Speakers

Matt Fagan

District Interpreter

Eric Frenzel

Ecologist, Sequoia National Park’s Vegetation Management Branch

Sept. 27, 2016 - Sequoia National Park, California

Introductory Note

It was a privilege to hear about the ecological importance of mountain meadows and the decision-making processes of our top park managers whose collective role is to protect our national treasures. Their jobs involve assessing and addressing increasingly complex situations and costly remediation in the face of today’s constantly-evolving climates. 

Park management budgets and tools can seem complex – especially with constantly changing climate conditions. Yet, it’s clear they have a thoughtful methodology to assess  conditions and need for restoration projects. Their assessment for what can be pricey expenditures is carefully based on natural consequences and weighing relative risks in an environment of new challenges.

Matt Fagan, Sequoia National Park District Interpreter, in the Halstead Meadow.


Outline

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE’s HISTORY HERE
CHANGING MANAGEMENT APPROACHES
ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS of WATER on MEADOWS
CHANGING MANAGEMENT APPROACHES
EARLY USE of MEADOWS
EVOLUTION & USE of a SIERRA NEVADA MEADOW
REBUILDING A MEADOW
WILDLIFE, CLIMATE and FUTURE PROJECTS
THE FUTURE of WATER SUPPLIES

All images © Alison M Jones. All rights reserved. 

Key Quote  This [meadow restoration] is a great example of a new approach we’ve initiated that’s not common practice. It makes the case, despite its high cost, that the project needed to be done. Having thought about long-term costs and the risks of trying something new, we’re now very proud of this project. We have a fully functional, hopefully self-sustaining ecosystem. – Eric Frenzel

SEJ TOUR LEADER  I live in the foothills at the base of Ash Mountain and come up here on the weekends, which is awesome. I’ve  learned much, and there is much more to learn. Now Matt Fagan will give us a big-picture overview as district interpreter for Sequoia National Park, as he knows a wealth of information.

MATT FAGAN  I’ve been here about 8 years, and I’m still learning. I’ve been a vagabond in the National Park Service. Born and raised in Maryland, my first park assignment was Assateague Island National Seashore, a seasonal park [on a long narrow peninsula running north-south between Chincoteague Bay and the Atlantic Ocean]. This is my 13th National Park Service assignment, and  I’ve lived here longer than anywhere I’ve lived in my adult life. Something keeps me here. 

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE’s HISTORY HERE

MATT FAGAN  During my travels for the Park Service, I’ve been to places that are relatively new. But this is the oldest park unit I’ve worked in. Looking back on the past 8 years and at the progression of this park’s history, I can map out the same progression of the National Park Service over the past 100+ years. We’ve seen changes made recently in Sequoia Kings Canyon that have changed our mindset of how we run National Parks. 

The history of this place fascinates me, because the first European Americans in this area were likely explorers like Jedidiah Smith. Nobody really stayed in this area. Those coming through here were generally trying to get to the other side of the Sierra Mountains. They didn’t spending a whole lot of time here. 

It wasn’t until the 1850’s that Hale Tharp, the first non-native American to settle here, saw all these meadows and said, “Great pasture for sheep and cattle.” So, folks started bringing stock animals up here. As you look down valley, you can imagine how tough it was to bring livestock from an 800’ elevation to over 6,000’ – it was a massive effort. By the 1860’s and early 1870’s, more people started bringing cattle and sheep up here. They started bringing more Europeans up here; and many saw these trees!

Thus there was a big lumbering effort here in the 1870’s and the 1880’s. They didn’t have the lumbering technology then that we have today. In some of these places, it took five, six or seven, days to cut down one tree. Some trees were so big around that would take two of their big saws apart, weld them together, and get two guys on either side of the tree. 

JOURNALIST  Misery whips. [Editor’s note: “misery whips” is a colloquialism for a 2-man cross-cut saw, emphasizing the muscle-aching efforts needed to use these 4 to 12-foot saws.] 

CHANGING MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

MATT FAGAN  Misery whips – yes. But fortunately, George Stewart saw these trees and what was going on. He became quite the champion [Editor’s Note: Stewart was a journalist and then editor of Visalia Daily News and then “Father of Sequoia National Park” for serving as its Park Superintendent for years]. In late September 1890 this became Sequoia National Park. A week later we had Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon National Park and Rock Creek Park.]

Not a lot of people know about Rock Creek Park, and I’m not sure why it isn’t called Rock Creek National Park. I think it had to do with funding between the state and national governments. [Editor’s Note: Rock Creek Park contains Native American camp sites dated from 2,500-1,400 CE, evidence of colonial and 19th-century settlements, and Civil War artifacts. Few are aware of all that. It has a rock formation that people used to drive through until cars got bigger and bigger and more people scraped their cars along the sides of the rocks.

So, we diverted the road around that, yet it wasn’t intact as it is today. It was excavated with the idea that cutting a hole through Crest Meadow was easier than moving whole trees and it might attract people to come through this area, where, in the 1920’s, there were a couple of groves called the House Grove and the Senate Grove – plus there was the President’s Tree. At the time, the idea was let’s make these places pleasant. They said, “Let’s landscape this area so people can come to a pleasant place and face no harm.” So, they proposed getting  “varmints” like mountain lions. Today, we’ll see deer, and people can go up and pet them. 

In the 1920 and ‘30s, and even into the ‘40s, Colonel John White was superintendent here and hated that. He was thought of as a radical here, since he believed we shouldn’t have cabins in and amongst a giant forest – nor should we kill some animals to benefit other animals. We should have this place like “no place on earth”, because it is like no place on earth. He was out of favor with folks back in Washington, D.C. but was Superintendent here from the late 1920s into the early 1940’s. There were some efforts to fire him because his radical notions, but in the Giant Forest you’ll see a nice plaque in his honor.

Because he was thinking way ahead, we’re seeing today the meadow in which Erik Frenzel has been involved. The meadow incorporates the idea that we look at parks as more than a nice place to be in nature with nice scenery we’ve landscaped for you. But instead, we should see this as an intact ecosystem inside the park. Now, we also deal with partners and people outside the boundaries, because an ecosystem doesn’t stop at park boundaries.

Our thinking on how we manage National Park Service units has evolved. Yes, the scenery is great. The animals are great. The ecosystem, as a whole, is even better. But we’ve also got to look beyond our boundaries, because we have issues today like pollution – even up here! Our handout called What’s in the Wind states we have the worst air in the National Park Service here in the summer. It’s a global problem, because a lot of the particulates we see come from overseas.

A meadow from the view of Sentinel Bridge over the Merced River with a flood sign.

ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS of WATER on MEADOWS

ERIK FRENZEL  Unlike Matt and Zach, I’m not a professional used to talking to people. I’m an ecologist here in the park. I work in the Vegetation Management Branch, and am standing in today for Athena Demetry, our parks restoration ecologist. She’s worked in this park for 25 years on some great projects. This is her latest masterpiece, so I’m going to try and do it justice. 

I want to give credit to Athena, since what’s occurred here is really a magical transformation. 

In your role as journalists, you have been talking about water this week. Even if you’re not a Californian, you know we are in a Mediterranean climate – we’re not the Pacific Northwest. It is dry here. This is what it’s like in the summer, dry, no rain. We really rely, especially in the mountains, on a winter snowpack for water. It comes during the winter as snow, and then melts out through the spring, giving us a timed release of snow. That means all the plant life and animal life here needs to be adapted to this kind of climate. They need to not count on rain throughout the summer. That’s one thing that impacts meadows in this mountain range. 

You might think we’re in the mountains now, since it’s very wet, but it’s like the rest of California. If you’re up on that dry soil that you just came down or if you walked back into the forest and dug down in the dirt, you’ll not find moisture. It’s dry. Yet I just had you come down this slope a few meters, to where we have water right on top of the ground. So, there’s moisture availability in this area. 

If you have a dry forest right next to a place, what’s missing from this scene?  I’m going to make you guys all meadow ecologists, “What’s missing from out here, just one thing?”  Trees – that’s in the “Meadow 101” course. What we have in these wetlands is a high water table You can guess why that might be….

One fun thing about being an ecologist is asking folks to explain why they’re seeing what they’re seeing. We’re now in a valley bottom, so all the snowmelt and moisture will percolate down into the soil; but eventually it must come to the surface. This is a topographic low, so when it’s dry up there, all the water’s is on the surface in the valley bottoms. That is critical for all animals and plants around here. There is a very different vegetation where we have this high water table. Not everything has adapted. Try growing tomatoes at home and then flood them. They don’t very well. Only certain species are adapted to having their roots continually inundated like they are in this meadow. You don’t have to be an ace botanist to grasp that what’s growing here is not growing 20 meters further up.

This is an entirely different vegetation community with other important effects. It’s a very productive spot for invertebrates. It’s a place that’s open – as you said, “No trees!” There are many seeds, so if you’re an animal that needs a nesting site or  a seed eater, or maybe a bird that hunts for insects, this is an important place for  them to get food, have shelter, and even get water. This is a spot where water is available – even in September in a kind-of-okay snow melt year. So think about the ecosystem importance of this meadow. It’s not just as a pretty place to take a picture. It is an important spot for this whole area for all the creatures that live here.

As you drove across from Sacramento, then to Grant and finally to here, how many meadows did you see? A few?  These are rare spots on the landscape. Especially when you think about how important a meadow is. This meadow is very different from the other ecosystems around us.

A PALUSTRINE WETLAND

JOURNALIST  What kind of wetland is this?

ERIK FRENZEL  Good question! This is a palustrine wetland. “Meadow” is somewhat of an art term, in some ways. Many people would recognize that word. I think its etymology is a “grazed pastureland.” Here we use “meadow” to identify an opening in an otherwise treed area densely covered by graminoids. The Sierra Nevada graminoids are grass-like plants, sedges, rushes, and grasses. 

This is technically a wetland, and that’s an important distinction. This meadow is here due to the high water table. That makes it a wetland, which has jurisdictional protection. “Wetland’ is really a more technical term describing the fact that throughout the growing season, this water table is somewhere within a foot of the soil surface. That’s the reason these plants are here – they’ve adapted to having their roots in the water.

JOURNALIST  Is this wetland important for migratory birds?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes. Matt may be able to list some for you. Yellow warblers are one species we often discuss.

MATT FAGAN  Many birds come through here – wrens, as well as ravens and scrub jays. 

ERIK FRENZEL  Wetlands are important also from kind of a selfish standpoint. You probably write about ecosystem services being important to us humans above and beyond the intrinsic value of preserving places providing habitat for wildlife and plant species that might not grow in other places. But we also talk about the importance, early recognized by those who established this park, of having an intact watershed for water supplies downstream.

Wetlands have a very important role in nutrient cycling and the uptake of nutrients out of the water for these graminoid plants. If nitrogen and phosphorous and other nutrients are deposited on the landscape, it hits this wetland – and these graminoids are just waiting to take up all that. So, from that standpoint, their benefit is they provide water quality insurance for us. When we get big downpours or big rain on snow events, they are “sponges.” The meadow sediment here contains coarse sands and a bit of organic material, so it is a sponge. It’s able to modulate the floods’ high points which benefit us. Downstream it protects our infrastructure, life and property. From those standpoints, we greatly benefit from having an intact wetland like this.

EVOLUTION & USE of a SIERRA NEVADA MEADOW

WOMAN  How did the native people use this?

ERIK FRENZEL  Not in this meadow, but some meadows around Giant Forest have edible bulbs like camas and other foodstuffs. Obviously, its water is an attractant for wildlife, so you can imagine this would be a good place for hunting. As well, basketry materials grow on the borders of meadows.

JOURNALIST  Do you have mugwort?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes we have mugwort, but I’m not an expert ethnographer on all its uses.

JOURNALIST  What was the evolution process of this wetlands – and how long it took?

ERIK FRENZEL  This evolution involves aspects of changing climates. Most meadows at this elevation in the Sierra Nevada are about 3,000 years old, and began during a warmer, wetter period. We know this, because people have carbon-dated sediments where the meadow has been cut what. A cross-section of this meadow reveals many transported materials, alluvium full of coarse sands and gravels. Then there may be a layer of sod – decomposing plant material; and then another layer of gravel. Over a long period of time, under the climate of the last 3,000 years, the sediment has gradually built up, and these plants trap that. A feedback loop exists where meadows grow.

Maybe “feedback” is the wrong word, but the plants serve a very important role here. As water comes in, they trap its sediment and grow bigger. The plants grow taller and continue to accumulate that material which makes the meadow bigger. That’s happened for about 3,000 years and is why meadows and wetlands are important. And that’s why we did what we did here.

Back in the cattle-grazing era, at the turn of the century this was an important spot, because it provided an ecosystem benefit by provisioning forage for cattle. Then a gully formed through this meadow, probably exacerbated by having many cattle grazing in a small space back then. During the ‘30s, we built this road to connect Giant Forest to the Grant Grove There was no road then – trails, yes; but no road. To do so, we built a dam right where this bridge is right now.

The dam went across this meadow, holding all the water that had moved down through these sediments. So, where water used to flow across the entire width of this meadow, we pushed it into two little culverts. Well, when you concentrate water like that, its erosive power increases. With water’s ability for erosion, boy, did we get a whopper! We had a little gully as we concentrated all that water into a couple of culverts. Now we’ve got a gully that runs from the entire upper end of the meadow all the way down to its very lower end, cutting through 3,000 years of sediments down to the base stones. In some places, it was 15 or 20 feet deep.

The deepest cut was just downstream of this bridge where water poured out of those culverts. So, what happens when you create a big cut in the meadow? You create a new topographic low point. We said the reason it’s so wet right here is because we’re in the low spot. Well, when you have a low spot, all the water now flows into that new lower channel – and the area that used to be wet is dry. The plants that held it all together go, and thus you no longer have wetlands, nor much of a meadow. What’s left is just a remnant of what used to be. Those ecosystem services, those intrinsic values that served the wildlife and all the plants are gone.

JOURNALIST  What does a cut like that do in terms of water supply and water quality?

ERIK FRENZEL  From a water-quality standpoint, the nutrient uptake that you’d otherwise have is gone. Since water now passes through a much narrower area, there’s much less opportunity for uptake. Any sediments that might come off the slopes – 3,000 years of sediments –  no longer have plants that slow down and stop the water. You send more sediment downstream. From a water-quality standpoint, it’s a bit harder to say. Water passes through faster, so there are peaks to the floods that are probably higher. But since this isn’t gauged, we don’t know.

Because less of that area is occupied, little interstitial spaces between all the sand no longer hold water. We think what probably happens is that downstream, peak flows come earlier in the year because water’s not being held in this meadow to drain slowly throughout the summer’s growing season. That’s what we think is happening on the quantity side. 

This happened a long time ago and we’ve known about this problem for a long time. We had to protect the road here, so for a  while we shoved boulders into the hole. The meadow was a lost cause. Then Athena Demetry arrived and said, “I think we can fix this. The way we fixed it is much different than what’s been done in other places where they created little dams and stepped them up the meadow to at least hold back some of the sediment.

ALISON JONES/NWNL  Did that model beaver behavior?

ERIK FRENZEL  I don’t know if it was modeled after beaver behavior, but it’s certainly what happens. Yet, beaver situations in the Rockies and elsewhere usually involve streams with a much lower gradient. This is a steep meadow. So that’s probably why those dams washed out repeatedly. This meadow is series of dams that were built and washed out, built again and washed out, and built again and washed out. 

REBUILDING a MEADOW

In the National Forest about 10 miles from here, there’s a low-gradient meadow. They said, “Well, we’re not going to be able to put it back the way it was. Let’s just dig a huge pond, make a dam, and use sediments from the pond to fill in parts of the channel.” But that meadow has a much lower gradient. We didn’t think that would work here. This meadow is too steep and water has too much force going down the meadow. So, working with collaborators from Colorado State, we decided just rebuild this meadow.

The planning for this got started in 2007 and has happened in two phases so far. In the first phase, we left the road alone. It is a big problem. Athena just fixed the section from the road to the upper end of the meadow. This was also a chance to try out some techniques, because this is not something that people are doing on a big scale. This is kind of experimental. This was a big risk. The risk was we’re going to do all—because it takes a lot of money to get fill and everything in here and restore the topography, and you think, well, what if we get a big winter and all that sediment goes downstream?  We just lost all that investment, so there’s a risk there in getting machines to do this.

JOURNALIST  Plus, like you said, there are really three different layers.

ERIK FRENZEL  Yeah.

JOURNALIST  It’s not just a bunch of money.

ERIK FRENZEL  Exactly, so there’s a risk. But the benefit that we could restore the topography and vegetative cover in the water table, would be that we would hopefully be able to walk away from this thing, since it would be self-sustaining, as it had been for 3,000 years. That was the hope. No maintenance. Once it’s done, we walk away, leaving a fully restored meadow.

We didn’t try to recreate that layer cake at all. 

ERIK FRENZEL  You just keep compacting those sediments down, and we just fill. We took a little bit of fill from here, but we tried to leave intact spots intact, because anywhere we scrape vegetation off, we’re going to have to put plants back. There was a lot of design that went into it. Once the topography was stored, we put down some erosion matting. You’re now standing on it. This was meant just to buy us a few years. The lifetime on this stuff is 10-15 years before it degrades. 

JOURNALIST  This looks like sand.

ERIK FRENZEL  I would guess that here it’s probably 5 degrees overall from the bottom to the top. All of that stuff went into the planning. That was one of the things that we did, all the planning, was to create a final plan of how steep do we want it to be, and what are the elevations?  Where are we going to borrow fill?  Where are we going to place fill?  We tried to buy ourselves some time, and then we planted. We took all the species you see up here. It wasn’t an accident why we picked these. We looked at reference sites and other places that didn’t have gullies. We’d ask, “What do they look like?”  Those were our reference conditions.

We studied and asked questions: “It’s flat. What grows there?  What are the dominant species like this sedge right here with deep rhizomes and long roots that knit together the soil, essentially creating a sod. We used three species we felt had the potential to knit together all that new unprotected soil. 

JOURNALIST  Is this list of plants posted on the site?

ERIK FRENZEL  I believe it is. One is this sedge:  Scirpus-Microcarpus. Another one is Glyceria Elata, a grass with the common name of mannagrass. And there’s Oxypolis Occidentalis, a forb or broad-leaf species in the carrot family. We thought those three species had the best chance of knitting all of that soil together. We contracted out and had thousands and thousands of these things growing from seed at this site. Then when it was ready we had many, many volunteers come to help us plant them, which was really great.

JOURNALIST  Where did you get your volunteers?

ERIK FRENZEL  They all came from all over. We began filling and plant restoration of the Upper Meadow in September 2007. In Spring 2008, we did this first section.

JOURNALIST  So these plants represent 8 years of growth?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes, for most of this. Some of this was left intact, but much of this – especially the far side of the meadow – was where all that fill was going in. All those plants are about 8 years old. We learned a lot. Some we had to replant. This upper meadow was a pilot. We learned 1) we were compacting the soil too much, so when we fixed the bottom section we didn’t make that same mistake. 2) The erosion matting that we used need to be a heavier-duty one. 3) The logs we used weren’t worth it. During the spring, water piled up behind them, and then found little holes to go through, which was counter to our goals.

The Yosemite Valley view of the Half-Dome on the horizon shows what our land can look like with restorative efforts.

AN EXPERIMENTAL RESTORATION PLAN

ERIK FRENZEL  It seemed obvious in retrospect. We were inventing a pilot project that was experimental, without other projects as an example. So, its value was in the mistakes. Athena and the people she worked with on the design incorporated all those lessons into the restoration of the meadow’s bottom section.

JOURNALIST  Did you take those logs out?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes. We sawed them and then moved them.

JOURNALIST  Was there ever a channel through here?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes. We mapped the whole topography of both the upper and lower meadow. Our desired topography was to have no channel. We did map it, so we know what it looked like. That helped in figuring how much fill we needed to make it level. 

Our dorky graph of water tables shows the water depth. We asked, “Where do we want the water table to be?” It was mostly 6-12 inches of the soil surface. The graph showed what we had before the restoration project, the deep-water tables, and monitoring wells that check our success. By restoring the topography and spreading out the water, we had brought the water table out across this whole meadow. It is nice to have data that shows our success in getting to our goal!

Despite having a good water table, we saw that what we’d planted on this upper section just one year later wasn’t thriving very well. So that took another set of plantings and a bit more work. We were also set back because we lost a bit of soil during a big flood event. So we replanted, and that took time. 

It took a couple of years to get this kind of cover – but not too long, when you think about it. It’s  filling in. We only out-planted three things, but if you walk around out there, there are many species. By creating habitat, we had seed coming in from other places, so much may have been here as a remnant when the meadow was degraded – and then once we created a spot for it to thrive.

JOURNALIST  You’re monitoring the water level and the vegetation. Are you monitoring birds and insects?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes. Jeff Holmquist, a collaborator on the project from White Mountain Research Station,  is doing invertebrate monitoring, because invertebrate are very dependent on water for important parts of their life cycle. That might indicate the change.

JOURNALIST  How did you find the appropriate fill, and what was it?

ERIK FRENZEL  Some of the fill was left over from other road projects. We have fill from other construction projects. Some came from outside of the park. Athena’s vision was to get rid of this road. So, we worked with the Federal Highways Authority and got funding for this bridge, negating the problem of channelizing the water and of having a dam in the meadow. We created a little side road around it, and then it took about a year to get most of it poured.

This was coordinated with a restoration of the lower part of the meadow, because that has a 15-20’ deep gully running down it. We used whatever we could get to fill that gully. We added erosion matting and wattles. We tried to salvage areas of intact vegetation and ended up with an intact meadow from edge to edge.

It’s mostly perfectly flat, or mostly –  enough that it’s wet. Since it’s wet on that side, where you stand right here, and if you walk across the whole thing. So we designed this bridge to allow that water to pass across the entire width of the meadow down to the lower part.

JOURNALIST  Does the gravel stone hinder it in any way?

ERIK FRENZEL No. It’s porous, which helps protect our infrastructure. We weren’t sure if this was going to work. But we thought it would. It’s porous, with big spaces that allows the water to move through it. Also, it’s shaded and cold under there, thus discouraging plants from growing. 

The lifetime cost of the project is spread over the life of this meadow, which may be another 1,000 years, depending on climate’s path. If we’d could have built dams and engineered a channel, we’d be coming back every 5-10 years to fix it or mess with it. But with Athena’s approach the meadow is fixed and we are walking away.

This project was an engineering decision that met all the goals in the project. The total cost of this upper pilot project’s first phase was $480,000. The bridge alone cost $500,000 for design and $3 million to build.

Then the bottom area of this meadow, the big, big, big, big gully we fixed, cost $938,000. 

So it’s been an expensive project, but in return we are pretty much done. We have a bit of work still to do at the end at the bottom. But climate allowing and if this is an area continues to have enough moisture to support this vegetation, we should be done. The bears should have it from here on out.

JOURNALIST  What’s the total length of the meadow and width?

ERIK FRENZEL  This whole meadow is 20 acres. The down-slope gradient is 4.5%. Some sections are steeper. The Halstead Creek watershed above it -where is all this water is coming from – is almost 1,500 acres.

WILDLIFE, CLIMATE and FUTURE PROJECTS

JOURNALIST  Throughout the years of your hot, dry summers, how has climate changed? 

ERIK FRENZEL  Fortunately, it’s wet enough that plants are surviving, but not so wet that we’ve had to worry about erosion. That was the big thing that we were worried about. You journalists have discussed issues of water, climate change, California, mountain wetlands and watersheds. In addressing the future of this meadow we faced some risks. There was risk of erosion. The project was experimental, and might have failed, affecting the future of people who manage land who do restoration. In land management and conservation decisions places, we face new challenges that by nature are experimental. Some projects may have little failures; some may be great successes. But I think this is a great example of a new approach we’ve initiated that’s not common practice. It makes the case, despite its high cost, that the project needed to be done. Having thought about long-term costs and the risks of trying something new, we’re now very proud of this project. We have a fully functional, hopefully self-sustaining ecosystem. We removed the big stressor, and we feel like this is a real success.

JOURNALIST  Have you had a wildlife response to your project in this meadow?

ERIK FRENZEL  Well, the bears love it. The deer love it. We don’t have data predicting how much or how often different animals were using it. But, anecdotally, bears are being seen here. We have traffic jams on this bridge. People stop to look at bears enjoying the early season food sources including roots and things that they dig out of these meadows – and berries later in the season. There’s a little wildlife path through this, kind of fun. We don’t know the full picture of positive impacts yet; but we think by restoring it to a meadow that had never been disturbed  will do what it’s supposed to do for wildlife. That’s the hope.

JOURNALIST  How many meadows in the Sierra Nevada need to be restored?

ERIK FRENZEL  Many people are working on what needs to be restored right now. We think about the turn-of-the-century impacts from ubiquitous, grazing cattle. Wherever cattle and livestock could go, they went. I don’t know the exact level of impact, but I can assume that every meadow in the Sierra Nevada that was accessible to stock at some point has been grazed without any kind of control.

As you think about that, many changes have probably occurred. Should we restore every meadow that was impacted?  That’s a harder question and gets to what to try and what results are desired? Luckily, the Park Service mission says to fix broken things. But if it costs a half-million dollars to fix this meadow, is that more important than some other thing: forest restoration or endangered species restoration? That can become a hard question. If you throw climate change in, you might ask if all of these meadows that will be impacted will have enough water in 100 years?  If not, should we make that investment?  That’s a legitimate question that we’re asking ourselves right now. 

JOURNALIST  Are you doing any carbon sequestration studies?

ERIK FRENZEL  We are not. But I think that’s a fantastic way of helping justify some of the cost, if there is a carbon market and you’re able to ensure or increase some sequestration. Carbon balance has been studied for Sierra Nevada meadows in general. We know roughly how much they store. We know that if conditions like this are present carbon should be accumulating. The flipside with wetlands is that you can have different kinds of greenhouse gases, so it gets a bit complicated. But we think that could be a great way of monitoring our success. Monitoring is very expensive, but carbon sequestration integrates all of the things that are happening below ground and above ground. Thus, it might be a way to quantify benefits of some projects.

THE FUTURE of WATER SUPPLIES

JOURNALIST  Do you think that in 100 years there’ll be enough water? Are you studying climate data to determine that?

ERIK FRENZEL  Yes, many people are working on parallel approaches to this problem. The park just finished a big process that we called the Resource Stewardship Strategy. It included all the people in the park .involved in stewarding natural and cultural resources. They asked, “What is the challenge for our generation? What will people in 50 years wish we had done? 

We’re fixing meadows now. We’re fishing. We’re pulling trout out of some lakes. But really we’re trying to think about the challenges a little bit further out. Part of it is brainstorming, part is trying to look at a broad, landscape scale. We’re doing this with partners, such as USGS. We’re still trying to get funding, look at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Devils Post Pile. There are other people working on this problem in the National Forests across the Sierra Nevada using remote sensing to find and use past climate signatures via remote sensing to predict what places might be at risk under future climate. We’re asking, “Hey, well, what places will likely to persist?  Which ones might be vulnerable?  Where might we be able to make a difference? Which places are impacted?  Which places might need  restoration?” 

But we’re also adding another step. In the past, it might have been enough for us to say, “This is broken, let’s try and fix it.” But now, we’re trying to think more strategically and say, “This place is broken. What does the future look like for this area? Is it the best place to invest our scarce resources – or is there somewhere else that might have a greater benefit. We’re trying to think a bit more strategically about where to invest our restoration dollar.

JOURNALIST  Did you use that matrix with the meadow project?

ERIK FRENZEL  We did not, because we weren’t at this point yet. And we’re still trying to develop that vulnerability-and-risk model for meadows facing climate change effects.

JOURNALIST  Looking backwards, does the meadow project seem worthy?

ERIK FRENZEL  I think so since I think this meadow has much value. I think we would have done it anyway. 1) There was an infrastructure need here anyway. This road was going to come apart sooner or later. We would have been rebuilding it, so there was an opportunity to use infrastructure to fix the root problem. That kind of made the solution we chose attractive. It’s also very visible. Plus, it’s one of our low-elevation meadows. There aren’t a whole lot of those  meadows and they’re pretty spread out. We think of each meadow as an individual with its own value and being somewhat uncommon on the landscape. 

The other benefit is we learned a lot, so just the learning value of it, even if in 100 years this 1,500-acre watershed doesn’t provide enough water, there’s at least some value in trying it and learning, and maybe we take this and apply it in other places, or somebody else can apply it.

JOURNALIST  Have you published any papers about it?

ERIK FRENZEL  Athena Demetry is working on it. She’s very busy, and unfortunately, she’s leaving us for Yosemite. She has the hardest job in this park.

JOURNALIST  To whom did she make the case for funding, and how did she do it?

ERIK FRENZEL  We had a bunch of different funding sources on this. We had fee money, from the $20 people pay to come in the gate; and much was funded with that fee money. Some came from the Water Resources Division, a regional level organization within the Park Service that funds various projects. We also have special pots of money set aside for these kinds of projects. We compete for them by putting a proposal together to explain its worth and thus the reason to give us the money. The money for the bridge essentially came from highway funds.

JOURNALIST  Was the old road that was here closed because of flooding?

ERIK FRENZEL  It was never closed because of flooding, that I know of. What was happening was on the downhill side. It was eroding and being eaten away, so we were continually worried that that a whole chunk of the road was just going to fall into the hole.

So if you were a driver around Sequoia and Kings Canyon that particular one year, it was not too much fun. I think it was four years before I could drive down the road without driving through road construction.

JOURNALIST  Do you get federal highway funds?

ERIK FRENZEL  This was paid for with federal highways fund

Posted by NWNL on August 4, 2025.
Transcription edited and condensed for clarity by Alison M. Jones.

All images © Alison M. Jones, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.