Recovery efforts underway for Valley fire-ravaged Boggs Mountain forest

Bracken ferns and apple green grass shoots are beginning to rise through the scorched soil of Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest in southwestern Lake County, a sign of nature’s will to mend itself.

But it will take several decades and human intervention to restore the 3,493-acre woods devastated by September’s Valley fire to anything resembling its former self. The rich forest both produced timber and annually drew thousands of hikers, bikers, horseback riders and campers. It’s closed to visitors until at least the fall.

When the fast-moving wildfire roared through, it burned 99 percent of the forest, leaving in its wake the black and silver skeletal remains of conifer and oak trees. About 80 percent of the trees were killed, said Jim Wright, interim forest manager.

“If you were familiar with the old forest and drove out there today, you might get lost. It looks completely different,” Wright said. “The trees you remember, they’re gone.”

Many of the trees already were dead or dying because the long-standing drought had weakened them, making them highly susceptible to bark beetles. The beetles are still alive in some surviving trees and could continue to kill, Wright said.

“If the bark beetles just go nuts on us this summer, we could lose several more percent” of the trees, he said.

Restoration work on the forest began late last year, but it’s still in the demolition stage.

Aided by huge machines, workers last week were cutting, stripping and loading trees onto trucks. About 100 truckloads of timber are being hauled from the forest each day, Wright said.

Throughout the forest, trees are felled then delivered to processors that pick them up, drag them through a series of blades to remove branches and much of the bark, and cut off the ends before other machines lift them onto the trucks.

An estimated 250,000 burnt trees - some 50 million board feet of timber - need to be removed from the forest. In normal years, about only about 500,000 board feet of lumber is harvested from the forest, said Boggs’ forester Gerri Finn.

The loss is huge, but Boggs was a relatively small part of the estimated 75,000 acres of timberland that burned throughout Lake County last year, most of it on private land, said Greg Giusti, a forest adviser with the UC Cooperative Extension.

Only about half of the burned trees in Boggs have been sold, and about 30 percent of the sold timber has been harvested, Finn said.

“We have two harvest plans actively working right now, and we just put to bid five more,” she said.

Sierra Pacific and Mendocino Redwood are the largest buyers, Finn said.

While clearing operations remain in full swing, preparations are underway to regrow the forest.

Inside greenhouses near the Oregon border, 300,000 conifer seeds have been planted for Boggs’ reforestation efforts. They include 165,000 ponderosa pine, 30,000 sugar pine and 105,000 Douglas fir, according to Cal Forest Nurseries, which produces about 25 million saplings a year for reforestation, according to a company representative.

The trees are being raised roughly in the same proportions in which they existed before the fire, officials said.

Forestry officials also plan to plant a small number of non-native trees - giant sequoia from the Sierra - to see how they do in the Boggs demonstration forest, which functions as a tree science laboratory in addition to being a working forest and recreation area.

“It’s a tree people look to for fire resilience and climate change resilience,” Finn said.

While the destruction is devastating to those who cared for and loved the forest, its rehabilitation creates an opportunity to experiment with forest management.

“This is going to be a fantastic laboratory” for how to replant forests, said David Thiessen, president of the Friends of Boggs Mountain, a volunteer group of about 100 people that assists Boggs forest, including by building and maintaining trails, erecting signs and printing educational pamphlets.

For the replanting efforts on private lands, some 100,000 seedlings are being cultivated at a Placerville nursery, Giusti said. The trees are being grown from seeds the state previously collected in the area and have been stored in a “seed bank” for just such uses, Giusti said.

Most replanting is expected to begin early next year, when the seedlings are a year old.

Thiessen said his group plans to participate in the rehabilitation efforts at Boggs Mountain.

“We’re probably going to be more necessary than we were before,” he said. “I hope we can be a small part of it.”

There has been much public interest in helping to restore Boggs.

Thiessen’s group has collected more than $15,000 in donations from companies and individuals to help with the Boggs replanting efforts, he said.

Fundraising by Lake County Rising and the Lake Area Rotary Club has raised $60,000 for post-fire replanting on private land. Each seedling costs about 50 cents, Giusti said.

Wright said there’s also been a lot of public interest in viewing the fire torn area - which now resembles an apocalyptic movie set - when it reopens with limited access later this year, but he doesn’t think it will last.

“I think a lot of people will come because they want to see. Then they won’t come back,” he said.