Editor’s note: The USDA Forest Service’s 10-year strategy to confront the wildfire crisis and improve forest resilience isn’t just about mitigating wildfire, it’s also about post fire restoration. Together we work with our partners to reforest areas impacted by wildfire.

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Greek Proverb

High up in Sierra Nevada country, everything moves just a bit slower. It’s one of the last places in California where the snow melts when spring arrives, and the mixed-conifer forest here grows at a pace measured in generations.

Fire keeps a different clock. What took eons to create is erased in just a few hours.

Somewhere in between those two extremes is the time society is most comfortable with; the 24-hour clock, the 365-day year. In that space, members of the Stanislaus National Forest’s Groveland Ranger District are planting upwards of 42,000 trees a day on the scarred landscape to repair the damage caused by the 2013 Rim Fire.

All of this falls into the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Rim Fire Reforestation project – an ambitious plan that seeks to turn back time, undoing much of the damage done.

“I’m under no illusions here,” says Ryan Murdoff, Groveland Ranger District Natural Resources Staff Officer. “I won’t get to see the full results of this project. I can only hope that my grandkids will be able to enjoy this space returned to its natural beauty.”

Murdoff is one of a team of biologists, soil scientists, foresters, silviculturists and other natural resource specialists who’ve spent the last several years bringing this reforestation project to the point where the teams are today: shovels in hand; satchels full of douglas fir, incense cedar and sugar and ponderosa pine; traipsing across the harsh landscape to plant at a rapid pace.

“I’ve been told that we have not planted this many trees at one time since the Complex Fire in 1987,” said Christina Wilkinson, Groveland District Culturalist.

Wilkinson’s personal experience with the Rim Fire motivated her to pursue a course of study in forestry, natural resources, and graphical information systems. In 2015, she joined the U.S. Forest Service as a temporary employee, and became permanent in February of this year. Wilkinson noted the shear volume of seedlings needed, coupled with the overwhelming need for seedlings across the western United States, proved a challenge for the team’s efforts.

“We are planting just over 1.3 million seedlings in some very rugged and unforgiving terrain. Because of the amount of fires that have recently happened in our state, other forests also need seedlings to plant. We have to rely on obtaining our trees from our Forest Service nursery in Placerville who are also stretched very thin,” she said.

The limited supply of seedlings was just one logistical hurdle overcome by the team. Since the Rim Fire burned such a wide swath, site selection became a complex endeavor.

“The Reforestation Interdisciplinary Team looked at all of the Rim Fire footprint to determine what areas we thought needed reforestation, and what the desired outcomes would be (we did this one at a time, unit-by-unit over the course of a couple weeks),” said Curtis Kvamme, Stanislaus National Forest Natural Resource Officer.

Kvamme said the team evaluates many factors – the current state of vegetation recovery, soil types, landscape positioning – when determining locations for reforestation. The team is also careful to consider any cultural or archeological sensitivities along with the possible existence of fragile flora.

“In the Rim Environmental Impact Study, we identified areas that had a long-term objective of supporting an ‘Old Forest Mosaic’ again,” said Kvamme. “It may not happen in our lifetime, but the hope is these areas can reach maturity and become high-quality wildlife habitat in the future.”

Crews will be in the field nearly every day with an expected planting completion of mid-April 2022. After that, we will stand back and envision the shade this team’s efforts will eventually provide as a new generation of trees grow at a tempered, steady pace.