Saw a bunny … chipmonks; woken up by not only chirping but shrieking birds… AND warned of a bear sighting but never really got to see the bear. There are still pines and cedar trees but as a second growth forest, the type of trees now growing are different from those trees from centuries ago. Man had logged the ancient forest and now we have … this second forest.
“During the Comstock mining era in the 1800s, people clear-cut much of the Lake Tahoe Basin’s forestland to provide wood for settlements and mining operations. Among the trees cut were a majority of the old growth stands in the Basin, many as old as 300-400 years. The removal of so many trees in a short period of time resulted in the re-growth of forests into dense, even-aged stands. Subsequently, fire suppression, intended to protect development in the Basin and throughout the Sierra Nevada, further increased forest density and compromised natural forest processes. Today, forests at Lake Tahoe are less structurally-diverse, less resilient to stress, more prone to catastrophic fire, and support a more narrow range of plant and wildlife species than forests of the past.“
– exerpt from California Tahoe Conservancy’s
Forest Improvement Site, 2020
