Trees Planted By the Thousands in Old Fire Footprint
By Andrew Silva, San Bernardino County Sun, Calif.
Apr. 29–RIMFOREST — When the Old Fire tore through the San Bernardino Mountains in October 2003, sections of the forest suffered almost irreparable damage.
After a fire that hot, pine trees might not come back for hundreds of years, if ever.
The fire came in the middle of a devastating crisis in the San Bernardino National Forest.
The forest has been suffering from too many trees competing for too little water during a punishing drought. That made them vulnerable to a sprawling bark-beetle infestation in the early part of this century.
More than 1 million dead and dying trees have been removed to reduce the fire danger and restore the forest to some kind of balance.
So why plant trees at all?
“We have areas where there is no seed source,” said Mary Beth Najera, of the U.S. Forest Service. “If you want a brush field, we won’t plant trees.”
The Forest Service just finished planting about 120,000 trees across 500 acres in the past month.
The season when the weather is suitable for planting trees is short, so that’s all that will be done this year.
In areas where the fire wasn’t as intense, seeds can survive and foresters leave it to nature to perform the restoration.
In the severely burned areas, contractors from the Pacific Northwest can put down the trees amazingly quickly, said Rudy Tantare, a forest culturist who oversees the replanting program, now in its third year.
Wearing bags around their waists full of dozens of year-old saplings, the planters slam a tool, resembling a hoe with an elongated blade, called a hoedad into the ground, slide the tree in the hole, pack the dirt and move to the next spot.
“They make it look easy. It’s not,” Tantare said.
The Jeffrey, Ponderosa and sugar pines are grown from local seeds at a nursery in Placerville.
“We’re trying to replace the same species that are representative of this area,” Tantare said.
Last week, it took a few days to plant 10,000 trees on 37 acres in and around Rimforest.
About 300 trees per acre are planted, on the assumption there will be a 50 percent mortality rate. The proper density should wind up being about 100 trees per acre.
“Another reason we plant is for watershed and habitat,” Najera said. “Critters like trees.”
The saplings, about 8 inches to a foot long, have to be kept near freezing before they are planted. After planting, a small branch is placed at the base to provide just a bit of shade.
The trees will grow a few inches the first year, maybe a foot the second year and should be about 4 feet tall in a decade, Tantare said.
“It takes a while to establish a root system,” he said.
In 15 to 20 years, the trees should hit 6 feet.
It’ll take about a century for the stands to reach full maturity.
“It’ll be a long time before this looks like it did before,” Tantare said.
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