One of Tahoe’s oldest forest stands at high risk of wildfire

For years, land managers discussed developing a fuel treatment plan for the Beaver Creek Pinery, a stand of largely old-growth ponderosa pines and black oaks in Lassen National Forest’s 41,000-acre Ishi Wilderness in northeastern California.

One of the largest old-growth forest stands in the region, it had never been logged and served as an important template for Northern California forest restoration efforts.

But the stand was never treated. Last year, the 430,000-acre Park Fire “ripped through” the pinery.

Now, authors of a fire modeling study focused on one of the few remaining old-growth forests in the Lake Tahoe Basin are pointing to the loss of the Beaver Creek stand as a cautionary tale of what could happen to the undisturbed giant ponderosa pines and other trees in Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay State Park.

The Emerald Point stand houses the largest remaining ponderosa pines in the Tahoe Basin, with some trees measuring more than 6.5 feet in diameter, as well as large Jeffrey pines and California incense cedar.

“It’s an extraordinary place,” said Hugh Safford, a research ecologist at the University of California, Davis who helped lead the study. “There are just absolutely massive trees in it, particularly the ponderosa pines.”

With more than a dozen species of trees, Emerald Point is one of the most ecologically diverse areas in the basin, hinting at the diversity the region boasted before it was heavily logged to support Nevada’s silver mines in the 19th century. Home to a bald eagle nest, the stand also serves as an important raptor habitat.

But like Beaver Creek, it has a problem.

Although the 2016 Emerald Fire burned 200 acres just a mile from the Emerald Bay trees and the nearby 2021 Caldor Fire burned numerous old-growth trees, the Emerald Point stand has not seen fire for at least 120 years and is considered “at high risk.”

In treated stands, dense underbrush is cleared or burned away — even off trail, there’s usually space to walk between trees, and dead limbs don’t hinder movement.

Untreated forests that haven’t seen low-intensity fire in decades are the opposite — buried under a tangle of dead branches, duff and other forest debris that makes it literally impossible to see the forest for the trees.

Since it hasn’t seen low-intensity fire in more than a century, the Emerald Point stand has devolved into an overgrown area vulnerable to drought, insect infestations and wildfire. The reasons date back to 1935, when the U.S. Forest Service established its 10 a.m. policy, mandating that all fires be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day after they were reported. That policy remained in place for decades, and only recently have controlled burns become recognized as critical in the health of forest ecosystems and to reduce the severity of wildfires.

“It was really clear this stand had no chance if a cigarette got dropped there on the wrong day,” Safford said. “To this day, I’m still amazed it hasn’t burned down.”

'We need to fight fire with fire'

The Lake Tahoe Basin is still celebrated for its beauty, but the basin looked much different in the early days of European settlement. As 19th century miners sought to unearth the rich silver deposits of the Comstock in western Nevada, they encountered a problem — the silver veins rendered the mines unstable and dangerous.

Lumber was needed to support the mine shafts, but with few trees in the Virginia City area, miners looked to the lumber-rich Tahoe area. Hundreds of thousands of old-growth sugar, Jeffrey and yellow pines were felled, then floated via flumes to lumber mills in Incline Village and Glenbrook before being transported to the Comstock. It’s estimated that by 1881, more than 2 billion board-feet of lumber had been removed from the Tahoe Basin.

But Emerald Point’s trees were never cleared for the silver boom, largely because of wealthy, private landowners during the period of intense logging.

“That was just a lucky break that Emerald Bay wasn’t cut,” Safford said. “You fast forward to today and you have this rare and little stand — it might be 40 or 50 acres, and that’s probably stretching it — and it’s isolated out on this little spit.”

Rob Griffith, district superintendent for California State Parks Sierra District, said the area has never been treated because of its location — most treatments, he said, are in areas immediately adjacent to populated communities or areas of “high probability of ignition.” Since 1997, roughly 100,000 acres of the Tahoe Basin’s 160,000 acres have been treated, according to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

But the study conducted by scientists at UC Davis and UNR and published in the journal Fire, showed that the stand is at high risk without treatment. Simulations showed that to withstand a wildfire, the stand needs to be thinned as well as burned.

“Based on their findings, we’re gonna take a look at that and decide ‘What do we do next?’” Griffith said. “We want to make sure the next time [a fire such as] the Caldor Fire visits the neighborhood … that this old-growth forest is resilient.”

This story was published March 13 by The Nevada Independent and is republished with permission.