Plans for prescribed burning on 1,300 acres of Calaveras Big Trees State Park’s dangerously overgrown South Grove of Giant Sequoias, the largest stand of the threatened trees in Tuolumne County and the rest of the Mother Lode, have been put off until next year, state parks staff said Thursday morning.
“This fall, conditions have not been favorable,” Amber Sprock, spokeswoman for Calaveras Big Trees and the state parks Central Valley District, said in an email. “The South Grove prescribed burn has been postponed until 2024.”
Plans for burning in the South Grove have been postponed multiple times in recent years.
Calaveras Big Trees and state parks staff announced plans for prescribed burning this fall in the South Grove on Oct. 18. Burning would depend on weather and air quality conditions. If weather or vegetation conditions were not conducive for burning and smoke dispersal, the project would be rescheduled.
California State Parks, Cal Fire and contractors have spent several years preparing the South Grove Preserve for burning. Crews have removed large fuels and masticated material along a fire road that circles the South Grove, to create a control line around the 1,300-acre burn unit.
Crews have also prepared large giant sequoias by removing heavy fuels and organic matter from their bases to reduce chances of negative impacts from fire.
In May 2022, a contract firefighter was killed by a falling tree during preparations for burning in the South Grove. Darin Banks, 26, was assigned to an initial attack hand crew working to prepare an area for prescribed burning in the Tuolumne County section of Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
The South Grove is home to about 1,000 mature giant sequoias on the south side of the North Fork Stanislaus River. The largest monarch sequoias at Calaveras Big Trees are found in the South Grove. It’s home to the Louis Agassiz Tree, named for a Swiss-American biologist and geologist, the largest giant sequoia in the park and one of the largest in the world. It’s 250 feet tall and more than 25 feet in diameter six feet above the ground.
The South Grove stands between 4,500 and 5,000 feet elevation, the lowest average elevation of any giant sequoia grove. Giant sequoias in the South Grove Preserve range in age from 1,000 to 3,000 years old, according to the nonprofit Old-Growth Forest Network.
Giant sequoias have limited distribution, covering about 28,000 acres in about 70 groves on the western slopes of the Central and Southern Sierra Nevada. In 2020 and 2021, more than 10,000 large giant sequoias were killed during three wildfires in the Southern Sierra. That was 17% to 19% of all the giant sequoias in the world killed or mortally damaged in just two years.
California State Parks says protection and stewardship of giant sequoia groves at Calaveras Big Trees have been priorities since the park opened to the public in 1931.
