redwoods Archives - Sempervirens Fund

A Stewardship Story: Return to Nature

WEBDOGS — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:00:17 +0000

A Stewardship Story:

Return to Nature

Surviving since nearly the age of the dinosaurs, redwoods are resilient—resisting bugs, fungus, rot, floods, and even fire. But only 5% of them have survived the last century and a half. Human impacts like clear cut logging, development, and the increasingly extreme weather events of our changing climate have left redwood forests struggling to recover.

Together, we are carefully caring for the redwood forests you protect, resetting their natural systems, and helping them return to nature.

Donate Now

Caring for our Lands

photo by Orenda Randuch

Resetting Redwoods

A century and a half ago, as California’s economy expanded, settlers and industrialists began moving into the Santa Cruz Mountains and deciding what the redwood forests were for. Imagine seeing for the first time the dense understory of sky-scraping titans shading young redwoods in a diverse community that nourished wildlife and cooled creeks teeming with Coho-salmon. Navigating the untouched forest proved difficult and dangerous, but within the forests’ intricate ecosystem these newcomers also saw the potential to use the forest to grow cities like San Francisco and to establish new businesses, institutions, and more.

In an act of hubris, they forcibly carved roads into hillsides that gave their equipment access to each tree and stream, disrupting what had been thriving for thousands of millennia. Today, giant stumps, evenly-aged forests, and Coho-less creeks are the familiar scars of the once decimated forests. These crossings and structures continue to redirect water and sediment today; a large reason why in many places, protection alone cannot undo that damage. Restoring impacted forests begins by removing infrastructure designed for short-term extraction in mind.

Thanks to you, we steward more than 12,000 acres of protected land that we work to restore to nature for all of us.

Take a peek behind the trees at how you have helped the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains–some of the most biodiverse and threatened on Earth–return to nature this year.

A Fainter Footprint in the Forest

In 2023, you protected more than 50 acres of redwood forest bordering Castle Rock State Park. This land had long been caught between commercial timber zoning and the steady expansion of a public park. As one of the last undeveloped inholdings within the park boundary, Castle Rock Hollow plays a quiet but important role in reconnecting forest and trail across the landscape, and can help realign the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail.

But tucked amongst its groves were several dilapidated buildings, unsafe for people and wildlife, and silently seeping chemicals and toxins into the soil and water. Thanks to you, these structures and materials were removed in the summer of 2024, ahead of winter rains and winds that could increase their threat to the forest and all who rely on it.

Watch as photographer Ian Bornarth documents the removal of these structures at Castle Rock Hollow and the space is returned to the forest.

Removing Roads Less Traveled

While not all of the forests we protect have unsafe buildings and materials on them, nearly all of them have roads. Many were designed for short-term industrial uses rather than long-term stability on steep terrain. Some continue to provide necessary access to the forest for stewardship, wildlife monitoring, and emergency crews like firefighters. But unmaintained roads can add to the erosion of mountainsides, fragile after the CZU Fire and the extreme winter storms that followed.

With fewer plants to help hold soil in place, dirt roads can wash out, taking away the soil the recovering forest needs, and muddying critical water sources we and wildlife need. With your support, we were able to “rock” crucial access roads—establishing beds of crushed gravel—and decommission unnecessary roads to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and give the space back to the forest.

See Orenda Randuch’s photos before and after the removal of an unused road at the Lompico Headwaters you protected in 2006.

Undamming Water and Wildlife

Unmaintained roads are not the only structures that disrupt forest systems. Dams can alter watersheds more completely and for far longer. A defunct dam on San Vicente Redwoods’ Mill Creek trapped sediment behind it for 100 years—creating poor water quality upstream and poor habitat quality downstream. Endangered coho salmon and threatened steelhead trout return from the sea to the forest to spawn the next generation among the pools created by redwood roots.

They depend on loose gravel and cobble to form stable beds for their eggs and to shape pools and riffles that shelter young fish. For nearly a century, that material was trapped behind the Mill Creek dam. Thanks to you, the dam was removed in 2021, and now sediment is able to move downstream again. Within a year, endangered coho salmon fry were documented in the watershed for the first time on record. These young fish will spend several years at sea before returning as adults. We continue to monitor the creek’s recovery through wildlife monitoring and an ongoing environmental DNA sampling project with UCLA and Amah Mutsun Land Trust. In the future, we hope to see the fry observed in Mill Creek complete that cycle and return to spawn, marking the first confirmed generation to do so in more than a century.

Watch as our Stewardship Team return fry to the creek after being counted.

Rooting Out Invasive Species

Infrastructure isn’t the only thing humans brought into the redwoods. As people across the country and globe came to the Santa Cruz mountains, plants and creatures came with them. Invasive plants like French, Scotch, and Italian broom took root in places without pests and pathogens equipped to naturally keep them in check. A single plant, such as old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), can quickly cover ground in the forest and strangle redwood trees. Invasive plants can be a double-edged sword to the heart of the forest as they go up the canopy. Not only can they grow quickly without natural checks—crowding out the native plants the redwood forest and its creatures rely upon—they are also less fire-resilient—making their big growth a big pile of fuel for a wildfire.

A seemingly harmless sounding species, periwinkle (Vinca major), is particularly difficult to remove because any root left in the soil will regenerate into new plants. Thanks to you, invasive periwinkle and French broom removal projects began in the summer of 2024 in the redwood forest you protected at Lompico Headwaters. In 2025 and beyond, the work has continued as a returning project so native plants can re-establish themselves on the forest floor. Your support allows us to remove invasive plants, their deep roots and copious seeds, so these invaded patches do not become a persistent source of dry, flashy fuel in the hotter, drier years predicted to come.

See our Stewardship Team's photos before and after work to remove a patch of periwinkle from the forest by hand.

Returning Redwoods to Nature and Resilience

The truth is: redwood forests still bear the scars of a history marked by profoundly destructive human intervention. They have endured axes and bulldozers, but also lingering barriers like dams, buildings, and invasive species. What has changed is how we act now. Stewardship, for us, is the ongoing work of carefully and humbly understanding how to support forests toward what they once were, and what they still have the potential to become.

Protecting our last remaining redwood forests from further development is a crucial first step. By reducing human impacts left on the land, natural systems regain the capacity to respond, adapt, and recover. Together, we will continue to anchor broader efforts to renew watersheds, support resilient forests, and accelerate the collective well-being of ecosystems that redwoods are capable of achieving. With your help, our forests will be resilient and strong, able to support wildlife, clean water, fresh air, cooler temperatures, and healthy communities for generations to come.

More to Explore

See San Vicente Redwoods’ fire recovery and resilience in the photo essay Fuel for Fire
Read more about Monitoring Wildlife
Learn more about Caring for Our Lands

The post A Stewardship Story: Return to Nature appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Reimagining Big Basin

Matt Shaffer — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:10 +0000

Damage from the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire is seen at Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Boulder Creek, Calif., Friday, April 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Nic Coury)

These Redwoods Are Too Big for Small Dreams

In the weeks after the 2020 CZU fire, as wildfire still smoldered in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, we attempted to answer a tough question we were being asked repeatedly: what will the park look like in the future?

At the time, we didn’t yet know the extent of the damage to the forests themselves, but we did believe the moment was significant: an opportunity for California State Parks to reimagine, not just Big Basin, but how all state parks are cared for, how structures are built and services are delivered, and how people are invited to experience the natural wonders of the state’s parks.

Here’s what we suggested then:

We aspire for a new Big Basin that honors its historic past and is designed for the future. Big Basin should be built to last, planned for fire, and designed to coexist with both nature and people. We envision a park that models resilience to climate change, applies both scientific and Indigenous knowledge to land stewardship, and welcomes all communities to experience its redwoods with respect and inclusion. We continue to believe this. And now we know that while the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burned 97% of the entire park, almost every structure was lost, and most Douglas firs succumbed to the fire, the vast majority of redwoods survived and will recover. That’s quite simply amazing.

Reimagining Big Basin

In August 2021, California State Parks launched Reimagining Big Basin, a collaborative visioning process bringing together hundreds of Californians who met, listened, and shared their own connections to the forest. Their ideas, gathered through public workshops, advisory meetings, and surveys, informed every element of the 2025 Facilities Management Plan, which now translates that vision into practice.

From the beginning of this effort, Sempervirens Fund served as an active participant in the working group guiding strategies for forest stewardship, facility design, and recreation planning, ensuring that conservation and visitor experience were considered together.

A Framework for the Future

Building upon the Reimagining Big Basin Vision Summary, the Facilities Management Plan sets out a clear path for establishing new visitor-serving services and restoring safe access while establishing how people will experience Big Basin in the coming years. The plan protects the park’s most sensitive landscapes, leaving the old-growth forest primarily for walking, reflection, and learning. Each element reflects the public input gathered over several years and the shared values of Sempervirens Fund and California State Parks.

Key objectives include:

Relocating visitor facilities, including parking and administration, to the new Saddle Mountain Hub, keeping intensive uses outside the old-growth redwoods.
Building for long-term resilience, with solar energy, underground utilities, and fire-resistant design that anticipate future climate conditions.
Integrating science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to guide restoration of forest health, water systems, and wildlife habitat across the wider landscape.
Preserving the old-growth experience by designing all structures within the redwood core to be minimal, resilient, and in harmony with the forest.
Managing visitation through a shuttle system and timed entry, ensuring access remains safe and balanced with resource protection.
More accessible trails and facilities, with new routes and restrooms that meet ADA standards so that people of all abilities can explore the forest.
Partnering with Indigenous communities to create ceremonial spaces and shared stewardship areas at Little Basin and other significant sites.
Restored trails and paths will replace damaged roads and reopen areas closed since the 2020 fire, giving visitors more ways to experience Big Basin while easing congestion in popular spots.
Expanding storytelling and interpretation to reflect California’s cultural diversity and deepen visitors’ understanding of the redwood ecosystem.

Together, these priorities represent a measured but ambitious plan to revitalize Big Basin in a way that honors its past and equips it for the environmental realities of the future. They also reaffirm Sempervirens Fund’s long-standing commitment to collaborative stewardship and to maintaining Big Basin as a place where forest health, cultural heritage, and public enjoyment advance together.

Want to get involved?

Stay connected with California State Parks as they manage the many phases of Reimagining Big Basin and seek public input and involvement.

Learn More

Caring for the Park’s Natural Resources

The Forest Management Strategy, completed in 2024, guides how California State Parks and its partners, including Sempervirens Fund, will restore and care for Big Basin’s recovering redwood forest. It recognizes the park’s landscape as both resilient and altered, where decades of fire suppression, historical logging, and climate change have left dense and vulnerable stands.

The strategy of this plan, which you can read here, marks a deliberate return to active management, blending modern science with time-honored stewardship practices. Its core objectives include:

Strengthen forest resilience by reducing hazardous fuel buildup and promoting a balanced mix of mature and younger trees. These management practices will create conditions that can better endure drought, storm, and fire.
Support the safe use of prescribed and cultural fire to approximate the historical fire cycles that once shaped redwood forests, improving soil health and habitat renewal.
Restoration will focus on maintaining the richness of native species and ensuring that wildlife can move safely through continuous habitat corridors within and beyond park boundaries.
Re-establish stream function, meadow health, and watershed stability in response to recognizing that forest recovery depends as much on water as on trees.
Restore traditional land-care practices through sustained collaboration with Tribal partners and ensure these lands remain places of cultural teaching and ceremony.

Together, these actions define a new standard for forest care in the Santa Cruz Mountains, an effort that treats fire, water, and growth as interdependent forces rather than opposing risks. Over two thousand acres of the park have been prioritized for initial restoration, setting a foundation for decades of adaptive management and learning.

Light peaks through recovering redwoods in the heart of Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Photo by: Orenda Randuch.

An accompanying Environmental Impact Report examines the potential effects on the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird that nests in the complex and high old-growth canopies. The CZU fire had an outsized impact on their nesting habitat. They prefer Douglas firs, which were decimated in the 2020 wildfire. Despite that, a murrelet sighting was captured on video in 2021. We believe that the combined planning for forest management and facilities will likely initially impact murrelet behavior, but will ultimately improve conditions at the southern end of their range. The plan also incorporates measures such as improved food storage, waste management, and visitor education to limit risk to the species.

Looking Ahead

Work at Big Basin will continue in stages over the coming years, guided by the Facilities Management Plan and the Forest Management Strategy. Together, these plans set the foundation for how the park will adapt to future conditions while protecting its ecological and cultural legacy. Sempervirens Fund strongly supports this direction and the years of collaboration that shaped it.

The scale of this work is substantial. State Parks anticipates roughly $370 million in phased investment to rebuild essential facilities, modernize infrastructure, and complete ecological restoration. That funding will come from a combination of state allocations, agency partnerships, and philanthropic support. For its part, Sempervirens Fund remains focused on the long-term stewardship of the forest: restoring redwood ecosystems, supporting climate adaptation, and ensuring the surrounding landscape continues to sustain the park’s recovery.

These plans also advance broader public goals. Legislation such as AB 679 and SB 630 will help accelerate the formal expansion of the Saddle Mountain area, reinforcing its role as Big Basin’s new headquarters and primary visitor hub. Together, these efforts move the park closer to a future where access and conservation strengthen one another.

Beyond the park boundary, we remain committed to securing and restoring lands that sustain Big Basin’s broader ecosystem. The Gateway to Big Basin property, for example, will strengthen ecological connections, support native regeneration, and provide a natural transition between the Boulder Creek community and the park’s new entrance area.

Revitalizing Big Basin is not just about recovery. It’s about renewing a covenant between people and forest, and between past and future. These redwoods have endured fire, time, and change. With care–and with all of our support–they will grow back stronger, and teach us to do the same.

More to Explore

Read more about how Nature Needs Time to Heal
Listen to California State Parks' Chris Spohrer introduce Reimagining Big Basin
Learn more about the Saddle Mountain Conservation Area

The post Reimagining Big Basin appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Why Cut Redwoods?

WEBDOGS — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 19:53:28 +0000

Written in partnership with Bay Nature magazine

Why Cut

Redwoods?

photo by Ian Bornarth

A counterintuitive approach to conservation gains urgency
in the face of drought and wildfires in California

BY AUDREA LIM

On any one of her routine treks in Deadman Gulch, Nadia Hamey will move downhill through thick vegetation in the San Vicente Redwoods, a swath of protected redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains about two hours south of San Francisco. She comes here to check the trees: the regiment of giants with their emerald quills, crowned columns that reach hundreds of feet above her head. Their fallen needles lie in a springy bronze mat beneath her work boots. She may stop to consider young redwoods that grow just an arm’s length from another tree, then will use a bottle of paint to spray a light blue line across its blushing bark. The line is a “mark of death” Hamey likes to joke, to make light of the difficulty of her job. An independent forester, she has tended to the region’s redwoods for 21 years, which includes selecting the trees to cut down^{see footnote number 1}. .“I’m really dictating which trees will go on and get a chance to prove themselves,” she reflects. “It’s seriously exhausting, because it’s so much responsibility. But it’s a really powerful thing to be molding the forest.”

Shaping a redwood forest by cutting down its trees is at once counter to a decades-long ethos of conservation organizations in California and on the leading edge of it, although still not without controversy. While restoration thinning has been supported by research and practiced in California in fits and starts since at least the 1970s, it has been slow to gain momentum. But many conservation groups are now concluding that the millions of acres of logged and damaged redwood forests along the Pacific coast may recover more quickly—in decades rather than hundreds of years—by the cutting of select trees to promote the growth of others. This seemingly counterintuitive approach to preservation has gained urgency in the past decade with the onset of catastrophic wildfires that now routinely burn beyond the control of firefighters throughout the state. The redwoods growing in San Vicente are an early example in the greater Bay Area of conservation groups cutting trees to restore a forest, helping us learn whether these forests can better survive wildfire as the region grows hotter and drier.

San Vicente’s restoration story began roughly a decade ago, a blink of an eye for flora that can live more than 2,000 years. It was around 2011, recalls longtime conservationist Reed Holderman, when local land trusts teamed up to purchase the roughly 13 square miles of forest. It was a massive piece of land in an ecologically vital location near the California coast with potential for public use, but the property required investment—it was laced with dirt roads, held a limestone quarry, and was home to a defunct dam, and the redwoods had been logged over the past century and were now managed for harvest. Nonetheless, pockets of old growth and a rich diversity of species remained. But if the land trusts didn’t purchase the property, it would undoubtedly be divided and sold for development.

Holderman, who was then the executive director of Sempervirens Fund, a land trust created to protect the region’s redwood forests, says the conservation organizations—Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), Save the Redwoods League, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, and Sempervirens Fund—faced a difficult situation: How would they care for a redwood forest that needed so much ongoing attention? “You needed to face the music, right?” he says. “What are we getting into, and what is it going to cost?”

map by Ben Pease at PeasePress.com

California is full of redwood forests that have been changed by people with varied motivations. For thousands
of years, Indigenous tribes harvested plants and lit fires to thin the greenery in the understory of the mostly fire-resilient redwoods, gently coaxing the forests to meet their needs for food, medicine, and shelter. With European settlement and the forced removal of Indigenous people came clear-cut logging, first with handsaws and horses and later with powerful chain saws and destructive earthmovers. The settlers also took the view that all wildfires should be extinguished, largely to protect their lumber^{see footnote number 2}.

Clear-cutting arrived in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 19th century, accelerating in the 20th century as the population of Northern California grew, creating demand for lumber as fuel, railroad track, and building material, especially as San Francisco rebuilt itself following the 1906 earthquake. By the 1920s, most of the biggest redwood trees were gone from these mountains, leaving behind armies of stumps. Regardless, a handful of lumber companies eked out a business cutting the region’s smaller trees, as well as managing redwoods with the intent to log them. At the time, people had been so successful at dousing wildfire that the last major one to burn the Santa Cruz Mountains was in 1884^{see footnote number 3}.

Sempervirens Fund purchased one of these heavily altered properties, called Redtree 236, in 2010. The redwoods were crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, on dirt eerily devoid of branches or fallen trunks. The forest “looked kind of artificial,” recalls Holderman. The former owners were “basically growing the trees like crops.” The land trust brought in consulting ecologists, soil experts, and foresters, including Nadia Hamey, to determine whether such a forest could be restored to a thriving ecosystem that supports thousands of other species. “We basically decided to try to figure out, how do you transition an industrial forest into an oldgrowth redwood forest?” Holderman says.

He was unsurprised by the consultants’ prescribed doses of selective logging as part of that solution. And he supported it. Many of his colleagues did not feel similarly. “I got a lot of blowback,” he remembers, bursting into deep guffaws. “Maybe a quarter of my board wanted to fire me.” The controversy was rooted in their belief that environmental stewardship meant letting nature heal itself and that over time, nature would sort it out. In this view, cutting trees was antithetical to conservation.

“Our argument was, ‘well, this is artificial,’” Holderman says. There was no way to know if an industrial forest would evolve into an old-growth forest, a process that can take millennia, but, he told doubters, “We know if we do this [active restoration], it’ll put this on a path to get there quicker.” So in 2011, Sempervirens began for the first time in its 125-year history to experiment with active restoration, cutting some trees to encourage others to thrive, and leaving felled trees on the ground to help restore the soil’s out-of-whack chemistry. Years of removal of fallen snags and old growth by the previous owner had left the soil nutrient poor. Sempervirens began felling trees with chain saws and moving them to modify a redwood forest for the benefit of the forest. “How you manage a forest to restore it, versus how you manage it to produce maximum commercial value, [these] have some overlapping similarities,” says Sara Barth, Sempervirens Fund’s current executive director, “but the end goals are quite different.”

Forester Nadia Hamey marks trees with blue paint she wants cut down. Here, in San Vicente Redwoods’ Deadman Gulch she encourages growth in the biggest oldest trees by felling nearby trees competing for resources.
photo by Orenda Randuch

Nadia Hamey was hired by Sempervirens and POST in 2011 to actively manage San Vicente Redwoods. She walked through the property with the conservation groups to assess the potential and challenges of the landscape. What did the land need and how would they pay for it? “When the cost of doing this came back,” Holderman says,“it scared the shit out of us.” The necessary forest restoration was complex; they knew it would ultimately require tens of millions of dollars, so the groups planned to start small at roughly $250,000 a year. That has grown to well over $1 million annually.

Holderman recalls a time he accompanied Hamey on one of the hikes, the two of them threading their way through the crowded stand of redwoods as she swiveled her attention across the forest-scape and hovered her finger before its specimens. She explained to Holderman that if she were working for Big Creek Lumber Company—a local sustainable logging company that had previously employed her—she would take and sell that tree, that tree, this tree, and that tree under the selective logging rules that applied in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But as a forester for a conservation organization like Sempervirens that was trying to restore an ecosystem, she would choose different trees. She’d also take this tree and that tree, pointing out a couple that were practically huddling in the shadow of their thicker, taller sibling, crowding its personal space.

The idea was to divvy up the 8,532 acres into three groups, each managed with a different goal. About a tenth of the property is preservation reserves, where the old-growth forest is healthy, and she does little besides weed and maintain roads and culverts. Working forest and restoration reserves account for the remaining acres. In the 3,700 acres of working forest—43 percent of the property— Hamey maintains an ecosystem with trees that might be sold. She picks out large, healthy redwoods—though not the biggest, oldest redwoods—that forestry contractors harvest and Sempervirens and co-owner POST sell to Big Creek as lumber. Annual lumber revenue fluctuates, and all of it is directed, along with public grants and private donations, to fund restoration elsewhere on the property and road repair, a cost that also fluctuates, and altogether it has amounted to about $775,000 over the last five years.

“Cutting down trees is hard—really hard. And it feels so counterintuitive to protecting forests,” says Sara Barth. Still, the partner organizations are seeing the long-term benefits of working forests taking shape. “We do not take it lightly. We want a new generation of old-growth redwoods to be established. And when we see the growth and canopies improve in the working forests we are seeing success.”

The goal is to return the restoration reserves to old-growth forest conditions, directing the chain saws away from the trees they would have been aimed at in the working forest. “You flip that on its head in the restoration reserves, and instead of removing some of the larger trees, you pretty much pick the winner,” explains Hamey. Having identified the one big champion redwood—a “future oldgrowth recruitment tree,” in technical language—you then “cut selectively around it.” Some of the accessible logs are removed to reduce fuel for wildfires, while others are either sold or burned for biomass, returning nutrients to the soil. Or as was the case for roughly 30 acres, a prescribed fire burned away the undergrowth and fallen vegetation. Tree-cutting is “the way that we make big adjustments,” Hamey says, and “as long as we don’t introduce weeds, the aftermath is amazingly cool.”

These practices are an attempt to emulate how plants, trees, and animal life interact within a forest ecosystem, enabling it to heal itself from natural disturbances such as wind, lightning storms, landslides, or pest infestations. Research that spans nearly 50 years in Redwood National Park demonstrates that the approach is working. An unnaturally dense second-growth redwood forest site there, called Holter Ridge—which averaged 2,400 trees per hectare in 1978, versus 25 to 90 trees per hectare in old-growth forests—has been thinned periodically since ’78, and the diversity of plants growing in the understory, as well as tree growth, has increased ^{see footnote number 4}.

But extensive disturbance can be a problem. Typically, the stumpy clear-cut redwood forests that have been left to recover on their own wind up far denser than old-growth forests. Where the old redwood crowns could sometimes span 100 feet, shading out everything below, felling these giants had the effect of bathing wide swaths of the forest floor in sunlight, encouraging the growth of other sun-loving and often less fire-resistant species. Today, these forests are largely occupied by them, especially hardwoods like tanoak and Doug fir. Yet all the trees, across every species, compete with one another for sunlight, water, and nutrients. The redwoods struggle to regain vigor. So Hamey thins the trees around the biggest redwoods to reduce that competition, a practice known as “crown release.” Her goal is to direct the growth of these mixed-species woods back into flourishing redwood forests that can weather (and thrive on) the occasional, moderate wildfire—their original state before European settlers arrived.

Nadia Hamey was born in the late 1970s and lived in logging camps on Vancouver Island, off the western coast of Canada. She saw industrial clear-cutting level the old forests of the Clayoquot Sound and, as a youth in the ’80s and ’90s, participated in activist blockades and protests. “It’s in my blood to fight,” she says with a chuckle. But her father, a forester, and her mother, a habitat protection officer, advised her that she wasn’t going to achieve her goals by creating roadblocks with her body and stopping loggers from getting to work. “You need to use your brain,” they told her, and “change the law.” So she enrolled at UC Berkeley and earned a degree in forestry.

“I was anti-,” Hamey reflects, on her attitude toward the timber industry. “I wanted to influence the unsound practices of logging.” Yet to learn the practice of forestry after graduation, she worked short stints for two of the biggest clear-cut logging companies on the West Coast, Weyerhaeuser and Simpson Timber Company. Then she landed a job in 2003 at Big Creek Lumber, a family-owned operation in the Santa Cruz Mountains that has been, at times, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Big Creek Lumber is now responsible for selectively logging part of the working forest in San Vicente Redwoods, along with operating its own sawmill and managing other private timberlands. Janet McCrary Webb’s grandfather, great uncle, father, and uncle started the company in 1946, after World War II. They set up a portable sawmill and began harvesting some of the timber on a neighbor’s property in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just a few miles outside of where San Vicente Redwoods now sits. They learned that once cut, redwoods will then sprout into eight or ten new trees, meaning that tree-cutting promoted the growth of the forest. “They were able to pick and choose what trees to thin and realized that thinning worked really well in that redwood forest,” McCrary Webb, now president of Big Creek, explains.

“I really came around to embracing
active management as a way to steward
forests,” says Hamey.

When outside timber operators arrived to clear-cut the forest, the family lobbied alongside advocates for Forest Practice Rules, a set of regulations governed by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the ’70s. The rules outlawed clear-cutting in the region, codifying it in the state’s Forest Practice Rules. Ever since, the only tree-cutting allowed has been “single tree selection.” This means foresters can’t create a gap in the forest larger than half an acre or remove a tree that’s not within 75 feet of another healthy and industrious leafy conifer, like a redwood. The goal, essentially, is to maintain a standing, thriving forest, whether it is managed as a working forest—one steadily supplying wood and other natural resources—or a mostly untouched forest preserve. The rules enabled small companies like Big Creek to remain in business.

Hamey calls her more than 10 years of past work for Big Creek Lumber, and her brief stints at other forestry companies, valuable learning experiences. Applying different silvicultural—forest science and management—practices could achieve wildly varying effects on a forest, nudging the direction of its growth and evolution. She also realized that in areas where the ecosystem was intact and healthy, it made sense to preserve land as wilderness, but when it came to more damaged woodland ecosystems, certain tree-cutting techniques could also return the forest to health. “I really came around to embracing active management as a way to steward forests,” she says.

➊

➋

➌

➍

➎

➊ To help restore heavily burned areas in San Vicente Redwoods (SVR), dead trees are logged and turned into biochar, a soil supplement. ➋ The thick, post-fire understory of SVR’s Deadman Gulch slows restoration efforts in 2024. Note the worker’s orange helmet in the background. ➌ Sempervirens Fund executive director, Sara Barth, visits Big Basin State Park after the CZU fire in 2020. ➍ Smaller trees with pink ribbons will be cut down in SVR’s restoration reserve to spur growth in a larger, older tree. ➎ SVR in 2016.

In August 2020, a thunderstorm rolled through Northern California, shooting more than 11,000 lightning bolts to the ground and igniting hundreds of fires, including four in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties that merged to burn some 86,500 acres. The CZU Lightning Complex Fire tore into the San Vicente Redwoods from the north, sparing only a few acres and failing to discriminate between areas managed as working forest, reservation reserves, and preservation reserves.

“Before the 2020 fire, I would’ve talked a lot more about how selective harvesting was like a surrogate for prescribed fire, which is a much-needed and missing component of our management,” Hamey says. Both techniques are necessary and complementary. Regular controlled burns can reduce invasive species, promote native plant growth, and remove the brush and small trees that can fuel any natural wildfire.

When trekking through the landscape of blackened stumps, corpses of trees left standing, and redwoods dying from a rot now growing inside following the fire, Hamey could see that the forest required even more thinning. Across the working forest and reservation reserves, it would be necessary to remove sick and damaged trees, regenerate the redwood stands, and deprive future fires of explosive amounts of fuel.

On a workday in August of 2023, the forest vibrated with the feral shriek of chain saws grinding through trunks, climaxing with a crack of branches as a tree crashed down in a dramatic plume of dust. The people Hamey supervised were clearing dead firs and hardwoods from strips of land along the ridgelines and the perimeters of areas that Hamey is restoring. They are creating “fuel breaks” to starve future fires, and “that will hopefully be our holding lines for future prescribed burns,” she explains. Steel behemoths roll through, grinding dead trees into sawdust, grasping fallen logs with their claws, and dragging them across the forest floor. In total the work has created 15 miles of shaded fuel breaks. These are 400-foot-wide strips of land where the hottest-and fastest-burning trees and plants are removed from theunderstory, depriving a potential wildfire of fuel and giving fire crews space to work.

Today, in much of the northern half of the property, where the fire burned hottest, the forest remains dead and charred. The vegetation type has changed, and the hardwood stands previously dominated by tanoak, madrone, California laurel, and Douglas fir have largely converted to shrublands with some hardwoods resprouting. These areas are particularly vulnerable to re-burning. In the coast redwood–dominated stands of trees, the redwoods mostly survived and have resprouted to varying degrees. The larger, older redwoods with the thickest bark have fared best. And the 30 acres of the restoration reserve forest treated with a prescribed burn in February 2020 appeared to weather the blaze far better than the untreated sections surrounding it, according to Sempervirens.

“Having a restoration and working forest in tandem has taught us a lot about not only supporting the forest’s long-term health but also how to prepare for and respond to wildfire,” says Barth. “We approach this work with urgency, humility, and a willingness to adapt based on results. The volume of active restoration work has increased since the fire, and that benefits forests and local communities, now and into the future. Rarely do we fully know what nature will do, so we pursue redwood resiliency in terms of health, habitat, and fighting climate change for millennia.

Buds in a redwood trunk sprout after fire, creating the green fuzzy “sweater” look seen in San Vicente Redwoods in 2022.

Sources

footnote number1

Peninsula Open Space Trust. "From the Ashes, a New Forest Rises - Recovery at San Vicente Redwoods." YouTube, 10 Mar. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1rzlbmsN38.

footnote number 2

Stephens, Scott L., Fry, Danny L. "Fire History in Coast Redwood Stands in the Northeastern Santa Cruz Mountains, California." Fire Ecology, 1, 1 Feb. 2005, Pages 2–19, https://doi.org/10.4996/fireecology.0101002.

footnote number 3

footnote number 4

Soland, Kevin R., et al. "Second-growth redwood forest responses to restoration treatments." Forest Ecology and Management, Vol 496, 15 Sep. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2021.119370.

More to Explore

Learn more about how we're Growing Old-Growth today for tomorrow.
Read our Climate Action Plan to help redwoods survive so we all can thrive.
Meet the mushrooms helping San Vicente Redwoods recover from fire.

The post Why Cut Redwoods? appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Growing Old-Growth

WEBDOGS — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 23:00:25 +0000

Growing Old-Growth

How You’re Restoring Redwood Forests Faster

An old-growth redwood is huge. One of the largest living things to ever grace the planet. And their size isn’t just impressive, it's important. In the Santa Cruz Mountains very few old-growth redwoods remain, but you’re helping to grow the old-growth of tomorrow, today. Together, we’re restoring redwood forests faster for the trees, for wildlife, for the fight against climate change, and for future generations.

Donate Now

Read about Caring for our Lands

photo by Orenda Randuch

The Benefits of Old-Growth

Seeing an ancient coast redwood in person is awesome. Capable of reaching heights more than three hundred feet tall–taller than the Statue of Liberty–redwoods are providing both habitat and unparalleled carbon storage every inch of the way. As redwoods grow older, typically about 150 years old in ideal habitat conditions, they not only grow taller, they also grow wider, thicker, and reiterate their trunks–creating lots of space for Co2 on the inside and space for wildlife and plants on the outside.

As they age, redwoods also become more resilient: better able to protect themselves and support the forest. Their thick, armor-like bark can grow to be a foot thick–helping to protect them from fire, pests, and rot. Old-growth canopies are higher and harder for fire to reach. Their well-established root systems spread 100-feet wide and interconnect with fungi and other trees throughout the forest to share nutrients and information. Old-growth redwoods are able to help support the forest as a whole, and with their ancient lifespans they are able to live for millennia. Read more facts about Redwoods.

Old-growth redwoods are not only crucial for forest health, they are crucial for the fight against climate change and species’ survival.

photo by Orenda Randuch

The Changing Forest

Redwoods’ size and resilience also made them incredibly desirable as building materials. The redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains were being clear cut to build, and rebuild when disasters like the 1906 earthquake struck, the growing communities around them. While your fellow supporters formed Sempervirens Fund in 1900 to protect the remaining redwood forests, many forests were already reduced to stumps. Only 5% or less old-growth redwoods are estimated to remain throughout their entire range today. While redwoods are incredibly resilient and capable of resprouting, entire forests were growing back at the same time which created forests that were too close together to grow as large as they once were and without many of the benefits of old-growth to help support them.

Redwoods at Big Basin show resilience 5 years after CZU Fire, story by CBS News Bay Area

Today, clear cut logging is not allowed in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But the forests, struggling to grow back in tight quarters without the assistance of their elders, face the additional challenges of increased droughts, high temperatures, and fire. When the 2020 CZU Fire ignited across the Santa Cruz Mountains, forests were already at a disadvantage–close together, hot, and dry. The unprecedented fire tore through 86,000 acres including nearly every protected acre Sempervirens Fund cares for. While most of the redwoods are expected to recover from the fire, the urgency to make forests as resilient as possible for the increasingly extreme and unpredictable effects of climate change ahead was starkly underscored.

Fortunately, Sempervirens Fund had decades of experience resetting redwood forests from past damage utilizing a forest management approach called Restoration Forestry. Active restoration forestry techniques had helped redwood forests recuperate more quickly and they could help establish healthy forest conditions like old-growth redwoods in decades rather than centuries

Restoration Forestry

Restoration forestry can help reset forest health and resilience so forests can provide fresh air, clean water, habitat, and carbon storage. Despite being backed by both cutting-edge science and traditional Indigenous practices, the methods can seem antithetical to their goals at first–after all, wasn't it cutting and fire that got the forest into this state in the first place?–but armed with research, humility, and observation, the results are becoming clearer and reinforce the need for our active management of forests.

When Sempervirens Fund protected a former tree farm in 2008, once known as Sempervirens 236, it was clear the forest near Boulder Creek would need more restoration forestry than any property we had protected before, in order to help return the industrial rows of trees back into a healthy, diverse, resilient forest. With the guidance of professionals like Forester Nadia Hamey, a plan was put in place to reduce competition and potential fuel for a fire, and increase the growth of larger redwoods, known as old-growth recruitment, and improve the forest’s resilience to challenges like fires and droughts. By 2019, we were already seeing an increase in biodiversity on the forest floor–a sign the forest can support more species. In 2023, Sempervirens 236’s redwood forests, now healthy and thriving, were added to Castle Rock State Park.

While a redwood forest might be able to restore itself given centuries and ideal conditions, the threats of climate change are unpredictable and urgent. Through restoration forestry techniques, forests like those at Sempervirens 236 can recover from the past and be resilient for the future more quickly.

photo by Rebecca Thomas

Forestry Techniques

illustrations by Shirley Chambers

1. Old Growth Recruitment

A restoration forestry technique removing smaller trees too close to a larger tree (sometimes called an “old growth candidate tree”) to increase the tree's growth and resilience by reducing competition and fuel.

2. Crown Release

A restoration forestry technique removing smaller trees too close to a larger tree to increase the tree's growth and resilience by reducing competition and fuel.

3. Thinning

A restoration forestry technique removing smaller trees that are too dense to reduce density, competition, and fuel.

4. Hazard Tree Removal

A forestry technique removing dead or damaged trees in danger of falling on life, structures, or access routes.

5. Clear Cut Logging

A forestry technique, outlawed in the Santa Cruz Mountains region in the 1970s, logging all trees within an area at the same time often leaving only stumps and disturbed soil.

6. Large Woody Debris

A restoration forestry technique strategically placing trees or large limbs into the water to mimic natural conditions that provide crucial water habitat for fish, water quality, and natural floodplains to reduce flooding downstream.

7. Fuel Breaks

A restoration forestry technique removing fast burning plants and trees from strategic areas like ridgelines to slow the spread of fire and increase firefighting opportunities.

The Living Laboratory

Restoration Forestry techniques like these are now helping the largest private forest remaining in the Santa Cruz Mountains recover from a history of logging, mining, and the severe 2020 CZU Fire, and regain resiliency as quickly as possible so the forest can both survive and help fight climate change. In the forests of San Vicente Redwoods that humans have exploited for nearly a century, we’re attempting to strike a careful balance of human involvement.

photo by Orenda Randuch

“Restoration at scale was always going to be tricky,” says Sempervirens Fund’s Executive Director Sara Barth. San Vicente Redwoods is a living laboratory where we seek to enhance its health by applying insights from academic research, other conservation organizations (including Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, and Land Trust Santa Cruz County), and the restoration forestry practices that helped reset Sempervirens 236 on a healthy trajectory for recovery. “Having a restoration and working forest in tandem has taught us a lot about not only supporting the forest’s long-term health but also how to prepare for and respond to wildfire.”

Protected in 2011, San Vicente Redwoods vast 8,532 acres include different plant communities, topographies, and different needs for recovery. Forester Nadia Hamey helped to prioritize the needs of the forest into different sections: Preservation - where the forest needs maintenance to stay healthy; Restoration - where the forest benefits from strategic thinning so trees can grow larger; and Working Forest - where the Old-Growth Recruitment helps redwoods gain much needed old-growth characteristics more quickly.

Any trees that are strategically cut for the forest’s health further benefit the forest by being utilized for habitat on the forest floor or in creeks, processed into biomass to return nutrients to the soil without the risk of becoming fuel for fire, or sold as lumber and reinvested into further work to restore San Vicente Redwoods.

Experts Dig into the Controversy

Restoration forestry and relying on sustainable logging to help fund conservation of San Vicente Redwoods has been controversial and it remains complicated today, even for its advocates. That includes Hamey. Logging can be done well or poorly, just like many other resource management objectives. When done well, it provides a sustainable source of wood with little long-term impact to the forest ecosystem,” she said. “We can use the revenue from timber harvesting to help achieve other land management objectives, like weed control, road maintenance, fuel reduction, large woody debris installation, etc.”

Dan Sicular, a California environmental planning consultant with 35 years of experience, believes that selling the logs harvested through thinning can help to fund forest restoration work, though he knows this view is controversial. His view acknowledges the reality of the outsized role of the timber economy in the West today; California’s forest industry contributes $39 billion to the state’s economy. With logging companies owning some of the largest tracts of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains, “I see some conservation benefit from having an active logging industry,” Sicular argued, especially when the alternative is for the companies to subdivide the parcels and sell them off, fragmenting crucial habitats. Also, since the logging companies don’t want their investments to burn up, they have a strong incentive to manage their land to prevent and control wildfire.

video by Jordan Plotsky

Tim Hyland, an environmental scientist for California State Parks, argues that in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the problem today is that there are too many trees, since forest managers stopped using fire to thin their ranks, especially fire-sensitive species like the Douglas fir. “So much damage to these ecosystems has happened in the last 100 to 200 years that it’s very easy for people to feel like, ‘please don’t touch it and it'll be fine.’”

Hyland acknowledged that, left alone for hundreds of years, the forest might eventually recover its state prior to Euro-American settlement, with one large tree out-competing the others to create a forest of giant redwoods that are widely-spaced from one another. But in a warming, drying climate, the smaller trees now crowding the understory are more susceptible to catastrophic, high-severity fires that leave significant damage. “A whole bunch of little sticks burn a lot better than one great big stick,” he explained. And since California forest managers have kept fire largely at bay for over a century, “lighting a fire in them is like playing with matches in a dynamite factory,” he said. “The fuels have built up to a point where it's extremely challenging to introduce fire in a safe way.” In this scenario, mechanical thinning of the smaller trees—cutting them, in other words—is a necessary safety measure before conducting prescribed burns.

video by Jordan Plotsky

Even while acknowledging that some trees must be cut down, Hyland remains skeptical. Felling the trees and dragging them out of the forest kicks up dust, disturbs the environment, and risks introducing invasive plants through the heavy equipment. “My primary problem with it is that humans are at the helm,” he said, “and if the decisions are influenced by financial considerations, then they're not primarily influenced by what the land needs.”

At San Vicente Redwoods, restoration forestry has been practiced with a lot of humility, evaluation, and a willingness to adjust if tactics aren’t working. Results of work done before the CZU Fire are incredibly encouraging and provide insight into where and how restoration forestry can help the forest recover from that fire and help protect it and nearby communities for the next fire.

Results for Redwoods

In February 2020–just a few months before thousands of lightning strikes ignited the CZU Fire in August 2020, crucial restoration forestry work took place that both helped protect the forest and nearby communities. Thirty acres in San Vicente Redwoods’ Restoration Reserve forest section were treated using prescribed and cultural burns, and more than 15 miles of shaded fuel breaks were created. The areas with prescribed burns appear to have weathered the blaze much better than the adjacent untreated parts of the forest. And the shaded fuel break helped fire crews stop the fire from spreading to a nearby community.

A photo of blackened tree trunks with healthy green canopies intact above was treated with a shaded fuel break prior to the CZU Fire and burned less severely. A photo of mostly standing dead trees with only a handful of trees bearing green regrowth and much more dense understory growth along the ground was not treated with a shaded fuel break prior to the CZU Fire and burned more severely. Photos taken in 2023 by Ian Bornarth.

“We’re seeing results that indicate restoration forestry are these redwood forests' best chance of recovering from past damage and both surviving and fighting climate change,” said Barth. Restoration Forestry is a key component to Sempervirens Fund’s Climate Action Plan, a plan to accelerate the protection and resilience of redwoods by 2030.

Redwood Recovery

In Real Time

You can witness redwood fire recovery first hand and catch a glimpse of a future old-growth redwood from the public trails at San Vicente Redwoods. Thank you for helping to protect and restore its vast forests, waterways, and habitats today, for tomorrow!

Visit San Vicente Redwoods

More to Explore

Read more about restoration forestry in Why Cut Redwoods by Audrea Lim and Bay Nature magazine
See the post-fire challenges at San Vicente Redwoods with Fuel for Fire
Dig into post-fire research and Indigenous Stewardship at San Vicente Redwoods
Watch the Awakening of the Silent Forest in the years after the CZU Fire

The post Growing Old-Growth appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Sempervirens in Elementis

WEBDOGS — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:27:56 +0000

Sempervirens in Elementis

New Art from Jane Kim

In her new art series, Sempervirens in Elementis—Latin for ever living in the elements, Sempervirens Fund’s Forest Fellow Jane Kim explores the relationship between redwoods and the elements: water, fire, earth, and air.

Donate Now

Read about Forest Fellowship

Artwork by Jane Kim

Exploring the Angles and Elements of Redwoods

As Sempervirens Fund’s inaugural Forest Fellow, Jane Kim has spent the last year studying the wonders of redwood trees. In order to begin to understand the redwood, the artist learned, they can not be studied in isolation. The trees are both a product of their ecosystem and a force that transforms it.

"I knew that I wanted to explore redwoods from many angles and the elements felt like a way to tell a whole story, " said Kim. "One of the most exciting things about the Forest Fellowship is the access and support I have to research, field trips, and the scientific community."

In her series Sempervirens in Elementis, debuting February 15 at the Andra Norris Gallery in Burlingame, the artist explores the relationship between redwoods and the elements: water, fire, earth, and air. Each work tells stories of the redwoods’ adaptations to the elements and the benefits they offer.

At the center of each piece can be found an ink print of a redwood round cut from a 500-year-old tree collected in the aftermath of the 2020 CZU Fire at the Gateway to Big Basin bordering Big Basin Redwoods State Park. For Kim, the round communicates the scars of human desire. “I am exploring the ways desire manifests itself in our actions and artifacts,” Jane Kim. “Our human relationship with redwoods, especially in the past few centuries, has been both exploitative and curious–but redwoods' relationship with the elements endures.”

The surrounding imagery of each piece in the series represents the natural intelligence of a redwood forest as the center of a complex, interconnected network of species and systems.

Sneak a Peek at Elementis in Sempervirens

WATER

In WATER, Kim submerges the round in a deep pool of a brimming creek to explore the mutualism of Coho salmon and redwood trees. (Concept rendering. Work in progress.)

FIRE

In FIRE, Kim reveals old secrets, from fire-following flora and wildlife, to new habitats for secondary nesters among redwoods’s hollows.

EARTH

In EARTH, Kim examines the secrets that sustain redwoods underground, and their relationship with fungi and earthen critters.

AIR

In AIR, Kim centers on redwoods’ relationship with fog–a critical source of water for the giants–and the wildlife that rely on both.

You can enjoy Jane's full works of art at the Sempervirens in Elementis exhibit at the Andra Norris Gallery from February 15 - March 14. Learn more.

More to Explore

Watch Jane Kim’s process of learning and creating in Curiosity Stories
See more of Jane Kim’s illustrations in the Redwoods and Climate Series
Learn more about redwoods and the elements Under the Redwoods

The post Sempervirens in Elementis appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Recording Redwoods: Sounds of the Forest

WEBDOGS — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 13:00:59 +0000

Recording Redwoods

Sounds of the Forest

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Field recordist, Thomas Rex Beverly, found an answer to the age-old philosophical question, and so much more, on his quest to capture the sounds of the redwood forest. Among the protected old-growth redwoods of the “Valley of the Giants” at Camp Jones Gulch, Thomas records the subtle sounds of nearly silent spaces. Follow his Curiosity Stories quest to hear the redwood forest as you never have before.

Donate Now

Watch the Episode

photo by Thomas Rex Beverly

Thomas Rex Beverly has dangled from ropes in deep caves and off Patagonian glaciers to masterfully record the sounds of nature which help bring stories like CODA, The Last of Us, and Frozen II to life. This time, he hopes to dangle overnight from an old-growth redwood in the “Valley of the Giants” at Camp Jones Gulch, which you protected in 2022. Excited to uncover sounds of nature nearly imperceptible to the human ear alone, he cups his ears listening intently in the old-growth grove to gauge how long sounds travel beneath the ancient trees. After carefully listening to a subtle gust of wind blow through the grove, he explains the sound of the wind is formed by the length of the tree’s needles; their distance from the ground mellows the sound.

https://sempervirens.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Recording-Redwoods-Microphone-Pan-to-Canopy-by-Thomas-Rex-Beverly_1.mp4

As he looks for ideal spaces to place his microphones attuned to different levels of noise on the forest floor, he hopes to hear water, rain, wind, birds, and the hollows of the redwoods as they can only be heard by one of the most sensitive microphones in the world. But recording at Camp Jones Gulch has different challenges than some of Thomas’ more remote locations. Just miles away from the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, airplanes occasionally make their way above the canopy and enthusiastic young YMCA campers below.

To capture as much of the forest’s subtle sounds as possible, Thomas camped at Camp Jones Gulch for a week. What he heard were astonishing sounds that set him on a magical microphone mystery.

Visit Sounds of the Forest for an immersive journey into this environment and hear the solitude of the forest come to life.

Join Thomas Rex Beverly on his Curiosity Stories quest to hear the redwood forest as you never have before.

Subscribe to Sempervirens Fund’s YouTube channel to follow Thomas' journey in the first season of Curiosity Stories.

More to Explore

Watch more Curiosity Stories about the wonders of redwoods
Subscribe on YouTube for episode 2 of Thomas’ Curiosity Story
Learn more about redwoods

The post Recording Redwoods: Sounds of the Forest appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Find That Lizard

WEBDOGS — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 12:00:17 +0000

Find That Lizard

Reptiles in the Redwoods

The redwood forests you protect support countless species in and below their canopies. But some of the forests’ inhabitants are such great masters of disguise, they’re hiding right beneath our eyes. We reached out to Dr. Earyn McGee, creator of #FindThatLizard and Coordinator of Conservation Engagement at the Los Angeles Zoo, to help us find reptiles and amphibians and to help her discover more about the habitats of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Meet Dr. McGee to learn about her redwood research below, then join her Under the Redwoods for more tips to #FindThatLizard.

Donate Now

photo by Ian Bornarth

Looking for Lizards

Are you interested in looking for lizards but don't know where to begin? Herpetologist Dr. Earyn McGee has lots of experience spotting reptiles and amphibians in their natural habitats where they blend in best to help them hide from predators and prey. But she's never been to the redwoods. So, she's sharing her process for researching new habitats and species as she learns about the reptiles of the redwoods. Meet Dr. McGee to learn more about her redwood research and then join her for her tips, tricks, and a special edition of #FindThatLizard Under the Redwoods.

Meet Dr. McGee

Find That Lizard

Learn about how to #FindThatLizard with the expert, Dr. Earyn McGee, the Coordinator of Conservation Engagement at the Los Angeles Zoo, Under the Redwoods on Tuesday, 10/29 from 1 to 2 pm Pacific.

More to Explore

Find that lizard with Dr. McGee Under the Redwoods
Learn more about the wildlife of the Santa Cruz mountains
Read about rare Santa Cruz sandhills habitat and its lizards

The post Find That Lizard appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Water and Wildfire Protection for Redwoods

Matt Shaffer — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 21:52:37 +0000

Investing in Water and Wildfire Protection for Redwoods and Communities

Across California our water, forests, and communties are at risk from soaring temperatures, flooding and droughts, extremes storms, and wildfire. And for far too long we have been responding to the latest crisis, rather than improving conditions to weather the next one. Fortunately, in 2024, voters can have an immediate—and lasting—impact on protecting water, forests, and communities.

At Sempervirens Fund we are proud to support Prop 4, a $10 billion statewide climate bond, and Measure Q, which would establish the Santa Cruz County Safe Drinking Water, Clean Beaches, Wildfire Risk Reduction, & Wildlife Protection Act. Learn more below and take action.

Prop 4: Protect California's Future

California faces devastating wildfires, vulnerable drinking water supplies, extreme summer heat, and other major threats from a changing climate. Prop 4 tackles our most urgent climate needs today, before the damage becomes too costly and unmanageable. Vote Yes on Prop 4 to protect California and what makes our state so special.

Take Action

Yes on Q! Water and Wildfire Protection

Measure Q: The “Water & Wildfire Protection Act” (for short) is a ballot initiative sponsored by local environmental and community organizations to protect our natural and working lands by investing in Santa Cruz County’s lands and waters to build resilience to wildfires and other natural disasters in Santa Cruz County. It focuses on protecting our water quality, ocean, beaches, wildfire risk reduction, forest preservation, wildlife habitat enhancement, and the improvement of parks and natural areas.

Take Action

More to Explore

See all of the actions you can take for redwoods and the Earth in our Action Center
Read about the impacts of climate on redwoods in our Redwoods and Climate series
Learn about our goals for redwoods in crisis in our Climate Action Plan for Redwoods

The post Water and Wildfire Protection for Redwoods appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

The Opposite of Redwoods

WEBDOGS — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:00:47 +0000

SemperVoices:
Jane Kim, Forest Fellow

The Opposite of Redwoods

Redwoods drew artist Jane Kim to California more than 20 years ago and today she returns the favor, drawing redwoods to help people better connect with and draw inspiration from the natural world around us. The more she learns about redwoods as Sempervirens Fund's first Forest Fellow, the more she contemplates people as redwoods' exact opposite. Get a sneak peek at her new art and how she hopes celebrating redwood adaptations can inspire us to adapt to our ecosystem rather than change it.

Donate Now

Watch Jane Under the Redwoods

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

We’re delighted you have joined us as Sempervirens Fund’s first Forest Fellow! What does being a Forest Fellow mean to you?

"It’s an incredible honor. Redwoods are one of the wonders that first pulled me to California more than 20 years ago. I still feel this awe that drew me to Northern California. To be the first Sempervirens Fund Forest Fellow brings a smile to my face."

What do you hope to accomplish as a Forest Fellow?

"I hope to learn as much as I can about coast redwoods forests and create art that deepens our relationship with these spectacular ecosystems."

Jane Kim, fine artist and Sempervirens Fund's first Forest Fellow, courtesy of Ink Dwell Studios

What draws you to redwoods and the habitats and species of the Santa Cruz Mountains region?

"I’ve loved trees my whole life, and coast redwoods are some of the most extraordinary. From their lifespan and magnitude to all their invisible secrets of survival, coast redwoods hold eons of wisdom. The Santa Cruz Mountains are especially interesting because of their more pronounced climate zones relative to the northern range. For example, in the southern range, redwoods are having to adapt to higher temperatures and less fog. We can observe adaptations of redwoods between varying climates to understand their survival limits."

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

Did the CZU Fire change how you see, connect with, or depict redwoods or other species in the Santa Cruz mountain region?

"Of course! I knew that redwoods are resilient, but I had no idea that there were so many adaptations invisible to the naked eye like the tree’s amazing ability to store arbuscular-mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), in unique structures in their roots referred to as “rhizonodes.” This is just one example! So many others that I’m learning along the way. It shook my own understanding of dying, dormancy, regeneration, and cycles."

Watch a resilient redwood stump surprise Jane in episode 2 of Curiosity Stories.

On the 4th anniversary of the CZU Fire, you shared that redwood trees might be our exact opposite in nature. Could you tell us more about this idea?

"I think of redwoods as our opposite in their approach to living. They play the long game! Our lifespan averages ~80 years and I do believe that limits our ability to truly be long-term planners.

A redwood’s life can span more than one thousand years. And the way the redwood is able to live this long is by adapting to its environment rather than controlling the environment. The fog loving trees can even produce a bit of its own fog! Terpenes, the compound that give redwood its odor, when released into the air, they form tiny particles that can become the condensation nuclei, or seed, for fog.

People on the other hand, want to control their environment to fit the monoculture life that we have created. Trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains look different than the ones in Humboldt because they have adapted to different places. Let’s look at Arizona or even Southern California. No matter the environment, humans force a certain way of living. In these drier climates, if we were like redwoods, we’d create homes and infrastructure in an adaptive manner like using composting toilets instead of ones that use water. Homes could be subterranean so less energy would be used for air conditioning. But humans define a standard of living and wildly alter the environment to meet the standard. It’s all backwards!"

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

How are you exploring humans’ relationship with the elements in your current series?

"I am printing a redwood cookie that was collected at the Gateway to Big Basin. This is reminiscent of logging and our initial relationship to redwoods as a lumber source."

You recently shared your piece FIRE which layers detailed painted woodpeckers atop a black and white print of tree rings seemingly lit from fire within its cracks. What can you tell us about the inspiration behind this piece and the woodpecker’s role?

"There will be four pieces in this upcoming series. Each one will focus on our classical elements—fire, water, earth, air—and how redwood forests are interconnected. Pileated woodpeckers benefit from burned snags and cavities in redwood forests. Their nests are then used by several smaller birds and animals. Ultimately, FIRE will depict several stories about the impacts of fire on a redwood tree and forest."

Can you share your process to create art like this?

"My practice as an artist starts with a story and then grows with research. I knew that I wanted to explore redwoods from many angles and the elements felt like a way to tell a whole story. What makes their way into the final artwork really depends on the journey research takes me. One of the most exciting things about the Forest Fellowship is the access and support I have to research, field trips, and scientific community. Without the support and collaboration of Sempervirens Fund, I couldn’t have collected the massive redwood rounds from the stump at Jones Gulch YMCA camp."

Watch Jane cut a “cookie” round from a redwood stump in episode 1 of Curiosity Stories.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by INK DWELL (@inkdwell)

What do you hope your work in this series will inspire?

"At the end of the day, reality is simply shaped by collective perspective. Art has, since the dawn of mankind, shaped our perspective. I hope that by celebrating redwood adaptations, we may be inspired to adopt some of those into our own decisions around human infrastructure and the role we play within the ecosystem rather than dominating and changing it."

Want a behind the scenes peek at the redwood art Jane Kim has been working on at Ink Dwell Studios? Watch Jane Kim take nature from Forest to Canvas Under the Redwoods.

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

More to Explore

Watch Jane embark on her journey to learn more about redwoods in Curiosity Stories
See Jane’s work illustrate complex concepts in our Redwoods and Climate series
Learn how Jane transforms science into art in Illustrating Nature Under the Redwoods

The post The Opposite of Redwoods appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Fall and Winter Hikes

WEBDOGS — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 07:00:08 +0000

Santa Cruz Mountains

Fall and Winter Hikes

As thermometers and leaves drop, crisp air and leaves beckon us outside to appreciate a different side of the Santa Cruz mountains’ wild beauty - colorful leaves, sparkling creeks, migrating birds, curious mushrooms, and of course banana slugs and elephant seals. Time in the woods is not only a treat for your eyes, the refreshing air has health boosting phytoncides that can improve our physical and mental wellbeing and help us feel connected with nature and each other.

If you're looking for trails and places to enjoy the change of seasons this fall and winter, you’re in luck! Our staff are revealing their favorite places to go in the Santa Cruz mountains now. Happy trails to you and please recreate responsibly!

Visit the Santa Cruz Mountains

North

Butano State Park

Trails: Six Bridges Trail
Why We Love It: A classic visit to redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains’ hidden gem where forests, streams, birdsong, and occasional fog await.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: Check out Dr. Hackenmiller's custom wellness tips for Six Bridges Trail to get the most health and mood boost.
More Info: Visit the Six Bridges Trail page and scroll down for trail, park, and health info.

photo by Orenda Randuch

El Corte de Madera Creek Preserve

Trails: Lawrence Creek Trail
Why We Love It: Enjoy the peace and quiet of the forest and the sound of water in the creek on this less travelled trail in the park.
Difficulty: Moderate/Difficult
Staff Note: This trail is open to bikes.
More Info: Visit the El Corte de Madera Creek Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by Andrew Sorensen

Huddart Park

Trails: Crystal Springs Trail
Why We Love It: This forested trail has a mix of redwoods and fall-color-changing oaks and madrones between the top and bottom of the park making it a “choose your own adventure” of difficulty—moderate going down from the Zwierlein Trailhead or difficult going up from Richard’s Road Trail at Skyline Boulevard.
Staff Note: Crystal Springs Trail is 4 miles one way or can be made into a 5-mile loop with Dean Trail from Zwierlein.
Difficulty: Moderate/Difficult
More Info: Visit Huddart Park’s Crystal Springs Trail page for more info or to download the map.

photo by PEHart

Purisima Creek Redwoods Preserve

Trails: Purisma Creek Trail
Why We Love It: This out and back hike traverses the park - so you can start from either side - through lush redwoods and creek where banana slugs are often seen around wetter weather.
Difficulty: Difficult
More Info: Visit the Purisma Creek Redwoods Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by Sarah Dinu

Windy Hill Preserve

Trails: Lost Trail
Why We Love It: This gently sloping out and back trail has nice views and the forested sections offer protection in fall and winter weather.
Difficulty: Easy/Moderate
Staff Note: This trail is also open to equestrians seasonally.
More Info: Visit the Windy Hill Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by Don Owens

Windy Hill Preserve

Trails: Lost Trail, Hamms Gulch, Eagle Trail, Razorback Ridge, Lost Trail
Why We Love It: This loop, with both open air and forested sections, is great for birdwatching and Eagle Trail is especially nice after rains where it follows Corte de Madera Creek.
Difficulty: Moderate/Difficult
Staff Note: All trails but Eagle Creek are also open to equestrians seasonally.
More Info: Visit the Windy Hill Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by Don Owens

West

Año Nuevo State Park

Trails: Atkinson Bluff Trail
Why We love It: While other parts of the park are crowded for elephant seal viewing, you can enjoy a seaside-to-sand dunes journey on this less crowded ocean-to-ridgeline treasure.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: You can increase your health benefits on this mix of easy looping seaside trails and more challenging adventures along cliffs and into dunes with Dr. Hackenmiller's customized Trails RX tips.
More Info: Visit Atkinson Bluff Trail and scroll down for trail, park, and health info.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Año Nuevo Coast Natural Preserve

Trails: Año Nuevo Point
Why We love It: Fall and winter is an exciting time to see one of the world’s largest populations of northern elephant seals.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: From September through November you can see the fall juvenile haul out, and from mid-December through March you can view breeding season.
More Info: Visit Año Nuevo State Park’s Seal Viewing Season page to learn more about the seals and the Elephant Seals Guided Walk page to see the schedule and make your reservation.

Big Basin Redwoods State Park

Trails: Redwood Loop Trail
Why We love It: Glimpse a special moment in time as an ancient grove in the heart of California's oldest state park rebounds from wildfire. What will the rains and extra sunlight and nutrients bring to the forest floor?
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: You can maximize your health and wellness benefits on this trail with Dr. Hackenmiller's Trails Rx tips
More Info: Visit Redwood Loop Trail and scroll down for trail, park, and health info.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Wilder Ranch State Park

Trails: Old Cove Landing Trail, Ohlone Bluff Trail
Why We Love It: Great open views along the bluffs on a wide path for easier sharing and social distancing that won’t get “rained out” so it can be visited in any weather.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: It can be cold and windy right on the coast.
More Info: Visit the Wilder Ranch State Park Hiking page and scroll down to the Easy Hike to find Old Cove Landing Trail to Ohlone Bluff Trail.

photo by keppet

East

Castle Rock State Park

Trails: Castle Rock Falls
Why We Love It: Explore forests, sandstones, and the magic of the wetter season in our temperate rainforest by visiting one of the easiest to reach waterfalls in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: See Dr. Hackenmiller's Trails Rx tips for Castle Rock Falls to get the most out of your time on the trail.
More Info: Visit the Castle Rock Falls and scroll down for trail, park, and health info.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Castle Rock State Park

Trails: Skyline/Loghry Woods/Saratoga Gap Loop
Why We Love It: The trails near Skyline Boulevard have many opportunities to see oaks and maples changing colors.
Difficulty: Moderate
More Info: Visit the Castle Rock State Park Hiking page and scroll down to the Moderate section to find the Skyline/Loghry Woods/Saratoga Gap Loop.

Long Ridge Open Space Preserve

Trails: Hickory Oaks, Long Ridge Road, and Peters Creek Trail
Why We Love It: This hike has both open air and forests.
Difficulty: Moderate
More Info: Visit the Long Ridge Open Space Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by Ross Finlayson

Monte Bello Preserve

Trails: Canyon, Bella Vista, Old Ranch, Indian Creek and Monte Bello Road
Why We Love It: This out and back hike is rewarded with great views from Black Mountain on a clear day.
Difficulty: Moderate
More Info: Visit the Monte Bello Preserve page and scroll down to download a trail map or a trail app.

photo by austlee

South

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Trails: Redwood Grove Loop Trail
Why We Love It: Immerse yourself in a living exhibit of ancient redwoods—that inspired the founding of Sempervirens Fund and the redwood conservation movement—on one of the most accessible trails in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: You can connect more deeply with these forests, and your health and wellness goals, with Dr. Hackenmiller's Redwood Grove Loop Trails Rx tips.
More Info: Visit the Redwood Grove Loop Trail and scroll down for trail, park, and health info.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Trails: Meadow-River Loop
Why We Love It: An easy to find, accessible park to experience deciduous trees including sycamores and box elders changing colors and beautiful redwoods.
Difficulty: Easy
Staff Note: Parking in undesignated areas is not recommended and can lead to car damage.
More Info: Visit the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park Hiking page and scroll down to the Easy section to find the Meadow-River Loop.

photo by Jim Bahn

The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park

Trails: Maple Falls
Why We Love It: This trail has lovely forest views and a waterfall.
Difficulty: Moderate
Staff Note: Cool, covered trails; but narrow. Limited parking and busy on weekends.
More Info: Visit The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park Hiking page and scroll down to the Moderate section to find Maple Falls. Please note: The last section of the Bridge Creek Trail to Maple Falls is currently closed to all users until further notice due to storm damage.

photo by Cody Badger

More to Explore

Still looking for the right nature getaway for you? Here are some more experiences that highlight the unique beauty and resilience of the Santa Cruz mountains - where the redwoods meet the sea.

Suggestions to Hike, Bike, and Ride the Santa Cruz mountains
Everlasting Vistas - our curated AllTrails list of hikes with great views
Wildflowers After Wildfire - hikes where you may see rare and fire adaptive plants
Check out our Visit page for featured hikes by park

The post Fall and Winter Hikes appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Protect Año Nuevo Vista

WEBDOGS — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:00:53 +0000

Año Nuevo Vista

Protecting and Connecting Forests to the Sea

From glittering white ridges to the glittering Pacific Ocean, Año Nuevo Vista’s breathtaking views boast much of what makes the Santa Cruz mountains special. Its shady redwood forest and sunny chaparral interspersed with rare white sands known as “the chalks” support endangered plants and animals. Together, we are protecting Año Nuevo Vista’s forest and watershed from development and helping connect the largest protected lands and wildlife habitat.

Donate Now

Visit Año Nuevo State Park

photo by Orenda Randuch

Habitats

Just three miles from the coast, Año Nuevo Vista’s 41 acres include a mosaic of habitat types from redwood forest to quickly disappearing maritime chaparral. Atop its ridges are the chalks: a white sandy soil more specifically categorized as “Maymen rock outcrop complex” or “rough broken land.” Here, resilient fire-adapted chaparral species like knobcone pines, chinquapin, scrub oaks, and bush poppies thrive. Despite its unstable, low nutrient soil, the chalks support several rare plants that can’t be found anywhere else. The chalks are the only known habitat for the extremely rare and critically-imperiled Ohlone manzanita and Schreiber's manzanita and home to one of only five stands of Monterey pine trees in the world. Below the chalks’ quick-draining soils, healthy second-growth redwood forest and coast live oaks sprout new growth recovering from the 2020 CZU Fire. Año Nuevo Vista’s diversity of habitat types supports many plants and wildlife within its borders and throughout the watershed.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Water

The headwaters of Old Woman’s Creek spring from Año Nuevo Vista. Running through the property, Old Woman’s Creek supplies water for thirsty forests and wildlife at Año Nuevo Vista and beyond. Old Woman’s Creek feeds into Gazos Creek, a critical habitat and watershed, as well as the Pacific Ocean.

Wildlife

Endangered marbled murrelets, coho salmon, and steelhead trout rely on the Gazos Creek watershed’s route from the ocean to reproduce in the redwood forest. Marbled murrelets nest among old-growth trees while coho and steelhead spawn in creeks amongst their roots. From the redwoods to the ridges, pumas are known to traverse their large ranges along the less populated chalks, leaving their scratches in the warm sand where western fence lizards and rattlesnakes can thrive.

photo by Orenda Randuch

photo by Ian Bornarth

Connections

Año Nuevo Vista is located within the largest remaining intact habitat patch in the Santa Cruz mountains. Nestled between Año Nuevo State Park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and Butano State Park, it’s just one parcel away from Big Basin to the east and shares a border with protected Skylark Ranch to the south. Año Nuevo Vista is key to connecting protected habitats for wildlife and protected park lands for people. Landscapes fragmented by human development impact the health of forests, watersheds, and wildlife. By protecting Año Nuevo Vista’s 41 acres, we can improve connectivity between 62,000 acres of protected land.

Stewardship

If protected with your support, we can steward Año Nuevo Vista to help restore it from human impacts and make it more resilient for increased wildfires and climate change threats. After the 2020 CZU Fire killed many trees and plants, Año Nuevo Vista’s fragile soils are eroding more quickly and washing into the crucial Gazos Creek watershed. By repairing roads, improving drainage and planting native plants, endangered plants and wildlife will benefit. Cameras will be installed to monitor wildlife’s use and habitat needs. Some areas burned severely in the fire and by removing standing dead trees, fast growing invasive plants, and creating a fire break in a key location, the speed and severity of fires can be decreased—better protecting the forest’s resilience and opportunities for firefighters to manage blazes. Together, we can protect Año Nuevo Vista and care for its woods, water, and wildlife.

photo by Ian Bornarth

More to Explore

See Año Nuevo Vista's chalk ridges from the Atkinson Bluff Trail with Trails Rx
Learn more about monitoring endangered marbled murrelets
Read more about protected land in the Gazos Creek watershed

The post Protect Año Nuevo Vista appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Healing Under Redwood Groves

WEBDOGS — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:44:15 +0000

Photo Essay

Healing Under Redwood Groves

by Verónica Silva-Miranda (she/her/hers/ella), a Latino Outdoors volunteer, who shares how she found healing in the forest in her photo essay.

For about three years now, my primary care physician has been trying to put me on high blood pressure medicine. I politely declined every time until last month; I woke up in the middle of the night from heart palpitations, I just laid in bed, focused on my breathing, and my mind started to drift off into a redwood grove. I’ve known for years that I struggled with high blood pressure, I would feel a pressure in my arm or my hands would start to throb or go numb. I learned to step away from what I was doing at that time and sit in a quiet space, close my eyes and think about what brings me peace; the redwood forest.

Donate Now

Visit Redwoods Trails Rx

photos by Verónica Silva-Miranda

There is a special bond I have created with redwood trees, they give me strength, put me at ease when I smell the fresh scent of new growth and stress instantly releases out of my body as I spend time amongst redwood groves. It’s one of the reasons I often visit redwood parks in California.

One of my favorite parks to visit is Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, located in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The redwood grove in the park has a beautiful accessible trail that is great for families with small children, elders, and people with mobility limitations. The trail has an interpretive walk and people can learn more about the amazing redwood trees and why they are so important to our environment. On this visit, I learned that redwood trees produce both male and female cones that can provide between 60 to 120 seeds which is incredible and a valuable source for preserving redwood tree growth. There is also a visitor center with tons of information on the park, redwood trees, and wildlife. Often there are activities for youth to participate in and information on park programs for families, school groups and visitors.

For me, having an accessible trail is important because of my limitations at the moment. My high blood pressure makes it hard for me to walk on trails with more than a 250 ft incline. I'm also learning to navigate an injury from a fall that has made my mobility limited, and I’m listening to my body when it needs to rest. I’m finding that slower movement has made me appreciate nature so much more. It’s easier to spot wildlife, observe moss up close, feel the soft bark on trees and hear the wind blow within the trees. It’s truly a remarkable feeling to spend some time in a redwood forest.

I’m so grateful for parks like Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park that offer trails like the Redwood Grove Loop. The grove provides a place of exploration, healing, learning and gives that WOW feeling. The loop will have you looking up at these beautiful towering trees that are so tall you cannot see the top from the ground floor.

I can honestly say that spending time underneath redwood trees has helped me adjust to the high blood pressure medication I was prescribed. I think the benefits of spending time amongst these ancient trees is beneficial to everyone, but especially important to those that have had to transition to taking medication, overcoming an injury or finding a balance for one's mental health. Visiting redwood parks definitely helps me gather my thoughts, have deep conversations with friends and family. When I’m alone sometimes I find a place to sit and write in my journal or jot down notes of things to accomplish or changes to be made.

At the end of my walk on this visit, I felt grateful for my family, close friendships, and the ability to visit this special park not too far from my home in San Francisco. As I learn to work with a new medication and continue healing from a back injury, I know places like Henry Cowell State Park can provide a place of healing and wellness not just for me but many other people as well.

The Redwood Grove Loop Trail

You can follow the Redwood Grove Loop trail at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park to find your own healing under the redwood groves. Trails Rx data can help you find the right trail for your health goals and professional wellness suggestions can help maximize the benefits of your next outing.

Redwood Grove Loop

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Immerse yourself in a living exhibit of ancient redwoods

0.9 miles

Easy

Loop

More to Explore

Explore the Redwood Grove Loop at Henry Cowell with Trails Rx data and suggestions for your health goals
Join Latino Outdoors for a conversation Under the Redwoods about the importance of connecting communities with nature
Read about how Forest Bathing can increase the wellness benefits of your next outing

The post Healing Under Redwood Groves appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

redwoods Archives - Sempervirens Fund

A Stewardship Story: Return to Nature

A Stewardship Story:

Return to Nature

Resetting Redwoods

A Fainter Footprint in the Forest

Removing Roads Less Traveled

Undamming Water and Wildlife

Rooting Out Invasive Species

Returning Redwoods to Nature and Resilience

More to Explore

Reimagining Big Basin

These Redwoods Are Too Big for Small Dreams

Reimagining Big Basin

A Framework for the Future

Want to get involved?

Caring for the Park’s Natural Resources

Looking Ahead

More to Explore

Why Cut Redwoods?

Why Cut

Redwoods?

A counterintuitive approach to conservation gains urgency in the face of drought and wildfires in California

BY AUDREA LIM

Sources

More to Explore

Growing Old-Growth

Growing Old-Growth

How You’re Restoring Redwood Forests Faster

The Benefits of Old-Growth

The Changing Forest

Restoration Forestry

Forestry Techniques

1. Old Growth Recruitment

2. Crown Release

3. Thinning

4. Hazard Tree Removal

5. Clear Cut Logging

6. Large Woody Debris

7. Fuel Breaks

The Living Laboratory

Experts Dig into the Controversy

Results for Redwoods

Redwood Recovery

More to Explore

Sempervirens in Elementis

Sempervirens in Elementis

New Art from Jane Kim

Exploring the Angles and Elements of Redwoods

Sneak a Peek at Elementis in Sempervirens

WATER

FIRE

EARTH

AIR

More to Explore

Recording Redwoods: Sounds of the Forest

Recording Redwoods

Sounds of the Forest

More to Explore

Find That Lizard

Find That Lizard

Reptiles in the Redwoods

Looking for Lizards

Meet Dr. McGee

Find That Lizard

More to Explore

Water and Wildfire Protection for Redwoods

Investing in Water and Wildfire Protection for Redwoods and Communities

Prop 4: Protect California's Future

Yes on Q! Water and Wildfire Protection

More to Explore

The Opposite of Redwoods

SemperVoices: Jane Kim, Forest Fellow

The Opposite of Redwoods

We’re delighted you have joined us as Sempervirens Fund’s first Forest Fellow! What does being a Forest Fellow mean to you?

What do you hope to accomplish as a Forest Fellow?

What draws you to redwoods and the habitats and species of the Santa Cruz Mountains region?

Did the CZU Fire change how you see, connect with, or depict redwoods or other species in the Santa Cruz mountain region?

On the 4th anniversary of the CZU Fire, you shared that redwood trees might be our exact opposite in nature. Could you tell us more about this idea?

How are you exploring humans’ relationship with the elements in your current series?

A counterintuitive approach to conservation gains urgency
in the face of drought and wildfires in California

SemperVoices:
Jane Kim, Forest Fellow