not walk into these places 50 years ago as apparently Stabling did for a very obvious reason. However, he routinely leads walks into the groves at various places to observe, consider and discuss the natural processes he’s talking about as they are now occurring. So, despite Steblina's insinuation, Hanson’s conclusions are based on actual observations and study. They’re not some sort of ivery tower dreamscape as Steblina insinuates nor are the policies as advocated by the John Muir Project and environmental groups, specifically the Sierra Club, destroying anything.
While I think we agree that European forestry practices superseded the more beneficial to the long range forestry health by the First Americans, it appears to me that the desired practices now advocated by Camp 70 and the forest and park service still treat the forests as sort of an agricultural crop as insinuated by the backhand swipe at former President Clinton in having the audacity to declare a national monument.
And, here’s an interesting statement: "Timber growth in the U.S. increased every year in the 20th Century. Even with the high harvest levels, more trees were growing in the U.S. than we were harvesting. The forests were changing due to fire exclusion, but more wood created a dense, urban society on the new continent."
Admittedly I lack the background to challenge that statement but I do recall family owned and run Pacific Lumber of Scotia California harvested sustainably. That is, until in 1986, they were taken over by Maxxam Corporation of Texas in a leveraged buyout.
To pay down their debt Maxxam increased harvesting beyond sustainability. It took 20 years of ill considered business practices for Maxxam to bankrupt Pacific Lumber. The plant is now permanently closed.
Response to Stephen Montgomery by Vladimir Steblina (Camp ’70 Foresters}
Yes, I think the giant sequoia are dead.
The fire was hot enough to kill the cambium layer in all probability. More importantly, the National Park Service, Forest Service, UC Berkeley researchers, and the Save the Redwoods League think they are dead.
Chad Hanson said, “They need this cycle of intense fire…to be regenerated.” He was not talking about greater seed release from the cones. Releasing a seed from a giant sequoia cone does not take much heat.
If Chad Hanson’s conclusions “are based on actual observations and study,” my comment is that Mr. Hanson is not paying attention when he walks the sequoia forests or reads the scientific literature on sequoias.
Has Mr. Hanson walked Case Mountain Grove, managed today by the Bureau of Land Management? I did in 1974 when it was in private ownership, and the landowner permitted me to access Coffeepot Canyon Grove inside Sequoia National Park.
Case Mountain Grove was logged about 10 to 20 years previously, and much of the white woods were removed. Case Mountain Grove was the only grove with EXTENSIVE sequoia regeneration throughout the grove area. That is the grove area that was logged.
The two avalanche chutes on the Garfield Grove trail were the ONLY other site with extensive sequoia regeneration. Those sequoias will NOT grow into monarchs being regenerated in an avalanche chute, nor were they regenerated by “intense” fire to release the seeds.
Every other grove south of the Mineral King road had little sequoia regeneration.
However, if the dead whitewoods are not removed, the subsequent fires in the burned sequoia forests will be worse.
Look at the dead sequoia in the Freeman Creek pictures. On either side of the giant sequoias, notice many dead whitewoods in the 20-inch DBH class. Those trees will be snags for a few years, and then they will start falling over in a jackstraw mess.
Yes, there will be giant sequoia reproduction among the jackstraw mess. The subsequent fire in that forest will result in a scorching, intense fire burning all the sequoia reproduction and a high probability of sterilizing the soil for centuries.
That will be the end of that sequoia forest. At that point, we will have lost the remaining monarchs and all the sequoia reproduction.
My statement that timber growth on Forest Service-managed lands increased in the 20th century is based on RPA data published by the Forest Service. The report for RPA 2020, based on data collected in 2017 and prior, showed that the Rocky Mountain region's growth has gone negative. We are burning down more trees than we are growing. The Pacific coast region of Washington, Oregon, and California was still positive in 2017.
However, with the Dixie and other mega-fires in the Sierra and the large Oregon fires in 2021, my professional opinion is that the Pacific Coast region will go negative in the next revision of RPA.
But since we are no longer harvesting public lands for wood products on any significant basis, not having our forests no longer on a sustainable basis is no big deal.
What is a big deal is that we are burning down our old-growth forests. President Biden’s executive order asked the Forest Service to prepare an analysis of old-growth and mature forests on public lands.
These are the bottom-line numbers: Since 2000, 700,000 acres of old-growth have been destroyed by wildfire and another 182,000 by insects and disease. Tree cutting resulted in 9,000 acres or ONE PERCENT of old-growth losses.
National forests are no longer being managed sustainably. While it would be fine if sustainability were only applied to trees, burning our national forests has reduced endangered species populations across the landscape. We are changing ecological systems, and not for the better.
Forest Service research shows that in just two recent years, wildfires have destroyed 20% of sensitive and endangered forest-dependent species.
We are destroying our old-growth forests and thousands of species with wildfires. The last thirty years of environmentalist management of our public lands have led to the greatest ecological change in the history of public forests, and that change has NOT been for the better.
I don’t understand the fixation with banning “logging” that obsesses the environmental community. Logging equipment is a tool to remove excess biomass that burns and kills giant sequoia. It is that simple.
We are all appalled by parents who refuse medical intervention for their kids to save their lives because they do not believe in vaccines or other medical treatments. The opposition to “logging” is in the same vein.
It would be great if the environmental community could devise a method to safely remove millions of pounds of biomass from the sequoia groves without using logging equipment. Camp 70 Foresters are looking forward to suggestions.
Monarch trees are an irreplaceable treasure. The past thirty years of managing the groves by forestry standards set by politicians and judges, despite environmentalists' pressure, have resulted in the killing of thousands of monarch trees.
Published science indicates that if we continue with current management practices, even more giant sequoia groves will be destroyed.
My fellow foresters and I are not willing to stand idly by and watch their destruction by well-meaning but scientifically challenged individuals who claim to want to protect our forest ecosystems.
Response to Stephen Montgomery by Vladimir Steblina (Camp ’70 Foresters}
Yes, I think the giant sequoia are dead.
The fire was hot enough to kill the cambium layer in all probability. More importantly, the National Park Service, Forest Service, UC Berkeley researchers, and the Save the Redwoods League think they are dead.
Chad Hanson said, “They need this cycle of intense fire…to be regenerated.” He was not talking about greater seed release from the cones. Releasing a seed from a giant sequoia cone does not take much heat.
If Chad Hanson’s conclusions “are based on actual observations and study,” my comment is that Mr. Hanson is not paying attention when he walks the sequoia forests or reads the scientific literature on sequoias.
Has Mr. Hanson walked Case Mountain Grove, managed today by the Bureau of Land Management? I did in 1974 when it was in private ownership, and the landowner permitted me to access Coffeepot Canyon Grove inside Sequoia National Park.
Case Mountain Grove was logged about 10 to 20 years previously, and much of the white woods were removed. Case Mountain Grove was the only grove with EXTENSIVE sequoia regeneration throughout the grove area. That is the grove area that was logged.
The two avalanche chutes on the Garfield Grove trail were the ONLY other site with extensive sequoia regeneration. Those sequoias will NOT grow into monarchs being regenerated in an avalanche chute, nor were they regenerated by “intense” fire to release the seeds.
Every other grove south of the Mineral King road had little sequoia regeneration.
However, if the dead whitewoods are not removed, the subsequent fires in the burned sequoia forests will be worse.
Look at the dead sequoia in the Freeman Creek pictures. On either side of the giant sequoias, notice many dead whitewoods in the 20-inch DBH class. Those trees will be snags for a few years, and then they will start falling over in a jackstraw mess.
Yes, there will be giant sequoia reproduction among the jackstraw mess. The subsequent fire in that forest will result in a scorching, intense fire burning all the sequoia reproduction and a high probability of sterilizing the soil for centuries.
That will be the end of that sequoia forest. At that point, we will have lost the remaining monarchs and all the sequoia reproduction.
My statement that timber growth on Forest Service-managed lands increased in the 20th century is based on RPA data published by the Forest Service. The report for RPA 2020, based on data collected in 2017 and prior, showed that the Rocky Mountain region's growth has gone negative. We are burning down more trees than we are growing. The Pacific coast region of Washington, Oregon, and California was still positive in 2017.
However, with the Dixie and other mega-fires in the Sierra and the large Oregon fires in 2021, my professional opinion is that the Pacific Coast region will go negative in the next revision of RPA.
But since we are no longer harvesting public lands for wood products on any significant basis, not having our forests no longer on a sustainable basis is no big deal.
What is a big deal is that we are burning down our old-growth forests. President Biden’s executive order asked the Forest Service to prepare an analysis of old-growth and mature forests on public lands.
These are the bottom-line numbers: Since 2000, 700,000 acres of old-growth have been destroyed by wildfire and another 182,000 by insects and disease. Tree cutting resulted in 9,000 acres or ONE PERCENT of old-growth losses.
National forests are no longer being managed sustainably. While it would be fine if sustainability were only applied to trees, burning our national forests has reduced endangered species populations across the landscape. We are changing ecological systems, and not for the better.
Forest Service research shows that in just two recent years, wildfires have destroyed 20% of sensitive and endangered forest-dependent species.
We are destroying our old-growth forests and thousands of species with wildfires. The last thirty years of environmentalist management of our public lands have led to the greatest ecological change in the history of public forests, and that change has NOT been for the better.
I don’t understand the fixation with banning “logging” that obsesses the environmental community. Logging equipment is a tool to remove excess biomass that burns and kills giant sequoia. It is that simple.
We are all appalled by parents who refuse medical intervention for their kids to save their lives because they do not believe in vaccines or other medical treatments. The opposition to “logging” is in the same vein.
It would be great if the environmental community could devise a method to safely remove millions of pounds of biomass from the sequoia groves without using logging equipment. Camp 70 Foresters are looking forward to suggestions.
Monarch trees are an irreplaceable treasure. The past thirty years of managing the groves by forestry standards set by politicians and judges, despite environmentalists' pressure, have resulted in the killing of thousands of monarch trees.
Published science indicates that if we continue with current management practices, even more giant sequoia groves will be destroyed.
My fellow foresters and I are not willing to stand idly by and watch their destruction by well-meaning but scientifically challenged individuals who claim to want to protect our forest ecosystems.
Though not an expert in any sense, I agree with the Camp70 statements that "Astonishingly, these groups and individuals still advocate a “no touch” approach rather than thoughtful forest management." I am reading Ethan Tapper's "How to Love a Forest" and heard him speak yesterday and he also would agree strongly with Camp 70.
- As an aside: "high-intensity fire is necessary for giant sequoia to regenerate." All of the sequoias on Palomar Mountain regenerate naturally without fire.
- Re: "the giant sequoia forests, of which only 74 exist worldwide." I sound like a broken record, but there are five regenerating groves in southern California, many larger than some northern California groves. And there are more than 500,000 sequoias in England alone. So there are many more than 74 sequoia groves in the world.
Re: Camp 70 Foresters photo caption, I don’t think Hanson and the Club considers that little seedling to be the equivalent to what is identified in the photo as the “dead" giant sequoia. While looking at the photos we can’t tell whether or not those trees are, in fact, dead. Loss of green needles in the fire doesn’t necessarily mean the tree is dead. Other than observing that “Oh, my God, they’re black and their needles are gone . . .” how was their demise determined?
Closer examination of the tree is needed to make that determination as a live tree can loose its leaf canopy and come back. The question can be answered by examining the cambium buried deep behind that thick layer of bark that appears to remain on the trees in the photos despite being blackened on the surface.
Referring to the content of the Camp 70 story, Hanson explained the impact of high intensity fires on the seed bearing sequoia cones. (Hotter fires, more seeds release) I didn’t see Hanson’s comments as meaning only high intensity fires can facilitate regeneration of sequoias but that hotter fires engender greater seed release from cones did he not?
Camp 70’s Vladimir Steblina rather glib and disingenuous statement that Hanson does not understand how the forests in the Sierra Nevada have changed and that he should “walk into what is left of the giant sequoia forest at Homer’s grove and Baird Camp" is a leap of logic. Admittedly he did not walk into these places 50 years ago as apparently Stabling did for a very obvious reason. However, he routinely leads walks into the groves at various places to observe, consider and discuss the natural processes he’s talking about as they are now occurring. So, despite Steblina's insinuation, Hanson’s conclusions are based on actual observations and study. They’re not some sort of ivery tower dreamscape as Steblina insinuates nor are the policies as advocated by the John Muir Project and environmental groups, specifically the Sierra Club, destroying anything.
While I think we agree that European forestry practices superseded the more beneficial to the long range forestry health by the First Americans, it appears to me that the desired practices now advocated by Camp 70 and the forest and park service still treat the forests as sort of an agricultural crop as insinuated by the backhand swipe at former President Clinton in having the audacity to declare a national monument.
And, here’s an interesting statement: "Timber growth in the U.S. increased every year in the 20th Century. Even with the high harvest levels, more trees were growing in the U.S. than we were harvesting. The forests were changing due to fire exclusion, but more wood created a dense, urban society on the new continent."
Admittedly I lack the background to challenge that statement but I do recall family owned and run Pacific Lumber of Scotia California harvested sustainably. That is, until in 1986, they were taken over by Maxxam Corporation of Texas in a leveraged buyout.
To pay down their debt Maxxam increased harvesting beyond sustainability. It took 20 years of ill considered business practices for Maxxam to bankrupt Pacific Lumber. The plant is now permanently closed.
Response to Stephen Montgomery by Vladimir Steblina (Camp ’70 Foresters}
Yes, I think the giant sequoia are dead.
The fire was hot enough to kill the cambium layer in all probability. More importantly, the National Park Service, Forest Service, UC Berkeley researchers, and the Save the Redwoods League think they are dead.
Chad Hanson said, “They need this cycle of intense fire…to be regenerated.” He was not talking about greater seed release from the cones. Releasing a seed from a giant sequoia cone does not take much heat.
If Chad Hanson’s conclusions “are based on actual observations and study,” my comment is that Mr. Hanson is not paying attention when he walks the sequoia forests or reads the scientific literature on sequoias.
Has Mr. Hanson walked Case Mountain Grove, managed today by the Bureau of Land Management? I did in 1974 when it was in private ownership, and the landowner permitted me to access Coffeepot Canyon Grove inside Sequoia National Park.
Case Mountain Grove was logged about 10 to 20 years previously, and much of the white woods were removed. Case Mountain Grove was the only grove with EXTENSIVE sequoia regeneration throughout the grove area. That is the grove area that was logged.
The two avalanche chutes on the Garfield Grove trail were the ONLY other site with extensive sequoia regeneration. Those sequoias will NOT grow into monarchs being regenerated in an avalanche chute, nor were they regenerated by “intense” fire to release the seeds.
Every other grove south of the Mineral King road had little sequoia regeneration.
However, if the dead whitewoods are not removed, the subsequent fires in the burned sequoia forests will be worse.
Look at the dead sequoia in the Freeman Creek pictures. On either side of the giant sequoias, notice many dead whitewoods in the 20-inch DBH class. Those trees will be snags for a few years, and then they will start falling over in a jackstraw mess.
Yes, there will be giant sequoia reproduction among the jackstraw mess. The subsequent fire in that forest will result in a scorching, intense fire burning all the sequoia reproduction and a high probability of sterilizing the soil for centuries.
That will be the end of that sequoia forest. At that point, we will have lost the remaining monarchs and all the sequoia reproduction.
My statement that timber growth on Forest Service-managed lands increased in the 20th century is based on RPA data published by the Forest Service. The report for RPA 2020, based on data collected in 2017 and prior, showed that the Rocky Mountain region's growth has gone negative. We are burning down more trees than we are growing. The Pacific coast region of Washington, Oregon, and California was still positive in 2017.
However, with the Dixie and other mega-fires in the Sierra and the large Oregon fires in 2021, my professional opinion is that the Pacific Coast region will go negative in the next revision of RPA.
But since we are no longer harvesting public lands for wood products on any significant basis, not having our forests no longer on a sustainable basis is no big deal.
What is a big deal is that we are burning down our old-growth forests. President Biden’s executive order asked the Forest Service to prepare an analysis of old-growth and mature forests on public lands.
These are the bottom-line numbers: Since 2000, 700,000 acres of old-growth have been destroyed by wildfire and another 182,000 by insects and disease. Tree cutting resulted in 9,000 acres or ONE PERCENT of old-growth losses.
National forests are no longer being managed sustainably. While it would be fine if sustainability were only applied to trees, burning our national forests has reduced endangered species populations across the landscape. We are changing ecological systems, and not for the better.
Forest Service research shows that in just two recent years, wildfires have destroyed 20% of sensitive and endangered forest-dependent species.
We are destroying our old-growth forests and thousands of species with wildfires. The last thirty years of environmentalist management of our public lands have led to the greatest ecological change in the history of public forests, and that change has NOT been for the better.
I don’t understand the fixation with banning “logging” that obsesses the environmental community. Logging equipment is a tool to remove excess biomass that burns and kills giant sequoia. It is that simple.
We are all appalled by parents who refuse medical intervention for their kids to save their lives because they do not believe in vaccines or other medical treatments. The opposition to “logging” is in the same vein.
It would be great if the environmental community could devise a method to safely remove millions of pounds of biomass from the sequoia groves without using logging equipment. Camp 70 Foresters are looking forward to suggestions.
Monarch trees are an irreplaceable treasure. The past thirty years of managing the groves by forestry standards set by politicians and judges, despite environmentalists' pressure, have resulted in the killing of thousands of monarch trees.
Published science indicates that if we continue with current management practices, even more giant sequoia groves will be destroyed.
My fellow foresters and I are not willing to stand idly by and watch their destruction by well-meaning but scientifically challenged individuals who claim to want to protect our forest ecosystems.
Response to Stephen Montgomery by Vladimir Steblina (Camp ’70 Foresters}
Yes, I think the giant sequoia are dead.
The fire was hot enough to kill the cambium layer in all probability. More importantly, the National Park Service, Forest Service, UC Berkeley researchers, and the Save the Redwoods League think they are dead.
Chad Hanson said, “They need this cycle of intense fire…to be regenerated.” He was not talking about greater seed release from the cones. Releasing a seed from a giant sequoia cone does not take much heat.
If Chad Hanson’s conclusions “are based on actual observations and study,” my comment is that Mr. Hanson is not paying attention when he walks the sequoia forests or reads the scientific literature on sequoias.
Has Mr. Hanson walked Case Mountain Grove, managed today by the Bureau of Land Management? I did in 1974 when it was in private ownership, and the landowner permitted me to access Coffeepot Canyon Grove inside Sequoia National Park.
Case Mountain Grove was logged about 10 to 20 years previously, and much of the white woods were removed. Case Mountain Grove was the only grove with EXTENSIVE sequoia regeneration throughout the grove area. That is the grove area that was logged.
The two avalanche chutes on the Garfield Grove trail were the ONLY other site with extensive sequoia regeneration. Those sequoias will NOT grow into monarchs being regenerated in an avalanche chute, nor were they regenerated by “intense” fire to release the seeds.
Every other grove south of the Mineral King road had little sequoia regeneration.
However, if the dead whitewoods are not removed, the subsequent fires in the burned sequoia forests will be worse.
Look at the dead sequoia in the Freeman Creek pictures. On either side of the giant sequoias, notice many dead whitewoods in the 20-inch DBH class. Those trees will be snags for a few years, and then they will start falling over in a jackstraw mess.
Yes, there will be giant sequoia reproduction among the jackstraw mess. The subsequent fire in that forest will result in a scorching, intense fire burning all the sequoia reproduction and a high probability of sterilizing the soil for centuries.
That will be the end of that sequoia forest. At that point, we will have lost the remaining monarchs and all the sequoia reproduction.
My statement that timber growth on Forest Service-managed lands increased in the 20th century is based on RPA data published by the Forest Service. The report for RPA 2020, based on data collected in 2017 and prior, showed that the Rocky Mountain region's growth has gone negative. We are burning down more trees than we are growing. The Pacific coast region of Washington, Oregon, and California was still positive in 2017.
However, with the Dixie and other mega-fires in the Sierra and the large Oregon fires in 2021, my professional opinion is that the Pacific Coast region will go negative in the next revision of RPA.
But since we are no longer harvesting public lands for wood products on any significant basis, not having our forests no longer on a sustainable basis is no big deal.
What is a big deal is that we are burning down our old-growth forests. President Biden’s executive order asked the Forest Service to prepare an analysis of old-growth and mature forests on public lands.
These are the bottom-line numbers: Since 2000, 700,000 acres of old-growth have been destroyed by wildfire and another 182,000 by insects and disease. Tree cutting resulted in 9,000 acres or ONE PERCENT of old-growth losses.
National forests are no longer being managed sustainably. While it would be fine if sustainability were only applied to trees, burning our national forests has reduced endangered species populations across the landscape. We are changing ecological systems, and not for the better.
Forest Service research shows that in just two recent years, wildfires have destroyed 20% of sensitive and endangered forest-dependent species.
We are destroying our old-growth forests and thousands of species with wildfires. The last thirty years of environmentalist management of our public lands have led to the greatest ecological change in the history of public forests, and that change has NOT been for the better.
I don’t understand the fixation with banning “logging” that obsesses the environmental community. Logging equipment is a tool to remove excess biomass that burns and kills giant sequoia. It is that simple.
We are all appalled by parents who refuse medical intervention for their kids to save their lives because they do not believe in vaccines or other medical treatments. The opposition to “logging” is in the same vein.
It would be great if the environmental community could devise a method to safely remove millions of pounds of biomass from the sequoia groves without using logging equipment. Camp 70 Foresters are looking forward to suggestions.
Monarch trees are an irreplaceable treasure. The past thirty years of managing the groves by forestry standards set by politicians and judges, despite environmentalists' pressure, have resulted in the killing of thousands of monarch trees.
Published science indicates that if we continue with current management practices, even more giant sequoia groves will be destroyed.
My fellow foresters and I are not willing to stand idly by and watch their destruction by well-meaning but scientifically challenged individuals who claim to want to protect our forest ecosystems.
Though not an expert in any sense, I agree with the Camp70 statements that "Astonishingly, these groups and individuals still advocate a “no touch” approach rather than thoughtful forest management." I am reading Ethan Tapper's "How to Love a Forest" and heard him speak yesterday and he also would agree strongly with Camp 70.
- As an aside: "high-intensity fire is necessary for giant sequoia to regenerate." All of the sequoias on Palomar Mountain regenerate naturally without fire.
- Re: "the giant sequoia forests, of which only 74 exist worldwide." I sound like a broken record, but there are five regenerating groves in southern California, many larger than some northern California groves. And there are more than 500,000 sequoias in England alone. So there are many more than 74 sequoia groves in the world.