Standing next to Woodland Road just off Highway 168, Jem Bluestein looks downslope into the Jose Basin. “It just came up here, up the canyon. It just came up here like a thousand freight trains, this fire with its walls of flame hundreds of feet tall.” He was recalling the massive Creek Fire that in the autumn of 2020 scorched nearly 380,000 acres of Sierra National Forest and private parcels tucked into the rugged mountain landscape.
It was one of the largest conflagrations in California history, burning for almost four agonizing months. The resulting devastation, he points out, was “entirely predictable and entirely predicted. It was an utter and total disaster waiting to happen because the fuel loads were explosive.”
Then, as Bluestein describes the scene, “It starts coming up the canyon, it picks up speed, intensity, heat. And then it hit our clean forest because we had spent the previous 20-some years thinning in anticipation of exactly this disaster. As it hit our property, it dropped to the ground and out of the crowns for the most part. And it started to slow down. And you can see right there where it stopped, where our forest survival began.”
Their land, he says, stood between the raging flames and the Shaver Lake community, “It would’ve just gone ballistic. It would have been a flamethrower directed at Shaver and unstoppable. But instead, what you see is our green patch and the green fan that spreads out upstream and uphill from us where the survival of the forest is evident. Several hundred square miles of forest did not burn because we stopped this fire here.”
The land Bluestein refers to embraces 134 acres in the Musick Creek watershed stretching along the southern slope of Mt. Stevenson. The “postage stamp” parcel, as he calls it, is a verdant, park-like terrain owned by the nonprofit Sierra Music and Arts Institute. But it was not always like that. For more than two decades, Bluestein and his crews have transformed the landscape with dedication, hard work and community support. They made it as fireproof as a forest can be.
The fire could have been even more destructive to the surrounding ecosystem, Bluestein calculates, if it had not been for the enlightened forestry of John Mount on the Southern California Edison holdings over the years, as well as the work of other community foresters.
But the swaths of land that did not burn in Sierra National Forest are still vulnerable. Bluestein blames the current conditions on “utterly disastrous, totally upside-down forestry practices that have reduced an endless giant forest in very good balance over a period of thousands of years, to bedrock.”
Raging wildfires in forests across the western states in recent years are evidence of a catastrophe that afflicts the Sierra’s forests and parks. Drought, bug-killed trees, fire suppression and climate change have converged as mortal threats to wide swaths of forest land in the state. Bluestein confirms that pine bark beetles had already killed most of the large canopy trees on their land before the fire came through.
The southern Sierra had reached a tipping point by 2015, according to UC Merced hydrologist Roger Bales. It was the combined effect of overstocked forests, a prolonged dry period lasting from 2012 to 2016 and periods of extreme heat. Lacking moisture in the root zone, trees literally died of thirst.
Carolyn Ballard was the Sierra National Forest fuels and fire specialist back in 2015, when she explained the conditions that eventually led to the Creek Fire: “The dead trees and the potential for large fires or fires to get very large, very fast is on the minds of everyone. We’re under a very dynamic and quickly changing situation due to the forest being pushed over its resilience thresholds.
“And part of this is due to some of the climate changes. We’re seeing our low elevation Ponderosa pine forest in a state of collapse in the southern Sierras, in what scientists are describing as mega-disturbances.”
Ballard observed at the time that rising temperatures in forests choked with brush and closely packed trees are wreaking havoc. “The combined impacts are creating historic conditions for wildlife and disease exceeding all previous projections.
“Small levels of disturbances are natural. This is at a scale that even out-scales anything that science thought would happen. We are experiencing cataclysmic changes, and they are accelerating because there’s so many effects and causes that we aren’t even clued into, which are already in effect. And each time we discover one, we discover several more.”
Since then, the trend toward rising heat and climate whiplash in California has only become more acute.
Serial logging for a century or more complicated the task of managing the land for wildfire protection and biodiversity. The Musick Creek landscape has been harvested three times over that period, removing the large canopy trees, the latest being in the 1970s. Those openings in the forest allowed thick vegetative growth to take over.
Mindful of those conditions, when Bluestein started managing their land, he saw what needed to be done. “We embarked on our crash program of thinning, trying to protect our maturing timber and our whole web of life here from the conflagration that everybody could see was coming.”
When the Creek Fire did come, it swept through and around their land at low intensity and eventually died out without the destruction that impacted the rest of the forest.
After the fire came the daunting task of cleaning up, stabilizing the soil and reestablishing both canopy trees and understory plants. “We didn’t have any erosion problems, and the grass and brush species were able to create a new fabric of living top soil and vegetation very rapidly. So that was very effective.”
Had that work not been done, experts concluded, the forest would never have come back after being replaced by shrub species. Over the past few years, Bluestein figures they have planted some 30,000 trees including a wide variety of local native species. Even though there is high mortality, many are growing vigorously.
Among the existing trees, shrubs, flowers and ground-hugging species, Bluestein and his crews have planted canopy varieties like incense cedar, ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, sugar pine, white fir, black oak, maple, aspen and even giant sequoia seedlings.
As those trees grow, they will have understory neighbors such as rhododendron, Sierra currant and Pygmy rose.
Black oaks that were burned grew back from the charcoal soil as monster shrubs. Bluestein had them pruned back to a few of the strongest sprouts, so those will now grow back tall as canopy trees.
Although predation and hot weather takes its toll, Bluestein believes they have a good chance of surviving, “There’s some moisture in there for our new little seedlings. And we’ve planted those areas, of which we have many. We have our beautiful creek. We have a few tributary creeks, and we have multiple beautiful springs popping out of the hillside.”
Allies have emerged to help in this rescue project. Bluestein credits staff at the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service in Fresno for helping safeguard the soil and revive trees. Other local groups such as Seedlings for Hope, the Sierra Resource Conservation District and Southern California Edison are providing thousands of seedlings for future plantings.
If nature is kind, this landscape will become a mosaic of beauty and biological diversity. But the work will go on, for once the land is restored it will need to be maintained.
That is the way it used to be when the people indigenous to this place lived here. Bluestein harkens a vision of that time, looking out over the canyon and seeing campfires of the multitudes of people who tended their land with care. “If a fire did not naturally occur on a regular enough basis, then when the conditions were right, the indigenous people would torch off a certain part of the forest to do some cleanup and to maintain and propagate some of their most precious required resources. And they kept that up for thousands of years.”
That traditional environmental knowledge still lives here in Sierra National Forest, embodied by Ron Goode, an elder of the North Fork Mono Tribe. His expertise in indigenous technology, and his skill in using fire to protect and enhance the land has attracted wide attention. He calls it good fire. And he shares that awareness with landowners, other tribes, university classes and even Cal Fire staff. It is a gift to the present day from Native Americans that were removed from this landscape. What goes around, comes around.
“What the land really wants is its people back. It wants people to live here and understand the forest and care for the forest, on a daily basis, forever.” That is part of Jem Bluestein’s vision for the future. It’s an ambitious concept that involves ongoing stewardship of the forest landscape.
“You get to a certain point and it’s time to go back where you started and keep the forests safe, keep them diverse, keep them growing and clear.” Bluestein envisions an idea that could achieve those goals and enhance local economies.
“The prescription that we need to see for the forest is trees under 10 inches in diameter, for the most part, need to be drastically thinned. That means thickets of trees and brush and that material and all the fuel lying around needs to be chipped or burned or removed in the best way that you can.
“Thousands of small crews would be moved into the forest, and they would have chainsaws, they would have chippers. The material that we cut and thin, we can clean it up, get that carbon low where it can help to keep moisture and nutrients and microbial action on the forest floor.”
Such projects could boost the local economy in this region and across the Sierra’s western front, where other watersheds have similar forest conditions. The woods working crews would be augmented by a variety of support skills, such as equipment operators and food services.
Crews would be equipped with portable milling rigs to salvage material without having to cut any healthy maturing timber. Then they could bring that material out, or leave chipped wood into the forest floor to sequester carbon into the soil.
It gets even more visionary. The wood waste, or slash, generated by thinning could be transformed into valuable products, according to Bluestein. “Use the slash on site through a very basic, almost ancient process, called pyrolysis to reduce the slash into perfectly usable fuel and other very valuable products such as biochar, which is coveted by organic farmers everywhere.” Concentrated carbon is employed as well in high-technology products such as graphene.
One of the most valuable products that could be extracted from pyrolysis is hydrogen. It is used for industrial processes such as oil refining and as a component in chemical manufacturing.
Currently, hydrogen is a product of fossil fuel production. But it could be produced from wood pyrolysis as a clean source of power for transportation or energy generation without carbon emissions.
The possibilities are endless, stresses Bluestein, “We have a sustainable, endless source of it right here, because we have these machines that we call trees that pull it out of the atmosphere and concentrate it for us. And if we do it right, we will have limitless renewable fuels, which we can take in the ultimate cleanest form of hydrogen if we’re smart.”
This is not a “pie in the sky” proposition. California has mandated hydrogen production and developing fueling stations. Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state has been selected as a National Hydrogen Hub, receiving $1.2 billion in federal funds to build or expand hydrogen projects that will power public transportation, heavy-duty trucks and port operations.
“We are moving from concept to reality—advancing clean, renewable hydrogen in California which is essential to meeting our climate goals,” the governor stated.
Furthermore, the hydrogen could be used for fueling transportation dirigibles. Not like the Goodyear blimp or the Hindenburg, but smaller rigid-body airships. In fact, there are companies developing and testing modern dirigible technology for logistics applications.
These are zero-emission airships that are able to move tons of cargo over long distances. They can even be self-driving. Bluestein sees a future where forest material and supplies could be hauled around without using roads. “Lumber that you mill on site from your thinning operations, the lumber that you salvage in the forest, you can haul that down to the valley under a big bag of hydrogen and then drop the hydrogen off at the hydrogen gas station.”
It is impossible to know just how warming temperatures and climate whiplash will impact the southern Sierra in coming years, or how the massive Creek Fire might affect the forest, the flora and fauna of the watershed that was burned. Will the large canopy trees return? Will chaparral and shrub species expand their range? Will there be more large fires?
Whatever fate emerges, the Sierra National Forest will continue to need maintenance and attention because it is a major local resource for recreation and the economy.
The most critical resource is the enormous volume of water that runs downhill to the Valley and water stored in the mountains. Bales points out that watershed restoration is critically important. “There have been conversations going on about the importance of these headwater catchments as part of the green infrastructure for our state’s water resources, just as our aqueducts and canals are part of the gray infrastructure.
“Our users, both ag and urban, need to secure the water future, and there needs to be investments in green infrastructure, the headwaters.”
The western slope of the Sierras plays a critical role in California’s water supply. Bales underscores the importance of conserving forest ecosystems that supply the lifeblood of the state’s economy. Protecting and reviving the forest landscape will take a major commitment by institutions across society.
As Bluestein navigates his pickup over the landscape that he and his crews have salvaged, he muses about the enormity of the task ahead for saving all the Sierra pine forests from catastrophe. “There’s so much that needs to be brought to bear. Federal, state, local, private, developed, integrated, coordinated and maximized over a period of many generations, like permanently.”
