MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – The Middletown Area Town Hall last week heard an update on the condition of trees at Middletown Trailside Park from a local forestry expert.

Greg Giusti, the University of California Cooperative Extension's director and advisor for forests and wildland ecology in Lake and Mendocino counties, spoke to the group at its Thursday meeting.

Trailside Park was the only county park significantly damaged by the Valley fire last year, according to county officials.

Giusti said he has spent the last six months looking at a lot of trees for people as a result of the fire. He agreed to evaluate conditions at the 107-acre park in response to concerns from the community and MATH.

He said he has called the Valley fire “an anomaly,” adding, “It truly is an incredibly unusual event that we've all lived through.”

The fire hit on a day with triple-digit temperatures, single-digit humidity and 40-mile-per-hour tornadic winds. “It was a perfect storm in terms of how you can optimize a wildland fire,” he said. “We've seen things on this fire that very few people have witnessed in terms of the devastation brought on the natural landscape.”

On the positive side, with concerns now focusing on the rains and the potential for flooding and erosion, Giusti said it is amazing how the mountain has held together despite rains.

He said the streams are running clear, the volcanic soils are sucking up water and aquifers are recharging.

“We as humans look at a fire as a catastrophic event,” said Giusti, explaining that, for many native California plants, fire is an act of rejuvenation, with some species unable to germinate without it.

“I can tell you, the forest will come back,” he said.

However, there are concerns. “The fire seems to have hit in a very bad cone year. I'm just not finding a lot of cones on ponderosa pines. That's the source of seeds,” he said, adding he hopes there are seeds in the soil that didn't burn up.

Other kinds of pines, like knobcone, require fire to open their cones, and Giusti said they were sitting there waiting for fire to germinate.

As a result, a tree type conversion may take place in the burn area, with the pine forest possibly giving way to an oak forest or something else, said Giusti, cautioning that the forest's regeneration will take many decades.

“The forest is going to take time, and time is on our side,” he said.

Giusti said that on March 4 he took a walk through Trailside Park, conducting a count of trees in a portion of the park by running transects of areas a tenth of an acre in size. He said he stayed away from the area of the park where trees have been cut.

He estimated 420 trees per acre – which he said was a high per-acre number – ranging in trunk size from 2 to 42 inches around, with a mix of 250 pine trees and 170 oak trees.

The reason there is such a large per-acre tree count is that, under periodic natural fires, the smaller trees would be cleaned out, Giusti said.

In a drought year, Giusti said all of those trees are like 400 straws in a glass. In a fire-resistant community, there needs to be control over the number of trees, which in this case is crowded and overstocked.

At the same time, a lot of the pine trees on Cobb Mountain were infected by western gall rust, a fungus that, along with insect damage, the drought and the fire, has dealt a serious blow to the area's trees, he said.

“That's what these trees out at that little park and the whole mountain have dealt with,” he said.

He said the pine mortality is high – possibly as high as 99 percent – while the oak trees burned in the fire are now sprouting. Giusti said that while the tops of the oaks may be dead, the sprouts have the adult tree's root mass from which to draw. He estimated 90 percent of the park's oaks are sprouting.

Giusti said he is concerned that there won't be a lot of regeneration of ponderosa pine, and that there might need to be an artificial planting in the future.

Out at the park he said there is a carpet of Indian warrior flowers, which he said are hemiparasitic and feed off the manzanita.

Giusti said he saw a lot of like shrubs like coyote bush coming back as well as small wildlife – chipmunks, ground squirrels and blue belly lizards – that were able to get underground and escape the fire, as well as larger wildlife like deer.

He also saw pockets of gray squirrels in the Summit Mountain area, and robins, towhees and acorn woodpeckers at the park.

If people want ponderosa pines to regrow in the area, he said they will need to get seedlings going, and he suggested getting local clubs to lead the replanting effort.

Giusti also talked about tree health. Even if pine trees have green needles, it doesn't necessarily mean they are alive, he explained.

In addition to signs of fire damage, he looks for disease and beetle damage when evaluating tree health. When those three issues are present, trees may survive but they won't thrive.

He also discussed the liability aspect when it comes to dead trees that are still standing in the park or near homes. Trees that are alive but not thriving pose a risk.

“The only thing a dead tree has left to do is fall over,” he said.

Giusti said dead trees have incredible ecological value, depending on where they are, and what or who might come in contact with the tree.

MATH Board Chair Fletcher Thornton asked if there is a possibility of taking out the park's dead trees and replanting fewer trees per acre in order to have a park that would better serve the community but still have a natural feeling.

Giusti said yes. “What a fire does, it sets the plant community on a new pathway. So if you let nature take its course, it will.”

He added, “We always have the opportunity to help that plant community to move on a pathway of our choosing,” suggesting thinning trees to help pines grows better in the required full-sun conditions.

He also explained the difficulty of finding a home for all of the burned and damaged trees. Giusti explained that there are no pine mills on the North Coast, just redwood mills. The nearest pine mills on the other side of the Sacramento Valley, and they are taking burned trees from the Sierras and beetle-killed trees from Southern California.

“There's just a glut right now,” he said.

Giusti said there will be the skeletons of dead trees in the forest for decades, and eventually they'll just fall over.

While he said he is not seeing a lot of ponderosa pine cones, he's seeing cones from knobcone and Douglas fir.

Even if they began replanting ponderosa pine seedlings right away, it would take 20 years for them to get only a little taller than the ceiling of the meeting room, he said. It's going to take time for to regrow the forest. In the meantime, he suggested the community needs to come up with a plan for the park.

MATH Board Secretary Margaret Greenley suggested, “It's basically a blank slate.”

Giusti replied it's not for the oaks and shrubby species, but it is a blank slate for conifers.

He said he plans to go out and take another look after the rains pass.

Also on Thursday, Interim Deputy Public Services Director Kati Galvani discussed repairs at the park, including re-fencing it.

She said the county definitely wants to reforest the park, which will be expensive to do. They're looking at planting ponderosa pines and want to speak to Giusti more about it.

They're also looking at redefining trails and have 32 workers coming from the California Human Development Department to help with that work, she said.

Other improvements include new doggies waste stations, kiosks and trail markers. “We're limited on what we can do,” she said, explaining that the park was acquired with grant funds for preservation, which limits development.

At the meeting, Supervisor Rob Brown also briefly discussed a plan the Board of Supervisors will discuss at its Tuesday meeting to locate a large dormitory at the park for volunteer work crews coming from around the United States and Canada to help Hope City with rebuilding homes on Cobb.

The building eventually will be turned back over the county, which could use it for community groups and events, he said.

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