Volume 2, Number 47 - Monday, May 20
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
HERE’S A PRESCRIPTION to improve your mood: Visit some big trees. I did that last Thursday with a field trip to the Black Mountain Grove on Sequoia National Forest, and if all goes as planned, tomorrow I’ll be in Sequoia National Park for a media event at the General Sherman Tree.
Some roads and campgrounds that have been closed for the winter (or longer) have reopened, and more may soon. Some public lands in the Sierra Nevada will remain closed because, as I saw last week, there is still quite a mess from wildfires and flooding.
If you’re planning a trip to the mountains soon, I recommend patience. Even if the roads are open, they may not be in the best shape, and work may still be in progress. Expect to see lots of big trucks. They may be carrying road-building materials in or loads of logs out.
Does that mean there is logging going on? Not necessarily. Some of the logs are from post-fire projects and have been sitting around for years. They may be chipped to make mulch but they won’t be making lumber.
Last week, in Black Mountain Grove, I saw huge piles of logs along roadsides from work the Forest Service did after the 2017 Pier Fire. The agency reported that the 36,556-acre wildfire killed more than one million trees. Four people were later arrested for starting the fire when they burned a stolen vehicle.
I don’t have time or space here to discuss the Pier Fire Roadside Hazard Mitigation Project, which was approved in October 2018 (more information HERE), but the number of “heavies”—large logs—still to be removed from just this one fire is simply astounding. (Watch future editions for some other articles related to Thursday’s trip.)
In case you don’t make it to see giant sequoias soon, you’ll likely miss seeing the dogwood blooming this year. Pacific dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) is a deciduous tree often found in giant sequoia groves (and elsewhere) and it’s a real treat to get to see the flowers. They look like fairies flitting about in the understory.
Calaveras Big Trees State Park plans to burn in South Grove, other areas this year
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
IN A TOWN HALL MEETING at Calaveras Big Trees State Park on May 15, officials recapped last year's accomplishments and provided an overview of work planned for the remainder of 2024.
Forester Jim Suero, Ben Jacobs, an environmental scientist and burn boss at the park and Richard Rappaport, an environmental scientist and former forestry crew chief at the park, participated in the presentation.
In March 2023, the trio reported that the park planned to burn 1,520 acres and an additional 1,495 acres by 2027. The park covers 6,498 acres and includes two giant sequoia groves.
As reported in the annual report published by Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition earlier this year HERE, work at the park in 2023 included 279 acres of restoration treatments through broadcast and pile burning and manual fuels reduction.
The acreage fell short of the goal in part because plans to burn about 1,300 acres in the park’s South Grove were scuttled last November, as Guy McCarthy of the Union-Democrat in Sonora reported HERE:
“Plans for prescribed burning on 1,300 acres of Calaveras Big Trees State Park’s dangerously overgrown South Grove of Giant Sequoias, the largest stand of the threatened trees in Tuolumne County and the rest of the Mother Lode, have been put off until next year, state parks staff said Thursday morning (Nov. 16, 2023).
“This fall, conditions have not been favorable,” Amber Sprock, spokeswoman for Calaveras Big Trees and the state parks Central Valley District, said in an email. “The South Grove prescribed burn has been postponed until 2024.”
You can read more in McCarthy’s story, but it’s important to know that last November’s cancellation wasn’t the first time planned burning in the park was postponed. In fact, planned burning is often postponed for many reasons.
As I wrote HERE, Marcie Powers, one of the founders of a group called Save Calaveras Big Trees, told me last October that “it’s crucial that the South Grove burn happen. It’s our singular opportunity this year to start creating a resilient, healthy forest.”
The South Grove prescribed burn didn’t happen last year, but the Parks team said it’s back in the plan for this year.
Although pile burns were conducted throughout the winter and into spring, now that the weather is warming up and fire season is just around the corner, projects will likely be completed — or attempted — in the fall.
“It's kind of a no-go to burn in the spring,” Jacobs said. “I would feel much more comfortable — and I'm sure partner agency CalFire would feel much more comfortable — burning into the cooler, wetter time of the year.”
That way, he added, vegetation will have a chance to burn down and then have rain or snow put the fire completely out through the winter.
In addition to the huge South Grove burn and the winter pile burning that continued from last year, plans for this year include:
• 157-acre Dos Brazos Complex prescribed burn project
• 17-acre Tire Tree prescribed burn project
• 105-acre West Moran 1 & 2 prescribed burn project
• 25-acre Trailhead Burn
• 102-acre Love Creek
Besides burning, the park plans forestry projects, including the Parkway Hazard Reduction project.
The five-year plan for burning released during the Town Hall meeting calls for a total of 3,137 acres through 2028, with most of that — 1,709 acres — this year.
Between 2018 and 2023, the park managed 686 acres of prescribed fire, most in 2020 when 272 acres were burned.
Suero noted that the park plans to add mechanical restorative thinning to its playbook.
“It's going to be either standalone treatment in conjunction with prescribed (or) post-prescribed fire. It really is another tool in the tool shed that we're going to utilize to manage our forests here,” he said.
He pointed on a map to Moody Gap and said that area needs attention.
“Right now, this is one of the areas that has thousands and thousands and thousands of piles that have been there for too long,” Suero said. “So they're no longer really piles, they're kind of like pancakes. And it is really not safe to burn in there. It’s not safe for the trees, and it's not safe for the firefighters. So we're gonna go in there and do a mechanical thin and take care of those piles, open up the stand a little bit more and further protect the South Grove.”
He added that this work will also protect neighboring landowners from fire coming off the park onto their land or reduce fire behavior if fire comes onto the park from neighboring properties.
Rappaport and Jacobs mentioned concerns about scorching trees but did not specifically address the situation with trees known as “The Orphans” last year.
In spring 2023, the park reported that the trees, named by early California immigrants, had suffered significant scorch from heat during the 2022 prescribed burn.
Although they were initially feared dead, by late October last year, it was determined that the trees were still alive.
“Scorch is a normal part of any burn, whether it's prescribed burn or natural fire,” Jacobs said. “There's nothing unusual about it. We expect it (and) we try to manage it, though. So we try to keep the canopy, the mature canopy intact. That's definitely one of one of my objectives.”
He added that it’s hard sometimes to get fuel underneath to “disappear” without killing the tree above it.
Fuel accumulation is another issue at the park, Suero said.
For decades and decades, he noted, trees along the entire perimeter of the park fell and were just pushed aside. That much fuel accumulation ruled out burning, he said.
“We call those heavies, because there's so big on both sides of the road, around the entire perimeter,” Suero said.
He added that a contractor spent about four months removing the heavies, which involved removing a total of about 14,000 tons of material.
Officials said that effort and other work to prepare the South Grove were necessary to continue the prescribed fire plan.
Good reads
Some interesting reading I’ve come across about giant sequoias and the Sierra Nevada published recently:
• Ken Wall, a retired banker and environmental advocate, wrote an opinion piece for the Fresno Bee with the headline: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, sequoias need intense fires to sprout seedlings.” Read it HERE.
• Ian Rose wrote a fascinating piece about grizzly bears that was published in The Washington Post almost a month ago. You can read it HERE (gift link). Rose reports that the last credible sighting of a grizzly bear in California was in April 1924 at Sequoia National Park and that, in January, a team of experts published a paper about the bear and its diet with results that “challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.”
• Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times wrote about an increase in wildfire weather last week HERE (unfortunately no gift links from The Times.) Of note, a new report “looks at three key weather conditions — heat, dryness and wind — that, when combined, load the dice for wildfires to spread quickly and grow large.”
Wildfire, water & weather update
Mostly sunny weather, according to the weather folks. Maybe snows are truly over for this spring. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
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