Before being called ‘giant sequoias,’ they were ‘Big Trees’
Home of the famous ‘Discovery Tree’ prepares for ambitious burning
Volume 1, Number 37 - Thursday, March 23, 2023
Now twice a week — Mondays and Thursdays!
This week’s spotlight
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
BIG PLANS FOR BURNING and other forest management projects at Calaveras Big Trees State Park were discussed during a town hall meeting there on March 16.
The giant sequoias growing in two groves at the park are among some of the earliest tourist attractions in California. They are believed to be the first of the Big Trees “discovered” by early explorers, as early as 1833 and 1850 — although Native American people living in the Sierra Nevada for thousands of years obviously knew about the trees.
But it wasn’t until sometime in the spring of 1852 — less than two years after California was admitted to the Union — that a hunter named Augustus T. Dowd chased a grizzly bear into the woods and came across a tree so large he could barely believe his eyes.
Dowd shared the news, attracting many visitors to the area to confirm his tale. About a year later, five men spent 22 days drilling holes in the tree and several days later it fell down so they could strip its bark to create a traveling exhibit intended to prove the tree’s immense size.
The stump was later used as a dance floor and, for a time, a two-lane bowling alley was constructed on the remains of the fallen tree. Many people were outraged by the activities, including notable preservationist John Muir, and the events resulted in calls for preservation of the Big Trees that had not yet been named Sequoiadendron giganteum.
Today, the huge stump is one of the first stops for many visitors to the park’s North Grove, one of two giant sequoia groves on the 6,498 acre state park that straddles Calaveras and Tuolumne counties about 100 driving miles southeast of Sacramento.
The park was established in 1931 and has grown through the years as the state has been able to acquire additional acreage including the much larger South Grove, purchased in 1954. The North Grove has about 100 giant sequoias, but the South Grove has ten times more — about 1,000.
As on other giant sequoia lands, the Big Trees, also called Sierra redwoods, grow along with other conifers including — in the South Grove — the current champion Sugar Pine, according to the Champion Trees Registry of American Forests. It’s also a great place to see many other native plants.
Neighboring lands are also forested and include parts of Stanislaus State Forest, private lands owned by Sierra Pacific Industries — the second-largest lumber producer in the United States — and about 320 acres owned by Save the Redwoods League.
Calaveras Big Trees State Park is noteworthy for being open year-round, although some areas are off-limits to vehicles during the winter. Other than the much smaller Placer County Big Trees Grove, it has the most northerly giant sequoia groves. The park offers 129 campsites, six picnic areas and hundreds of miles of trails.
Forest management
Visitors to the state park might not think of it as part of a forest. But as stewards of the land, the state park system has adopted a vegetation management plan that defines the desired conditions of the plant communities on the land, including giant sequoias, and best practices for their management. Decreasing fuel loadings to reduce vulnerability to catastrophic wildland fire are among the park’s goals.
Calaveras Big Trees State Park is among members of the fledgling Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, a collaboration of public and non-governmental organizations formed in 2021 for conservation of giant sequoia grove ecosystems.
Other members include the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Forest/Giant Sequoia National Monument, Sierra National Forest, Tahoe National Forest, the Bureau of Land Management, the Tule River Tribe, the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
All of the members have one or more giant sequoia groves on land they manage, as does Save The Redwoods League, a special coalition affiliate. A number of other organizations are also affiliate members.
The groups organized to sound the alarm about the shocking loss of giant sequoias to high intensity wildfire and other drought-related hazards.
Coalition members met at Calaveras Big Trees State Park last December for an update on work accomplished in the first year of operation.
More than 85 percent of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada burned in wildfires between 2015 and 2021 — compared to only about 25 percent in the preceding century. In addition to public education, a major focus of the coalition has been fuel reduction and efforts to return beneficial fire to the groves.
Association concerns
The state park system has also been under pressure from the Calaveras Big Trees Association. In February 2022, the association wrote to Armando Quintero, director of the California State Parks, expressing concern about fire risk in the park.
Vida Kenk, president of the association, noted that its board “believes that without immediate restorative measures CBTSP is very likely to become the next Big Basin. This would be devastating to the Park as well as the surrounding communities that principally rely on tourism. Hence, we urge DPR to designate CBTSP as a top priority for immediate restorative and fire reduction actions. These include fuel treatments such as mastication and thinning followed by prescribed fire, as commonly implemented by land managers to modify wildfire behavior and effects.”
The reference to Big Basin, California’s oldest state park, was to the 2020 lightning-caused wildfire that essentially destroyed the park and its coastal redwood trees in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
According to the report provided at the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition meeting in December, crews worked on both groves in 2022, conducting “restoration treatments on a total of 297 acres using broadcast and pile burning as well as hand crews to reduce the fuel load.”
But in late October 2022, the Union Democrat newspaper in nearby Sonora reported that preparations were “still underway for a future prescribed burn in the overgrown South Grove section of the park in Tuolumne County, but no timeline has been announced.”
Current plans
Prescribed fire, including broadcast burning, has been part of the management strategy at the state park since 1975 and by 1981 nearly the entire South Grove had been treated with fire, according to the 2018 Vegetation Management Plan.
By 1983, though, managers determined that low intensity prescribed fire “was not a robust enough disturbance” to directly restore forest ecosystems at the state park.
“This recognition caused the resource management program… to shift from a primary reliance on fire as a restoration tool, to the use of manual and mechanical methods for stand restoration with fire being a subsequent tool to maintain the results,” the 2018 plan noted.
Environmental Scientist Ben Jacobs, also known as the Burn Boss at the state park, was one of the speakers at the March 16 town hall meeting. He’s been with the park since 2018 and previously was with Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks where he worked to fight fires and to start them as part of the National Park Service’s prescribed burning program.
Jacobs described some of the work done in recent years, and also challenges as the park faces as it embarks on a five-year program.
Work this year is planned in both the north and south groves. Fuel reduction work on 27 acres around park infrastructure has been contracted this year. South Grove prep has been underway and will continue into this year for a planned 1,300 acre burn discussed in a previous town hall meeting.
Projects described included the Maintenance 1 & 2 prep and prescribed burn, West Moran 1 & 2 prep and prescribed burn, Pioneer prep and prescribed burn and the South Grove prep and prescribed burn.
In 2023, the park plans to burn 1,520 acres with burning of an additional 1,495 acres planned by 2027.
Resource goals include providing for firefighter and public safety, reestablishing fire as the dominant ecosystem process, maintaining forest health and diversity by shaping flora density and composition and increasing forest resilience against catastrophic wildfire and pest invasions.
Other goals are to create a treated fuels buffer around the northwest corner of the park to protect all the structures and campgrounds from wildfire and to enhance the watershed to establish a soil structure that is capable of filtering nutrients for a high quality water system.
Objectives related to trees include creating areas of mineral soil and sunlight within the sequoia grove to aid in its regeneration, reduce shade-tolerant tree regeneration in white fir and incense cedar and limit mortality in mature pine and oak species.
But Jacobs noted that all of the plans are dependent on conditions including weather and staffing.
“We are never guaranteed the windows and the resource availability,” he said. And although prepping the land in the South Grove and pulling together a large burn may be the plan, it’s possible the park may have to look at other alternatives.
“Eventually, if we get to the point where there’s just no way that we’re ever going to get a window to do it, then we will have to look at different alternatives out there,” he said. “Maybe go back to the thinning routine, and another 10,000 piles, who knows?”
Important partners
Forester Jim Suero also discussed the importance of partners. The park will be involved with prescribed fire monitoring in a joint effort between the University of California, Davis, and Cal Fire’s Fire and Resource Management Program.
The data collected from plots being established in both groves will provide managers with information to inform future decisions.
The park is also contracting with the Ancient Forest Society to collect seeds in both groves. The seeds will be stored at the L.A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.
“We hope we never have to use that seed,” Suero said. “But if a devastating fire comes through and we need to replant, we’ll have the ability to do so and maintain the genetic integrity of our sequoia groves.”
He added that collaboration with the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition is helping the park.
“We’re sharing resources and it’s a great group to be part of, and an important group to be part of going forward.”
And recently executed agreements with Stanlislaus and Sequoia National forests will provide the park with resources for prescribed fire operations, Suero said. Another agreement, not yet finalized, he said, is expected to use the National Park Service’s aerial drone firing team.
“This is a really neat … advancement and firing techniques that we have not used in the park,” he added.
Suero also discussed what he called the “heavies” — biomass that the average person might just call logs.
“We’re moving all the heavies around the perimeter of the South Grove (with) another contract,” he said. “We’re just getting close to finalizing (the contract) and hopefully when the soil saturation lessens and the roads are clear we can get out there and get this contract going.
“In preparation for the fall (there’s) a lot of work to do, there’s a lot of heavies out there. So it is a fairly major contract to undertake. But we’re gonna get it done.”
Visitor impacts
The planned work intended to protect the forest and park resources will also have impacts on visitors and the surrounding communities.
In addition to smoke during burns, there will be potential long-term trail closures and — in the case of the South Grove — potential long-term closures to both the trail and fire road systems.
Park officials also note that visitors and community members should expect the area to look different following the planned work.
More information
More information about Calaveras Big Trees State Park is available online HERE.
Wildfire, water & weather update
As I’m writing this early Thursday morning, it’s raining in the Tehachapi Pass. Recent storms promised (or perhaps a better word is threatened) much more rain and snow that we have actually received here at 4,000 feet at the tip of the southern Sierra Nevada. Friends to the north and friends on the coast have had to deal with much more.
If you’re somewhere warm and dry and with electrical power, you might want to check out the article HERE on NASA’s earth observatory. It has a cool image with a slider that lets you see northern California on March 16 of this year and a year ago. In particular the difference in the watersheds is amazing.
The best information on what is heading toward the Sierra Nevada can be found at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE. From the weather reports, it appears that we have more wet weather on the way, but not as much as earlier this month.
Drought update: The new California drought map is out this morning. The entire coast is now out of drought, along with more than two-thirds of the state and all areas where giant sequoias grow. The California-Nevada River Forecast Center also provides great information about rivers and floods. You can select options to change what is displayed on the map.
Wildfire update: No wildfires, and it’s a good thing because all of our first responders are still busy clearing snow and rescuing people from rivers. Stay safe!
The difference between the Monday and Thursday editions
Monday’s editions of the newsletter include my ramblings about giant sequoias and related topics under the heading “Perspective,” in addition to the historic photo of the week and featured giant sequoias growing outside their natural range (around the world). Thursday editions typically will include more formal articles (long form journalism). Both editions have links to news about giant sequoias and weather and wildfire updates, depending on the season. Subscriptions to the Monday newsletter remain free. Access to the Thursday editions and archives now requires a subscription.
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Giant sequoias in the news
• Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit “dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West,” has published an article about giant sequoias. You can read the original version by contributor Joe Stone HERE. As of this morning, the opinion piece has been published in at least 9 newspapers. Stone is editor of Forest News, the publication of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE). The latest edition of that publication HERE has a photo of a giant sequoia on the front.
Here’s an excerpt:
The challenge is avoiding catastrophic wildfire, a challenge made difficult by today’s dense groves. According to Alexis Bernal, a researcher with the University of California at Berkeley, Sierra Nevada forests typically held about 20 sequoias per acre before 1860. Since then, fire suppression has allowed the growth of as many as 120 to 160 trees per acre.
Bernal advocates extensive logging before fire can resume its natural role. Emergency logging by government agencies has already begun in forests with sequoia groves, including clearcuts along roadways in Yosemite National Park.
Not everyone agrees that logging is the answer. Forest ecologist Chad Hanson, with the John Muir Project, calls Bernal’s approach an excuse to continue commercial logging of public lands. He believes sequoia deaths have been far lower than official estimates and that new trees can sprout even after severe fires.
It will be interesting to see if publication of this piece spurs a lively conversation as it never mentions what many scientists believe to be one of the causes of the higher-severity fires blamed for giant sequoia mortality — years of drought.
• USA Today reported this week that California will receive $78.9 million of $197 million in USDA grants to help more than 100 communities and tribes across the nation become more resilient to wildfire. Read the story HERE.
• A BBC article HERE has great graphics to help explain extreme weather and how is it connected to climate change? Here’s an excerpt: “Compared with the 1970s, fires larger than 10,000 acres (40 sq km) are now seven times more common in western America, according to Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists and journalists.”
• A Facebook comment by a ranger at Sequoia National Park that I published in Tuesday’s newsletter was featured in an article HERE by yourcentralvalley.com.
Thanks for reading!