Forests and grasslands are burning at an alarming rate in the West. When will they regrow?

RENO, Nev. — Annabelle Monti stands on a hillside above Markleeville, California, looking down at the town narrowly spared by the Tamarack Fire.  

In 2021, the lightning-induced fire started just a few miles away and smoldered for days before blowing up into a 68,000-acre inferno. Miraculously, the fire split just before it reached the town of nearly 200 people, burning around Markleeville on both sides before it continued east toward Highway 395 and Nevada.     

The fire left behind destruction and charred mountainsides. But a patch of green pine trees still circles Markleeville, and it’s on this green patch where Monti, a silviculturist with the U.S. Forest Service, looks down and shakes her head. The trees packed tight, needle to needle, there is no space between them.

To Monti, this dense green patch is emblematic of a problem plaguing the West.

“It’s just way too many trees,” she says.

Down the road, at the intersection of highways 88 and 89, Monti studies another hillside; this one is brown, charred and barren, not a hint of green. This hill burned during the 1987 Acorn Fire; three and a half decades later, before vegetation could get reestablished, it burned again in the Tamarack Fire. 

The hillside is so damaged, trees and shrubs are unlikely to repopulate the hill on their own any time soon.

What we know: Oak Fire threatening Yosemite grows to California's largest wildfire this year

This is the battle foresters and land management agencies are facing in forests throughout the West: The forests that are standing are unhealthy. The land that has burned, in many cases, is also unhealthy.

The Reno Gazette Journal, a part of the Paste BN Network, examined three fires over 35 years in the eastern Sierra — the Acorn Fire in 1987, the Washoe Drive Fire in 2012 and the Tamarack Fire in 2021 — to understand how land managers help forests and shrublands re-establish themselves after a fire, and what these new landscapes should look like.

Reseeding in the face of fires 

A particular intersection of the Acorn and Tamarack fires stands out to Monti. Near the Mad Dog Café at Woodfords Station is a confluence of unburned, semi-burned and charred land.

On the southwest side of the highway is the hillside that burned twice, in both the Acorn and Tamarack fires. Just west of that hillside are freshly blackened trees, with pockets of green interspersed where the Tamarack Fire didn’t burn quite as hot.

Across the canyon is a completely different view. North of Hwy. 88, in the Acorn burn scar, Jeffrey pines mix in with manzanita and ceanothus. For a hot, steep hillside with soil that feels like beach sand, the regrowth is impressive.

To the untrained eye, it’s hard to see that a fire even burned through the area. Some of the growth is natural; some was planted by land management agencies. In 100 years or so, if another fire doesn’t burn through, it will finish filling in, according to Monti. 

But it’s hard getting young trees to grow in the eastern Sierra. That reality has pushed land managers to try all sorts of tactics to reforest and revegetate burned areas. 

Last spring, Monti was involved in a project using drones to drop seeds in the Loyalton Fire burn scar. It’s a new effort to get young trees to sprout, since seedlings planted by hand often don’t grow well in the Eastern Sierra. Foresters hope to see about a 95 percent success rate. But they know that goal will be a tough one to reach.

In 2016, after the Hawken Fire in southwest Reno, the Forest Service replanted about 2,000 seedlings. Only about 100 survived.

“It’s a ton of money, a ton of effort, a ton of resources for really poor results,” Monti said.

'The fire is moving very fast': Firefighters make progress against California's largest wildfire near Yosemite National Park

Conservative estimates for reforesting are anywhere from $600 to $800 per acre. On the Tamarack Fire, the Nevada Division of Forestry chained and re-seeded several thousand acres. Chaining, where two pieces of heavy equipment drag a chain between them, downs charred-but-still-standing trees while churning up dirt to assist reseeding. The downed trees, in theory, will keep snow from blowing away in the winter, watering the young seeds.

But with the sheer number and size of recent wildfires, it’s impossible for land managers to catch up with efforts to restore lost habitat, Monti said. Reforestation efforts need to start within a year of a burn, but agencies are falling behind.

When will the forests look 'normal'?  

Residents and recreation enthusiasts impacted by fires often call agencies asking when their view will shift from brown hillsides to green forests.

“It’s not going to happen in their lifetime. It’s not going to happen in their kids’ lifetime. On the grand scheme of things for these forest ecosystems, this is just a drop in the bucket,” Monti said. “As a silviculturist, you’re thinking in decades for trees. Most people don’t think like that … Then you factor in conversations like climate change, and there’s a very good chance it will never look like it did before the fire.”

When the Acorn Fire burned, it touched an area that hadn’t burned since 1902. Residents in the area were used to viewing what, by 1987, had become an overgrown and too-dense forest. But the forests we see and idealize today aren’t what forests should look like, according to Monti.

Before European settlement of North America, this region had about 80 to 150 trees per acre, according to Monti. Now, forests hold anywhere from 400 to 500 trees.

Wildfires in US: 2 firefighting helicopter pilots die in Idaho; thousands ordered to evacuate near Yosemite

To picture a healthy forest, Nevada Division of Forestry Forester Anna Higgins suggests people envision an area with about 75 percent fewer trees.

“People see so much green and think it’s healthy, but it’s so out of balance,” she says. “People are used to the conditions they see now. They just don’t realize how unhealthy and flammable it is.”

Higgins doesn’t know if mountainsides and hillsides will ever look how we remember them. She hopes public perception of what a healthy forest is will change along with forest management practices. During a 2016 thinning project in the Galena area, nearby residents were upset at the removal of trees.

“Now, people are like, ‘You need to take out more,’” Higgins said. “People are coming to realize these forests are going to burn.”