Gnarled and ethereal, the trees of Tomales Bay State Park have long held a treasured place in the psyche of the Point Reyes peninsula. But they’re diseased, dying and dangerous. After more than a century of fire exclusion, insects and repeated drought, the old trees are failing, and no young trees are growing up to replace them.
To reduce risk and restore the resiliency of the forest, California State Parks has unveiled a draft project description and treatment guidelines for a plan to cut, burn and clear sections of the 2,400-acre park. Under the proposal, different parcels of the park will receive different treatments, creating a complex mosaic of approaches.
A virtual community meeting about the project will be held in December. The project documents are open for public comment, with a six-week public review period of a corresponding public works plan anticipated in June.
“Improving the forest health, helping these forests reproduce and persist, helps to preserve the whole system, with the wildlife and scenery that people love about the park,” said Cyndy Shafer, the natural resource program manager for the Bay Area district of California State Parks, which spent three years preparing to launch the project.
The project description outlines four main strategies: prescribed burning, mechanical thinning, manual thinning and herbicides. It doesn’t specify where each approach will be used. Rather, it maps the park’s different habitat units, based on their distinct ecologies. Treatments will be tailored to these units, with an eye toward expanding the Bishop pine population into landscapes now dominated by hardwoods.
The project will be done in phases and could take years, Ms. Shafer said. Treatment areas will be prioritized in consultation with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Tribal representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Work will take place on both sides of Tomales Bay, not just on the familiar stretch surrounding Heart’s Desire Beach but also the parklands around Tomasini and Millerton Points, and the forests that stretch to the top of the Inverness ridge. Wetlands, stream corridors and grasslands will remain untouched.
Some of unhealthiest parts of the park fall along the Johnstone and Jepsen Trails between Shell Beach and Heart’s Desire. The forest above Perth Way is also crowded and dying.
The project reflects a new perspective on preserving wildlands: Sometimes you have to cut and burn a forest to save it. The process could be upsetting for visitors who experience smoke, noise and equipment in a forest that now feels serene. But the work is essential, said Inverness forester Tom Gaman, who sounded the alarm about the park’s health in a 2019 report. His inventory of 50 sample plots found high levels of tree disease and death, along with layers of duff nearly a foot deep.
“It will turn a senescent and dying ecosystem into a resilient forest,” he said of the project. “State Parks has created an excellent document that will work as a guiding principle, but also give some sort of flexibility…It is well organized, detailed and ecologically sensitive.”
He added, “This is a gargantuanly complicated task.”
Tomales Bay State Park hosts one of the most extensive and picturesque groves of Bishop pine in the world, according to naturalist Jules Evens. Bishop pines were once widespread but now survive only in isolated relict stands.
The park contains several other important habitat types, including coastal shrub and hardwood forests. There are ancient Douglas firs and special species such as California bottle brush grass, California vanilla grass and a rare type of manzanita found only in coastal Marin.
For thousands of years, the landscape was managed through natural fire or routine ignition by the Coast Miwok: Trees were spaced out and meadows kept clear, water flowed more freely and underbrush was tamed. Burned forests supported more diverse wildlife and higher densities of birds like wrens, Wilson’s warblers and rufoussided towhees. But after the development of the Seahaven subdivision and other parcels in the 1940s, and the creation of the state park in 1952, fires were snuffed out as soon as they started.
Now the Bishop pines are compromised. A short-lived species, they’re dying of old age, Western gall rust, pine pitch canker and bark beetle. Their cones need the heat of a fire to crack open and release seeds across the forest floor.
Millions of other trees in the park are succumbing to sudden oak death or drought, or are choked by dense growth that invites deadly insects. There is very little forest regeneration due to the heavy accumulation of dead trees and a dense understory. Seeds need healthy soil and sun to germinate.
“This is a very sick forest,” said historical geographer Gray Brechin, who lives in Seahaven. Over the decades, “the land has changed drastically, and the climate has changed a lot, too.”
Mr. Brechin said the forest “could be much more beautiful than it is, especially if there were young Bishop pines that were replacing the old ones.”
Instead, the spectral stands of diseased and dying timber are fuel for a future catastrophic wildfire. Over the years, residents have worried about the growing risk. Inverness voters this month faced a wildfire tax initiative that sought to address that risk.
Returning to his childhood home in Seahaven after decades away, Jim Grant recalls being startled by the forest’s poor condition. “‘Oh my God, this is terrible,’ I thought. The state park policy was ‘If it falls, just leave it in place,’” he said.
Better management, Mr. Grant added, “might help slow down the fire a little bit, and maybe that gives us the extra 15, 30 or 40 minutes to get out.”
Woody Elliott, a Seahaven resident and former natural resource manager at San Simeon State Park, agreed the project will help ease fears of local residents. But he warned that “catastrophic wildfire in Inverness can happen regardless of fuel management in Tomales Bay State Park. And such management, including initial work and its necessary maintenance, will necessarily occur over decades because of its high cost and environmental impact.”
The new documents are one step in a long process of meeting legal, permitting and administrative requirements. Pieced-together funding sources helped State Parks reach this point, and now there’s a boost from the state’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, which aims to meet a million-acre annual restoration target by 2025.
One of the project’s greatest challenges will be the ecological diversity of the landscape, requiring different strategies. There will be two approaches to burning: “broadcast burning,” which ignites the understory of the forest, and “pile burning,” whereby vegetation is burned in open piles or smoke-trapping boxes. Both mechanical and manual treatment can be employed, as can herbicides applied by hand. Because most state parks don’t allow grazing, it’s unlikely that livestock would be introduced unless they’re needed for future maintenance.
Another challenge is timing, as work must be scheduled around storms, winds, dense fog and bird nesting season. Steep and impenetrable terrain may limit access, and with so many acres of dead timber, the scale of the task is daunting.
There’s also the puzzle of how to rebuild the forest once it’s cleaned up. Park scientists will study the best techniques to heat pine cones and disperse seeds. They hope to plant small groups of trees over time, because mixed-aged forests are more resilient.
Certain areas will be off-limits, protecting the park’s 200 acres of healthy Bishop pines, legacy oak trees, wildlife nests, den logs, archeological sites and sacred Native places with cultural value.
Returning the park to its full glory won’t be a one-time effort. The plan states that retreatment will likely be needed at least every five years, and perhaps more, with flexibility due to the unpredictability of climate change.
Recovery and restoration take more work than protection, Mr. Gaman said: “It’s not going to be like the past, where you just set up a park and say, ‘Well, there it is! That’s nature!’ We’re way beyond that now. The ecology has been transformed.”
The report is not yet posted online but can be obtained by emailing Bree Hardcastle at [email protected] or Cyndy Shafer at [email protected].