Three wildfires in 2020 and 2021 killed or mortally burned 13% to 19% of the world’s giant sequoias, which grow naturally only on the west slope of the Central and Southern Sierra Nevada range, and now the nonprofit Calaveras Big Trees Association is warning that the Mother Lode’s share of the largest trees on earth are facing catastrophic wildfire threats.
Fire dangers in Calaveras Big Trees State Park due to overgrowth, beetle infestation, and drought-weakened stands of trees have combined to create conditions similar to most of the Stanislaus National Forest.
Without immediate fire reduction actions, Calaveras Big Trees State Park and its more than 1,000 giant sequoias could burn like Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz County did in June and August 2020, Vida Kenk, a biologist and president of the association, told the California Department of Parks and Recreation Director Armando Quintero in a Feb. 1 letter.
“This is an emergency. This is a crisis,” Marcie Powers with the association said Wednesday at the park east of Arnold. “The forest is dense with dry, combustible vegetation, standing dead trees killed by bark beetles and drought stress. We want the state parks system to do more in the next five months than they plan to do over the next five years.”
State parks authorities stood with the Calaveras Big Trees Association on Wednesday to underscore that the parks system and the nonprofit advocates want the same thing: to avoid a megafire that could destroy one of the few places on earth where giant sequoias grow.
“It would be devastating if we lost the whole park,” Danielle Gerhart, acting superintendent for the state parks Central Valley District that includes Calaveras Big Trees, said Wednesday. “There would be nothing we could do if a megafire came through here. That’s not preventable.”
Richard Rappaport, an environmental scientist and former forestry crew leader at Calaveras Big Trees State Park who helped do fuels management, fuels reduction and prescribed burning in the park from 2016 to 2020, stood on Wednesday in dense, overgrown forest near park buildings and giant sequoias reaching hundreds of feet into the sky.
“This is a good example of the dire fuels situation we’re facing,” he said. “These are shade-tolerant species, incense cedar and white fir, growing so dense that they’re out-competing other saplings that might emerge, including giant sequoia saplings. They are also creating ladder fuels that allow wildfire to get into the canopy.”
Rappaport said the young trees and taller trees in the canopy, growing so closely together that bright sunshine barely reached the forest floor, amounted to “a recipe for conflagration, for a megafire. The trees and saplings are so close they create vertical and horizontal continuity for wildfire to spread rapidly.”
Gerhart emphasized that Calaveras Big Trees State Park recently received an additional $7 million from the state Wildfire and Forest Resiliency Program to spend over the next five years, “to make our forest resilient when a big fire comes through. It’s our job now to prepare for what’s coming.”
More than 250,000 visitors annually come from around the world to see the giant sequoias at the park, Gerhart said.
Sanders Lamont, a volunteer at the park the past 15 years and a member of the Calaveras Big Trees Association, added to what Gerhart said, “This is the only state park in California that is home to giant sequoias. If you go to the national parks — Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia — access to the groves is far more challenging. Here you can drive in and walk into the giant trees. There’s nowhere else in the world you can do that.”
Powers and Lamont said again they and their nonprofit want the same thing the state parks authorities want, they just want it to happen faster before the next devastating wildfire burns through and does irreparable damage to an extremely finite resource. Scientists say there are about 70 groves of giant sequoias in the world on just 28,000 acres — less than 45 square miles — and they’re all on the Central and Southern Sierra west slope.
“What we are asking for is more resources immediately,” Powers said Wednesday. “In the next five months we need more forest crews and more equipment to remove the dead vegetation and thin the forest.”
There’s a lot of federal funding available for reducing fire threats in California right now, and there’s a lot of state funding out for forest resiliency projects, Powers said. But time is short, and the next fire season is right around the corner.
“This absolutely should not take two to five years to take action here,” she said. “We are talking to the director of state parks and recreation. Do you want to see another event like last year in Sequoia National Forest and Sequoia National Park?”
Mike Albrecht, a forester and logger who runs Sierra Resource Management off La Grange Road near Jamestown, is also part of the collaborative Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions group that formed before the 2013 Rim Fire megablaze that burned up more than 400 square miles of watersheds in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park, primarily in Tuolumne County.
“What I think is happening is finally there is some recognition among some legislators, agencies, and environmental groups, they are finally recognizing we are in real trouble in our California forests,” Albrecht said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “Unfortunately, it takes disaster after disaster after disaster for people to see it. Last fire season, a couple blazes burned into the sequoia groves down south, and it showed that even these thousand-year-old trees are vulnerable to these bigger, hotter, more devastating fires.”
Albrecht said it’s about time people recognize megablazes that can burn giant sequoia groves for what they are: “The canary in the coal mine.”
“When the big sequoias start burning, that’s the canary, and people need to recognize that,” he said. “People are now seeing what foresters and the timber industry have been saying for decades. We need to thin our forests much more aggressively, and the folks at Calaveras Big Trees see they still have a chance to protect our giant sequoias. But it’s not a five-year plan. We need to do something this year, 2022.”
Albrecht said the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest near Pinecrest and its variable density treatments, including prescribed burning, is an example of how to manage forests today.
Adam Rich, a wildlife biologist with the Stanislaus National Forest, described variable density treatments as “cutting edge research” in June 2020.
Albrecht also praised recent work by UC Davis researchers Eric Knapp and Malcolm North on how variable thinning and prescribed fire influenced tree mortality and growth during and after the severe drought of 2012 to 2015, and another North study “Operational resilience in western US frequent-fire forests,” set to publish in March in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
“We need to thin our forest stands by more than fifty percent,” Albrecht said. “We’re talking about protecting the whole ecosystem. The sequoias on down to the smallest birds, mammals, and reptiles.”
John Buckley, a former Forest Service firefighter and fuels treatment foreman, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, and a leader with Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, said the Calaveras Big Trees Association is a dedicated and effective support group for the park.
“It’s understandable the support group is highly concerned about the very legitimate threat of a high severity wildfire doing significant damage to the park’s precious resources,” Buckley said. “The risk to the North Grove, where most visitors visit, is high due to the steep slope above the North Fork Stanislaus River. A fire starting down near the river would have high potential to spread rapidly upslope and to eventually reach the North Grove and surrounding areas.”
There definitely would be value in having the state provide crews and resources to do a variety of fuel reduction treatments in the park, Buckley said.
Park staff, however, are the experts on where treatments are most beneficial and which treatments produce the biggest value for the cost, Buckley said.
“It’s important to give credit to park staff for already having done a broadcast burn to reduce fuels on the north side of the North Grove of giant sequoias and also along a portion of the southwest side of the grove,” he said. “Those two burn treatments have already reduced risk to that iconic sequoia grove to some degree, but more treatments are needed.”
John Buckley, a former Forest Service firefighter and fuels treatment foreman, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, and a leader with Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, said the Calaveras Big Trees Association is a dedicated and effective support group for the park.
“It’s understandable the support group is highly concerned about the very legitimate threat of a high severity wildfire doing significant damage to the park’s precious resources,” Buckley said. “The risk to the North Grove, where most visitors visit, is high due to the steep slope above the North Fork Stanislaus River. A fire starting down near the river would have high potential to spread rapidly upslope and to eventually reach the North Grove and surrounding areas.”
There definitely would be value in having the state provide crews and resources to do a variety of fuel reduction treatments in the park, Buckley said.
Park staff, however, are the experts on where treatments are most beneficial and which treatments produce the biggest value for the cost, Buckley said.
“It’s important to give credit to park staff for already having done a broadcast burn to reduce fuels on the north side of the North Grove of giant sequoias and also along a portion of the southwest side of the grove,” he said. “Those two burn treatments have already reduced risk to that iconic sequoia grove to some degree, but more treatments are needed.”
Calaveras Big Trees State Park is vital to Calaveras County’s economy, Buckley added, and it is an ecological treasure.
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Contact Guy McCarthy at gmccarthy@uniondemocrat.net or (209) 770-0405. Follow him on Twitter at @GuyMcCarthy.