Re: Experts Question Aspects of Prescribed Burning

Like perhaps the Big Meadow prescribed burn?

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Old Dude

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mrcondron
Like perhaps the Big Meadow prescribed burn?

That one certainly wasn't good. But I don't think that sort of thing is what they have in mind.

I was just being a WA. Maybe in the next 100 years or so we'll have enough data to figure how Mother Nature has done it for the past billion years.

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Old Dude

The native Americans used to set fire to the meadows in Yosemite Valley because they knew the value of fire and its benefits on the landscape.

My understanding is they did it because it kept the pine trees from encroaching into the meadows.
It also was good for the oak trees and helped increase their acorn harvest.

Old photos vs modern photos illustrate how much the meadows have changed as a result of no fire. As a result NPS is now starting some annual meadow burning.

In the Valley anyway, I'm pretty sure the pines are encroaching on many parts of the meadow because of the blasting of the moraine by Bridalveil because that ended the spring floods that kept the ground too wet for pines to sprout, and South Side Drive changed the flow of water keeping the area north of it even drier.

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Dave
In the Valley anyway, I'm pretty sure the pines are encroaching on many parts of the meadow because of the blasting of the moraine by Bridalveil because that ended the spring floods that kept the ground too wet for pines to sprout, and South Side Drive changed the flow of water keeping the area north of it even drier.

I'm not sure if Hetch Hetchy will be restored in my life-time (even if the dam started coming down today, the dismantling effort would take several years and the valley itself would take a good 25-30 years to regenerate to anything even vaguely resembling it's natural self) but I've been thinking that it would be an incredibly useful ecological experiment if they left HH pretty much untouched (no roads, no buildings in the valley...maybe some unpaved trails and the occasional bridge (built high enough so as not to impede any water flowing beneath it, even in flood times) and then continued working on the man-made "remediations" in YV. This would be an almost unparalleled opportunity to observe the long-term effects of man vs. nature in two almost identical ecosystems, located so close to each other that the only significant variable would be the effects of man.

I don't recall seeing this point made anywhere in the Restore Hetch Hetchy effort and I'm sure it's not enough to instantly get a critical mass of people on board for the restoration but I would think it would certainly be persuasive to at least some segment of the population.

--David

Restoring Lake Eleanor for a starter has been suggested to the Restore HH people. It would be waaay less expensive and would be an excellent argument for HH if Eleanor could be done successfully.

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Old Dude

More like a BIG disaster. I still will never understand why they did that "prescribed burn" that day. I thought it was a joke as people came in telling me they were seeing smoke 20 miles away and me calling it in to hear it was a set fire in August on a nasty hot day. Shameful. It will take many lifetimes to see that beautiful area back to what it was as it still tried to recover from the last one. The only benefit is amazing wildflowers in the spring.