There is a bumper crop of cones on our known blister rust resistant sugar pines around Lake Tahoe this year! With the critical help of arborist Ben Cavalier and our own Edric Alvarez, we have been busy climbing these “seed trees” to collect as many of their precious cones as possible for our restoration work. We are on track to collect about 100 bushel bags of seed containing roughly 200,000 seeds this season!

Many of us may not be able to identify a Sugar Pine, but the cones can’t be missed. They sometimes grow to more than 12 inches long.

It is the pinecones which may one day help the magnificent species return in full to the Tahoe Basin.

Watering baby seedlings through the hot summer months is enormously beneficial for their survival. We are seeing up to 50% greater survival on watered sites, which is terrific! We are SUPER grateful to all of our fantastic volunteers that have joined our watering events this summer on North and South Shores.

This feature on how Michael Taylor and Steve Sillett’s team discovered the second and third tallest giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park last summer – only for the KNP Complex Fire to rip through the area just months later – is hauntingly appropriate as the Washburn Fire burns around Yosemite National Park’s Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

Tahoe Quarterly Feature on Michael Taylor and the Sugar Pine Foundation by Matt Jones

California is home to some of the biggest trees in the world. Redwoods, Douglas firs and Sitka spruces that tower over the lush forests of the north coast. Giant sequoias of incomprehensible girth scattered across disparate groves of the Sierra Nevada. Stately sugar pines stretching skyward from the shores of Lake Tahoe, their massive cones dangling from disheveled branches.

OUR NEW PROGRAM ASSISTANT & LEAD WATER WARRIOR

We are thrilled to have Lauren Benefield on our team this summer - and (hopefully) beyond! She immediately applied to our summer part-time job opportunity and, when we met her, we knew that she'd be the perfect person to lead our summer Watering Evenings and offer general operational and administrative support.