Visit to Sequoia National Forest brings heartbreak in wake of 2 devastating wildfires
The employee at Springville Building Supply scoffed when I said I was vacationing from San Luis Obispo.
“The weather isn’t bad there,” he said.
Located in Tulare County, Springville is the first community big enough for a hardware store when you drive down from the top of Highway 190, over 6,000 feet in elevation change along the Tule River.
If you get stuck behind a slow-moving truck or stalled by construction, it can take an hour to drive the winding 25-mile grade.
The rolling, oak-covered Sierra foothills around Springville are similar to those around Paso Robles.
I stopped by Springville Building Supply to find a door sweep that critters wouldn’t gnaw on. We were vacationing at a rustic location where five generations of my wife’s family have stayed.
As I returned to the car, had to mentally brace myself for heartbreak on the trip back up.
That’s because the place I was headed — Ponderosa, population 52 — was an island of green surrounded by pines that had been burned to matchsticks.
The lightning-sparked SQF Complex fire burned a total of 174,178 acres in Sequoia National Forest and surrounding areas in 2020.
Of the two fires that made up the SQF Complex, the Shotgun and Castle fires, the Castle was by far the biggest and worst. It burned across two national forests, a national monument, private land and property belonging to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, California State Parks and Tulare County.
Firefighters fought hard to save Ponderosa and defend three sides of the rectangular community. Unfortunately, just down the hill, 94 residences were destroyed in the communities of Alpine Village and Sequoia Crest.
The wildfire also caused a stunning ecological disaster. About 10% to 14% of the world’s mature sequoia trees, situated in 20 groves, incinerated in a single blaze.
Some of the epic red sunsets we saw in 2020 were the product of ash from trees burning about 130 miles east of San Luis Obispo.
The sequoia is resistant to low-intensity fire but this fire was hot and at the time the state was under siege with many lightning caused fires. Firefighting resources were called on from as far away as Mexico.
In the past, as I drove up Highway 190 from the San Joaquin Valley, the air would become markedly cooler and moist as pine forest replaced the oaks above 5,000 feet.
The light would get softer as the sun was filtered through the pine needles that whispered in the wind.
That is gone now.
What remains is a sharp black forest of fence posts pointing at the sky.
Two years later, much of the Castle Fire burn zone is still closed to public access because of the danger from falling snags.
It is not uncommon to hear what used to be a majestic ponderosa pine crashing to the ground.
In 2021, another lightning-ignited blaze burned the other side of the Tule River watershed and across to the Kern River watershed.
The Windy Fire consumed 97,528 acres from the Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation to Sequoia National Forest and Monument.
The loss in sequoias is still being counted, though firefighters were able to battle and save the popular Trail of 100 Giants sequoia grove.
When added up, the acreage devastated by the SQF Complex and Windy fires equals 425 square miles burned in two short years.
Put another way, an area the size of every incorporated city in San Luis Obispo County burned, not once, not twice, but almost 23 times.
Given the length of time it takes to produce a mature pine, the forest will never be the same in my lifetime.
A mature redwood takes about 67 human generations to grow.
This is the most raw example of climate change that I have experienced. And this is only one of many western forests that have experienced major losses due to wildfires.
Critics point fingers at the management of public lands, but the solution isn’t as simple as “more logging” or “rake the forest.”
In the case of the SQF Complex and Windy fires, flames burned through areas that have been logged, grazed and crossed by roads.
Drought and bark beetle infestations had left many pines dead, with drooping, brown tinder-dry limbs.
Higher temperatures and low humidity levels bedeviled firefighters.
High wind drove embers faster than any human intervention could stop.
In the years before the fires, grants were completed to reduce the number of dead trees near communities, including the land that my wife’s family owns.
The firefighters were often able to hold lines there but most of our public budgets go to fire fighting and not forest management.
Fire season is year-round in parts of California as summers grow hotter and drier. Firefighters are under increasing pressure. How much can we ask of them?
Much of the water California relies on originates in the Sierra snowpack. What happens if forests no longer store water?
How long will it be before another generation can again take a walk in this forest?
These were some of the many questions that came to mind as I drove up the hill.
So much changed in just the last few years. It will take action, not games of rhetorical “gotcha,” to see things change for the better.
