People at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, working with state and federal partners like Cal Fire and the Forest Service, have ambitious plans to do prescribed burns on more than 1,300 acres of overgrown understory and old growth forest lands this spring, in an effort to save endangered, fire-threatened monarch giant sequoias and to prompt reproduction of the rare giant trees.
They talked about it Thursday night in a public town hall meeting near the Big Trees park entrance east of Arnold, and the weather-related, drought-related variables they anticipate are the same or closely similar to the challenges burn bosses will face if they do any controlled burning this spring up and down the Stanislaus National Forest and anywhere else in Calaveras and Tuolumne counties.
Plans this spring at Calaveras Big Trees include prescribed burning in the entire 1,300-acre South Grove, home to more than 1,100 giant sequoias between Highway 4 and Highway 108 in remote north-central Tuolumne County. A recent, high-profile example of prescribed burning that was visible up and down Tuolumne County was the controlled burn in late November on top of Mount Provo, south of Highway 108 between Twain Harte, Ponderosa Hills, and Tuolumne township.
“At the last town hall in November, we shared how we have a real fuels problem, especially in the northwest corner of the park,” Ben Jacobs, burn boss for Calaveras Big Trees State Park, said via Zoom during the town hall. “Overstocked trees in the understory, lots of bug-killed trees, and lack of sequoia reproduction in the North and South groves, due to lack of heat from fires to release seeds.”
Prescribed burning and controlled burning have been practiced for more than five decades in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, in the surrounding Stanislaus National Forest, other locations in the Central and Southern Sierra, and elsewhere in California. Re-introducing fire to the landscape is an essential tool to help reverse more than a century of total fire suppression in state and federal forests in California.
“In the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s, we have a long history of prescribed fires in the park,” Jacobs said. “Wayne Harrison, we’re building on the work that Wayne and other folks did before us.”
Since November, Big Trees planners have been preparing for prescribed fires in the northwest corner of the park and in the South Grove, where park staff and private contract workers have focused on clearing a perimeter road around the South Grove, Jacobs said. They are about 50% done with prepping the rim roads for the North and South groves.
“Obviously our South Grove burn is our highest priority,” Jacobs said. “We want to burn the entirety of the South Grove. Sequoias are a fire-dependent species. It would be a dereliction of duty if we don’t reintroduce fire to these groves. We hope to ignite this thing at the end of the month, depending on weather and other variables.”
The North Grove segment is prepped for controlled burning, thanks to prep work completed before rain and snow forced park authorities to cancel prescribed burning planned last fall.
“We want to do all this before we lose these Calaveras groves to an unwanted wildfire,” Jacobs said.
Foresters and burn bosses know it’s vital to remain proactive and to plan for ideal opportunities for prescribed fires and controlled burns at the beginning of every fire season, to be prepared for the best windows and chances for low-intensity, low-severity intentional fires. They know it’s essential to reintroduce manageable fires to the fire-dependent ecosystem and the landscape it covers, to reduce the chances of catastrophic wildfires that can destroy communities and irreplaceable natural resources like the more than a thousand giant sequoias in the North Fork Stanislaus River watershed straddling Calaveras and Tuolumne counties.
John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, and a member of the collaborative Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, what at the meeting and asked if, in addition to prescribed burning, will the state park have authority to remove biomass?
Calaveras Big Trees officials answered they don’t currently have authority to remove biomass, that it’s beyond the scope of what they currently can do.
Another attendee in the room asked what percentage of mortality park authorities expect among sequoias in the South Grove due to prescribed burning.
“We hope we don’t lose any monarch sequoias,” Jacobs said. “We might lose some younger trees. We are fully aware these trees are vulnerable right now, and we really have to prevent what happened in the Southern Sierra.”
Jacobs said the threat to Calaveras Big Trees and the South Grove is so dire that he and his team are not in position to take time to thin the entire South Grove, which would take years.
“We’re trying to speed up this process with fire as the primary tool,” Jacobs said. “We realize there’s a risk, that prescribed fire can still put out a lot of heat. We’re caught between a rock and a hard place. It’s a fine line, a narrow window. We want to reach our fuel reduction goals with no mortality of sequoias.”
Another attendee Thursday night asked about the ongoing drought and how that affects plans for prescribed burning. Jacobs responded that he’s reluctant to do prescribed burns when it’s been so dry and drought conditions are continuing, but “if we don’t burn because of drought, we put the sequoia groves at further risk.”
“We can’t do fire across the landscape like before settlement,” Jacobs said. “What we have now in terms of conditions is unprecedented. I’ve been doing this since 1979 and we’ve seen nothing ever before like 2020 and 2021. Yeah, it’s dry out there, that’s why we’re trying to do a burn in late April, not late May.”
Buckley also asked about night burning, to reduce heat coming off the prescribed fires and increase firefighter safety. Jacobs responded that typically air permits secured for prescribed burns in the park do not allow night burning. Jacobs said he’d be open to night burning in the South Grove, but in his experience from prior burns in the northwest section of the park, smoke from night burns tends to hug drainages, which funnel smoke toward Arnold and Big Trees Village.
“We’ll be doing a lot of mop up on the edges to prevent escapes,” Jacobs said. “If we light it this spring, we are married to it until it rains or goes out.”
Plans for the South Grove burn call for six staffed engines, two 20-person hand crews, a water tank truck on standby, and a helicopter, park authorities said. Jacobs said he’d prefer to have 10 engines available.
Rich Pasquale, a fuels management officer with the Stanislaus National Forest, said in late November on the Mount Provo burn that burning and other fuel reduction strategies are natural elements of Central Sierra ecology, environment, and history, and they are as vital to forest health as rain itself.
“This process is natural like rain,” Pasquale said. “What happens if you remove the rain?”
Lightning-strike fires and humans lighting and managing fires to reduce fuels are practices as old as the indigenous peoples who lived in the Central Sierra for thousands of years before Europeans arrived and the 1850s Gold Rush.
“One of the biggest challenges is the people who stand to benefit the most from these natural processes, they don’t have a complete understanding of how they work,” Pasquale said. “And how long these processes have been part of the natural progression. If we can at least get our western public to understand this part of our ecology, our environment, it would be easier for us to communicate the need for it.”
Fire scientists called the Mount Provo burn a prescribed broadcast underburn of low intensity. Its objectives included reducing the buildup of flammable forest fuels, surface fuels, and ladder fuels; reducing the threat of uncontrolled, large and damaging fires; improving protection of life and property in the community of Ponderosa Hills; enhancing and protecting wildlife habitat and improving deer browse; and protecting the North Fork Tuolumne River watershed, campgrounds, and forest and private infrastructure.
The Forest Service wants people to know the Sierra Nevada is a fire dependent ecosystem, where fire is part of the natural forest process.
Some mountain residents know and understand the benefits of prescribed burning, but they don’t want controlled burns too close to their homes. Jeff Savage is a resident and cabin-owner, leasing property from the Forest Service on the roughly 80-acre Cow Creek tract, east of Strawberry and south of Highway 108, since 1968.
Savage remembers prescribed fires in the Cow Creek watershed north of Highway 108, below the Cow Creek tract and above Beardsley Reservoir. The last controlled fire there was about four years ago, Savage said in a phone interview Friday.
“Up here in the tract, there’s 42 cabins, and we prefer clearing and thinning to prescribed fire on the tract itself,” Savage said. “We don’t want flames too close to the cabins.”
Kevin Bohall, assistant chief for the Cal Fire Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit, said Friday that all dates for TCU prescribed fire plans this spring are weather-dependent and fuels-moisture dependent.
“We have big ambitions to get these burns done, to protect communities and other resources,” Bohall said. “It will depend a lot on how much more rain we get in the next four weeks. We usually hope for a few more storms in April and maybe one more in early May. If we don’t get enough rain, that’s going to close the prescription window a bit, and accelerate the other half of our job, responding to wildfires. That takes staff and resources away from what we can do on prescribed fires.”
Bohall said the Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit has planned multiple prescribed burns this spring, and dates for each will depend on the best time and day to begin ignitions to achieve the specific prescription and objectives of each project. In timber-fuel models, the ideal window can occur multiple times during a given year, with a common objective of ensuring healthy forest land that can withstand wildfire under dry summer conditions. In grass-fuel type models, the best windows are typically after June 1, with the curing of annual grasses.
In Tuolumne County, two potential prescribed burns include more burning on the ongoing Shiloh Vegetation Management Project near Sierra Village and Highway 108, and Mount Havilah above Tuolumne township, where Cal Fire has done broadcast burning and plans this spring include pile-burning to reduce fuels .
In Calaveras County, Cal Fire plans include pile ignitions at the South Park Vegetation Management Project outside Arnold. In the same area, Cal Fire TCU crews will assist with the Big Trees burns. Also east of West Point in the Winton Schaad Vegetation Management Project, prescribed burning or pile burning are planned along Winton Road, following work accomplished there this past winter. In the Rancho Calaveras area, TCU will help the Army Corps of Engineers with the Hogan Observation Point Burn, to reduce fuels where Fourth of July activities are staged each year. And in the same area, TCU personnel plan to do prescribed burning or pile burns on the New Hogan Vegetation Management Project.
Danielle Gerhart, acting superintendent for the state parks Central Valley District, summarized at the end of the Thursday town hall meeting at Calaveras Big Trees.
“We have a lot of work planned on up to 1,700 acres in the next four to six months,” Gerhart said. “It’s a huge workload, and all of this is extremely important. We want to be transparent with you all, so we’ll probably have another town hall this summer.”
To further educate the public about how to reduce risks of catastrophic wildfires by better managing the forests that surround and border many Mother Lode communities, the nonprofit Calaveras Big Trees Association has confirmed Dr. Scott Stephens, a fire scientist based at UC Berkeley, will talk about prescribed burning and mechanical fuel reduction treatments on Zoom from 6 pm to 7 pm Monday, April 18. A link for the Zoom event should be on the association’s website, www.bigtrees .org, by Monday.
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