SUGAR PINE
"No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment." – John Muir
“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” – E.B. White
For 18-year old Dick Hotchkiss it was an exhilarating experience to drive a Robinson & Sons logging truck in the Grass Valley, California July 4th parade in 1956. On the truck was a single sugar pine log, 11-foot in diameter and 32 feet long, that had for hundreds of years lived in the canyon of the Middle Yuba River. It was a trophy, a demonstration of the faller's craft and symbolic of a traditional skill that supported families for generations. The big log was also a cultural affirmation and a display of pride for work well done. The last hard-rock mine in Grass Valley, until now a reliable employer, had just closed and those workers were probably transitioning to logging, or lumbering to use the traditional term. Logging had become the economy of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in an era recently described to me by an old-timer as the “timber rush.” After WW II there were returning veterans who deserved houses and those houses were made of wood. In the 1950’s and 1960s the foothills were peppered with sawmills, many of which were small operations with the owner and a few employees on site.
When I started working for the Tahoe National Forest in 1975, most employees were in the “timber shop” and the forest-wide concern was “getting out the cut.” My job as an archaeologist was created by regulations and requirements of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). The concerns of wildlife biologists, botanists, hydrologists, ecologists, archaeologists and others were initially seen as an impediment to getting the cut out. It took some time and attrition for foresters and road engineers to get beyond their purely productive patriotic stance.
In the mid-1850s when Bayard Taylor, a 19thcentury traveler, poet and literary critic, was riding on Washington Ridge, northeast of Nevada City, he noted an unbroken forest of “pillars two hundred feet high and six feet in diameter.” He likened their splendor to a “grand natural cathedral.” Taylor was awe struck: “No Doric column could surpass in beauty these stupendous shafts. They are the demigods of the vegetable world”. The forest that Taylor was describing was a forest probably dominated by sugar pines. Subsequent lumbering and silvicultural practices have since created a more “productive forest” on that ridge, one that favors faster growing ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. We take them for granted, but trees, whether we know it or not, provide in addition to “forest products”, habitat for many species and spiritual support for humans. Sugar pine was once an abundant species in the Yuba and adjacent watersheds but that is no longer the case.
Sugar Pine is the largest pine in the mixed conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada. In the North-Central Sierra they are found between 2,500’ to 7,500’ where they reach heights of 175’ to 200’ with diameters of 36” to 60” and they can live from 300 to 500 years. Their cones, typically 10 to 20 inches in length, are the longest of any conifer with a mature cone producing an average of 150 seeds or nuts, with the best nuts found in the cones of the oldest trees. Intervals between heavy cone crops averaged four years. Sugar pine, gray pine, and piñon pine are considered the best tasting pine nuts in California.
In the early 1980s some of my friends formed work crews and contracted for forestry-related jobs like tree-planting, thinning, wildlife habitat improvement, trail construction and maintenance and erosion control. It was hard work but rewarding. My least favorite job was cone-gathering in order to provide a seed crop for tree nurseries – I’m not happy working high-up in trees. The cones of sugar pines are way out on the ends of tapering branches – by far the most difficult to collect. It fascinates me that indigenous people were gathering sugar pine nuts without spikes to climb with, belts, belay rope and pole pruners.
Sugar pine seeds/nuts were a favorite and abundant food for the local Nisenan and Washoe and they knew the location of reliable seed producing trees. Traditional burning practices favored sugar pine regeneration – it is very resistant to low-to moderate-severity fires and has adapted a thick, fire-resistant bark and open canopy that retards aerial fire spread.
It’s difficult to imagine how indigenous people were able to gather cones because branches begin in the upper third of the tree and the cones are located at the end of long, supple branches. The Nisenan climbed sugar pines by hooking young trimmed sapling over a lower limb and the cones were pulled loose with a stick that had a projecting branch at the end. Lizzie Enos, a Nisenan traditionalist, said that in the Sugar Pine Hill area, on the south side of the Bear River, men dislodged the cones by jumping up and down on branches. Another method is for the climber to press down with his foot to get the branch moving in a rotary manner causing the cone to drop by virtue of its own weight. The Sierra Miwok propped a dead tree against the trunk or used a special climbing pole.
Gray pine grows at a lower elevation usually in a savannah or oak woodland setting. Edwin Bryant, while traveling the Emigrant Trail, wrote in his 1847-48 diary, “We saw in a number of places, ladders erected by the Indians for climbing the pine trees to gather the nuts, and the poles used for the same purpose.” He was only a few miles from Johnson’s Ranch so these would have been gray pines
When the Nisenan and Washoe harvested sugar pine seeds they used campsites that had been used for generations. Ideally the site would have a spring or stream near a knoll or meadow in a transitional zone where there were also berries, grass seeds, vegetable matter, tubers, medicines, plants used in basket-weaving and firewood.
In the Yuba River watershed there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of bedrock mortars in sugar pine habitat. Nut hunters would often camp at a favorable elevation then search for the most productive trees. Archaeologist David Hunt applied GPS data and statistical analysis to the location of Nisenan and Washoe campsites in the watersheds of the Middle and South Forks of the American Rivers and determined that sugar pine nuts were collected at many locations and processed at numerous small bedrock mortar locations. In his opinion sugar pines probably extended farther westward than they do now. This is substantiated by the observations of USGS forester, John Lieberg in 1902, ”Old stumps of sugar pine standing among Digger (gray) pine and oak, where not a sapling or seedling of the species is to be found, show a more extensive westward range within recent times.”
Sugar pine cones. Cherry Hill/Middle Yuba
Sugar pine nuts and acorns were very valuable because they could be stored. In the winter of 1849-1850 a group of vigilantes calling themselves the California Blades destroyed a group of Nisenan settlements and camps on the divide between the Bear River and the North Fork of the American River. They claimed it was retribution for stealing horses and mules and boasted about destroying extensive caches of acorns and sugar pine nuts.
While sugar pine nuts are small compared to acorns they were valued for their taste and the extra effort required to get them was considered worth it. Even the intruders enjoyed the flavor of sugar pine nuts. J. D. Borthwick, an artist visiting the Nevada City area in 1854 remarked, “… they have a taste even sweeter than that of filbert.”
The unique quality of sugar pine lumber caught the attention of miners, lumbermen and builders. With few lower branches most of the wood is clear, or free from knotholes. Theodore Judah, who surveyed the Central Pacific Railroad route noted, “It is well known that the sugar pine of these lands often runs 125 feet high without a limb, and often measures eight feet at base – while a tree is seldom found measuring less than three and a one-half feet at base.”
When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 it opened additional markets and greatly accelerated the amount of lumbering. With the railroad, lumber could easily be transported to the east as well as to valley and coastal cities in California. Narrow gauge railroads, constructed specifically for lumbering, were used extensively in the upper reaches of Deer Creek, on the Dutch Flat Divide and in the Truckee River basin. Typically, lumbermen constructed mills in the best timber stands then constructed their narrow-gauge railroads to connect with the standard gauge transcontinental railroad. According to historian David Beesley, everything marketable was cut, creating a two-and-a-half to three-mile circle of devastation with no seed trees remaining.
By the end of the 19th century the loss of trees and the resultant erosion was clearly detrimental to forest health and water quality. John Leiberg, inventoried and reported on federal forest reserves including Yuba River country. He observed, “… where the cut is exhaustive a great change has taken place. Of the sugar pine in the region examined, the tree is losing ground at a rapid rate on all the areas logged, … the coming forest will contain only 2 or 3 per cent at the most. The deficiency of sugar pine in the reforestation is due to one general cause, and that is wasteful and unscientific logging methods – everything capable of yielding immediate profit being cut, without the slightest provision for sparing a sufficient number of seed trees to restock the cut-over areas.”
Bob Paine, a former Nevada City journalist, spent summers in the early 1920s with his uncle at the Hegarty Ranch, near Graniteville. He noticed that two Chinese men living on the property were engaged in manufacturing shakes from sugar pine. The shakes were dried and bundled then floated downstream in the Milton Ditch where they were stored on a landing downstream then transported to market by a wagon. Shakes were split from a round of sugar pine, or sometimes cedar, by using a froe, which is a wedge-shaped blade with a handle that is hammered with a hardwood mallet. Dimensions vary, but in the Sierra Nevada roof shakes were typically 32” by 5”. Shakes shingled the roofs and were often the siding of historic structures. They were also used to make door and window sashes and crates.
Clear lumber from sugar pine was in great demand. Lumbermen despised shake makers, calling them “highgraders”. When the U.S. Forest Service was created in 1906, shakes were the most valuable forest product maintaining a market value well above dimensional lumber. “Shakes were produced only from the choicest sugar pines, and only from select portions of the bole – no more than 40 percent.” Swift Berry, a member of the U.S. Forest Service timber management staff wrote, “Since most of the shakes are made from the most valuable species, sugar pine, and only the best and straightest trees will rive, the shake-maker constantly lowered the value of the stand by skimming out the best trees.”
Abuses of the mineral laws, for logging purposes, was common on the California national forests. From 1902 to 1918 lumber companies filed mining claims for no other purpose than to gain surface rights to the timberlands. The Forest Service contested a large number of these so called "sugar pine mining claims" which were particularly rampant in areas adjacent to railroad rights-of-way.
After WW II there was a period of “intensive management” on National Forests that included clear cuts and the cutting of remote old growth “decadent” trees made possible by increased road building followed by plantations and herbicide application. By 1960 the Multiple Use–Sustained Yield Act and in 1964 the Wilderness Act were the first in a series of environmental laws that sought to recreate a healthy forest ecology. Sugar pine is no longer logged in the Tahoe National Forest – even the most business-oriented foresters recognize the extent of the damage done.
Meanwhile we are learning that trees and other plants are connected with each other in numerous ways to promote the stability, or equanimity, of the greater community. Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, studies communications between plants through mycorrhizal networks from one plant to another, usually from a sufficient plant to a plant in need. Simard’s research shows that biological science and indigenous knowledge share some common ground. “The science of plant communication and behavior is only scratching the surface of how nature works, but what we are seeing is nothing short of amazing. This scientific understanding, suggestive of sentience in forests, resonates with indigenous wisdom, which calls for respect and learning from the hitherto unseen law of the forest, our teacher”.
Cabin at Loney Meadows/South Yuba with a shake roof and walls made of split-cedar log uprights. The cabin finally collapsed in the winter of 2018 -2019.
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This is a revised and expanded version of an essay I wrote for Tree Rings/Yuba Watershed Institute a few years ago.
Select Bibliography
Bayard Taylor. Eldorado: or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850).
Ralph L. Beals. The Ethnology of the Nisenan (1933).
John W. Duncan. Maidu Ethnobotany (1961).
Glen Farris. Quality Food: The Quest for Pine Nuts in Northern California (1993).
Kat Anderson. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2005).
David Hunt. The Power of the Acorn: Late Holocene Settlement and Resource Distribution in the Central Sierra (2000).
John B. Leiberg. Forest Conditions in the Northern Sierra Nevada. (1902).
Myron Angel. History of Placer County (1882).
Theodore Judah. Preliminary Report of the Chief Engineer, Central Pacific Railroad (1862).
David Beesley. Crow’s Range: An Environmental History of the Sierra Nevada (2004).
Kevin S. McKelvey & James D. Johnston. Historical Perspectives on Forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Transverse Ranges of Southern California: Forest Conditions at the Turn of the Century (1992).
Swift Berry. Shake Making and Tray Mills in California’s National Forests.(1913).
Turrentine Jackson. History of Tahoe National Forest: 1840-1940: A Cultural Resources Overview History (1982).
Suzanne Simard. Conversations in the Forest: The Roots of Nature’s Equanimity (2015).
