I first walked with the sequoias in Giant Sequoia National Monument in 2019 and in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in 2020. I never imagined that so many of the sequoias that I met would perish just a year later. It wasn’t until after my visit to Sequoia and Kings Canyon in 2020 that I learned that the smoky air wasn’t only due to the redwoods burning further north but that what became the SQF/Castle fire was already burning to the south. Gradually the many small lightening fires merged into one huge conflagration that raced through the forest, reaching the crowns of the sequoia like never before, scorching 174, 178 acres and twenty-two sequoia groves. A year later the KNP complex and Windy fires tore through the national parks. Two years and 13-19 percent of all living sequoias were destroyed.
REDWOOD CANYON
The Redwood Canyon Grove was the largest grove of living sequoias. In many places the KNP fire of 2021 didn’t burn up to the crown and the trees survived, but in an area known as the Sugar Bowl once filled with sequoias, the fire was merciless. I had promised the NPS before and after photographs, but it was impossible.
Oh trees, how can we possibly honor your loss? What stories need to be told from these shards of memory?
The sunlight played with the trees, the horizontal black lines of shadow echoing the vertical. Lupines, nitrogen fixers with brilliant purple flowers began the work of healing. I sat heartbroken. Eventually I began to sing. What else was there to do but to sing to the trees, to sing of love and sadness, to offer a melody of compassion and healing?
40"x59" 2020
40"x54" 2020
40"x50" 2020
42"x50" 2022
68" x 40" 2022
40"x57" 2022
MCINTYRE GROVE
Mouse over images for larger view
Bear Creek Trail before and after fire (this trail leads to McIntyre Grove)
52" x 40" or larger shot 2021, all created 2022
48"x40" or larger 2021
40"x40" 2021
Installation at Hyde Gallery, Grossmont College
Sequoia Seedlings Freeman Creek 2023 60"x40"
Sequoia Seedlings Freeman Creek 2023 48"x36"
After Salvage Logging and Replanting, Alder Grove 2023 68"x40"
STUMP MEADOW- CONVERSE BASIN GROVE
Converse Basin Grove, once the largest sequoia grove in the world, was bought by Charles Porter Converse in 1868 and logged over a period of fourteen years until the mill burned down in 1905. Sequoias were not the lumberjack’s treasure trove, but shattered when felled, only good for grape stakes and shingles. Nonetheless almost every sequoia was cut down. One hundred and fifty years later the sequoia stumps remain, testimony to the feats and madness of the early settlers.
40" x 59" 2022 All created 2023.
40"x60" 2022
PORTALS
As fires and fevers rage, the heat and flames can offer cleansing--an invitation to perceive of the ashes as a portal to envision life anew. The Converse Forest in the Sierra Nevada mountains was once home to the largest grove of sequoias in the world. The Boole tree, over 2000 years old and the sixth largest in the world, was the only large sequoia left standing. It lives among the stumps of its fellows in a forest ravaged by bark beetles and fire. Can we step into the portals offered by the sequoia’s many cavities hollowed by fire, to imagine new ways of being and doing? Below are two images from an eventual series of many.
BIG BASIN
Redwood trees have proven to have an amazing ability to regenerate after fire. Although the fire in 2020 burned to the crowns of many of the redwoods, 95% of the trees survived.
Photo 40” x 46” 2022
