Big deal for big trees: Sequoia grove saved
Redwoods League to pay $15.6 million for 530 acres
ALDER CREEK GROVE, Tulare County — The allterrain vehicle cut through heavy brush, bounced over rocks and sliced through the undergrowth as it rumbled up a steep trail toward a meadow dominated by giant sequoia trees high in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains.
The tawny goliaths were among nearly 500 oldgrowth trees poking above the misty forest at Alder Creek Grove, the largest privately owned sequoia forest in the world and a remote oasis virtually unknown to the general public. Until now. After 20 years of negotiations, the San Francisco conservation group Save the Redwoods League was to announce Tuesday that it had agreed to pay $15.6 million by the end of the year for the 530acre hillside grove, which includes the 3,000yearold Stagg Tree — the fifthlargest tree in the world.
“We are at the heart of one of the most unique pieces of ground in the world,” said Sam Hodder, president and CEO of the Redwoods League, after he climbed out of the
ATV to stand beneath the ancient trees, most at least 2,000 years old. “You have pristine alpine meadows dappled with ancient trees that have been growing since the Trojan War. ... An opportunity to save it and to inspire the world with the power of nature — I think there is nothing more important that we could do.”
The forest, in Tulare County, is surrounded by Giant Sequoia National Monument and Sequoia National Forest. Owned since 1946 by the Rouch family, it contains 483 giant sequoias that are at least 25.5 feet in diameter. The ancient stand is about the same size as Yosemite’s famous Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, which was established in 1864 and helped inspire the creation of the National Park System.
The 34.7foot diameter Stagg Tree, named in 1960 after legendary football player and coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, is older and bigger than the Mariposa Grove’s Grizzly Giant, which is 30 feet in diameter.
“This is perhaps the most significant sequoia conservation opportunity in the last 75 years,” said Becky Bremser, the director of land protection for the Redwoods League. “By protecting this property, we will not only safeguard the biological richness and ecological resilience of a forest unlike any other on Earth ... we are creating the opportunity for this extraordinary mountain forest to inspire the public.”
Forestry officials say the real value of Alder Creek is its diversity. Unlike most other sequoia groves in California, it is made up of trees of many different ages and sizes, from seedlings to 3,000yearold giants. There are also mature stands of red fir, white fir, ponderosa pine and sugar pine. There are also meadows, wetlands and riparian woodlands.
“This is the way a healthy giant sequoia forest should be,” said Jim CampbellSpickler, a forest canopy ecologist at Humboldt State University and a Redwoods League consultant.
Giant sequoias, which can live for 3,000 years, are among the oldest living things on Earth. They are similar to their coastal cousins, the coast redwood, but grow only in a narrow band on the western slopes of the Sierra, generally at between 5,000 and 8,000 feet of elevation, where there is snow in the winter.
Oldgrowth trees once covered the Sierra Nevada and the California coast all the way to the Oregon border. Starting in the 1850s, loggers began cutting them down. A recent Redwoods League report said 95% of California’s oldgrowth redwoods, including coast redwood, were wiped out in a frenzy of logging that lasted more than a century following the California Gold Rush.
About 11,000 acres of the 48,000 acres of giant sequoia forest in 73 groves were once heavily logged, and another 5,000 acres were partially logged. Most of what’s left is now public or owned by tribal groups. About 1,200 acres are in private hands.
And the trees are facing more serious obstacles as the climate warms.
A Redwoods League study this year found that as a result of climate change and the accumulation of brush and ladder fuels that allow fire to climb into the tree canopy, recent wildfires burned so hot that they killed many of the giants, which are largely resistant to fire. Warming temperatures, increased fire danger and a shrinking snowpack in the Sierra were all issues mentioned last year in the league’s State of Redwoods Conservation Report.
The stand at Alder Creek has not been immune from these and other disturbances. The grove was last logged in the 1950s, but the oldgrowth trees were apparently left alone. A 236lot subdivision of mostly summer cabins, called Sequoia Crest, was built next to the grove at about the same time. It is not part of the Redwoods League deal.
Hodder said $7 million of the $15.65 million has been raised. The league is launching a fundraising campaign this month and hopes to raise the rest of the money through private donations and grants before Dec. 31, when the deal closes.
Once the deal is finalized, the Redwoods League plans to spend another $4.75 million on ecosystem studies and restoration work, including the clearing of dense stands of trees and underbrush to make room for sequoia cones, which need fire and open space for their seeds to grow.
The league plans to sell Alder Creek to the U.S. Forest Service for incorporation into Giant Sequoia National Monument in five to 10 years, Hodder said. In the meantime, he said, trails and other services will be built or enhanced and public access will be a priority.
Skip Rouch, one of the four owners of the property, said his family will retain a quarteracre plot of land with a small Aframe house on it. They agreed to sell because, with 16 children slated to inherit the land, it was only going to get more difficult to make decisions about how to manage the property.
“I’m sure it will be well preserved and not developed, which is what’s important,” said the bearded, 68yearold Rouch, who remembers being on the land with his lumberjack father as a child when he ran a bulldozer, built the road in and out of the property and held the dedication for the Stagg Tree, which he believes his father discovered. “If it had gotten bought by a developer it would have changed everything.”
The purchase comes a year after the Redwoods League bought the nearby 160acre Red Hill sequoia grove, bordering the South Fork of the Tule River. The 110 ancient trees at Red Hill will also be incorporated into Giant Sequoia National Monument and opened to the public by 2021.
“With Alder, we’ve now protected the two largest unprotected sequoia groves in the world,” Hodder said. “This is a spectacular and inspiring place that people need to see.”