If the giant sequoia is dying out, why so many seedlings and saplings?

In a Sierra Nevada canyon all but incinerated in the 2021 KNP Complex fire, a new forest of California’s beloved giant sequoias is now growing. Only not yet one that is actually giant.

The seedlings and saplings are mostly knee-high to chest-high and mixed with thickets of ceanothus and other post-fire brush growing amid the true giants that stand dead among them.

The fire killed almost every tree in this section of the Redwood Mountain Grove in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, reputedly the world’s largest stand of sequoias.

The new trees number in the thousands — at least 4,000 per acre or as many as 20,000, depending on who is counting. A few rise above head-height, the most energetic sentinels of regeneration.

What will become of this nursery in the wild in the next hundred years, or thousand, is the crux of a scientific and policy dispute. Starkly different visions of how the grove will recover in the long run have implications on how forest managers should act today.

The KNP Complex fire burned through all 3,000 acres of the Redwood Mountain Grove. Due to the quirks of weather — and possibly to prescribed burns that had cleared out excess vegetation — most of the grove survived without any disfigurement visible today. But on the southern edge, flames rose into the treetops and killed almost every tree over 300 acres. Scientists see the high-intensity burn scar as key to the future of the planet’s largest tree. But there is a vast divide in what they say they are seeing in it.

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1. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif., United States – October 21: These giant sequoia saplings sprung to life in a moderate burn area of the Redwood Mountain Grove as seen on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif. 2. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif., United States – October 21: The SQF Complex fire burned four years ago and scorched these giant sequoias in the Redwood Mountain Grove in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks seen on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025.

One vision is bleak: The new crop will dwindle rapidly, leading to a depleted grove and possible extinction due to drought, a warming climate and the fire-enhancing effects of a century of fire suppression.

“These environmental shifts are altering the delicate balance that has allowed sequoias to thrive for millennia,” the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, an alliance of federal, tribal, state and local land management agencies, warned in an online post.

The other vision sees the trees recovering from fire as they have for millions of years: The saplings will dwindle in number but grow in size to become the giants — only one or two per acre, given the space their massive crowns take up — that define a mature sequoia grove.

In practical terms, the disagreement boils down to the question: Should humans intervene or let nature take it course?

As a cure for past errors, the stewards of federal land now pursue a robust policy of logging in the national forests and prescribed burns and aggressive tree planting there and in the national parks.

Some environmentalists contend that the forest is its own best steward and doesn’t need more human tinkering to cure a century of mismanagement.

“What these groves need is fire, more than anything,” said fire ecologist Chad Hanson, who has studied the Redwood Mountain Grove recovery. “Everything I’m seeing out here tells me this is ecologically beneficial and restorative and these fires are bringing something back into the system that was missing for over a century.”

While Hanson’s organization, the John Muir Project, supports prescribed burns, it has sued in federal court to block the National Park Service from conducting aggressive seeding of areas of high sequoia mortality in the KNP Complex fire. The lawsuit is still pending, but the planting went on as scheduled. Now tens of thousands of nursery-grown seedlings are mixed with the hundreds of thousands that germinated naturally.

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1. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif., United States – October 21: Chad Hanson, Ph.D., Forest and Fire Ecologist with the John Muir Project, hops over a log during a visit to the Redwood Mountain Grove in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to ascertain regeneration of the giant sequoias in different burn areas from the SQF Complex fire which burned four years ago, seen on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. (Tomas Ovalle/For The Times) (Tomas Ovalle/For The Times) 2. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif., United States – October 21: A giant sequoia cone sets on the forest floor in the Redwood Mountain Grove on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif. Giant sequoia cones are serotinous, which means that fire on the forest floor causes them to dry out, open and release their seeds. This adaptation helps to ensure generational success. 3. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif., United States – October 21: Chad Hanson, Ph.D., Forest and Fire Ecologist with the John Muir Project, examines a very young giant sequoia sapling in the Redwood Mountain Grove in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks where he has researched the growth of the giant sequoias after the SQF Complex fire which burned four years ago, on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025.

The National Park Service sees planting as insurance against the uneven distribution and high mortality of the naturally sprouting trees. Hanson sees potential harm from foreign seed not adapted to the micro-climate, the contamination by nursery fungi and disruption of the native soil by planting crews trampling around.

The Redwood Mountain Grove at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks was devastated by the KNP Complex and Windy fires.

(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

Two Tales of a Grove

To see both points of view firsthand, I walked into the grove with Hansen in the fall and repeated the six-mile round trip on an unusually warm December day with a five-member escort from the National Park Service and U.S. Geological Service for the opposing point of view.

Los Angeles Times reporter Doug Smith on a hike in October 2025 in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

The two treks covered roughly the same ground but branched off to different micro zones within an area of the grove that was more or less burned flat.

In an area of several hundred acres, a few paces in any direction can be the difference between a narrative of hope and one of despair.

Hanson crossed Redwood Creek on a fallen log at the northern edge of the high severity burn, an elastic term that generally means an area where most of the trees are dead.

The John Muir Project’s Chad Hanson examines saplings in the Redwood Mountain Grove.

We quickly walked into a bed of knee-high sequoias saplings so thick I couldn’t estimate their number.

Hanson, who spends much of his life crawling through underbrush to count trees, plunged ahead into stands of chest-high ceanothus, pointing out sequoias camouflaged in the pervasive post-fire brush. As we moved deeper into the high severity burn, we came to spots where there were fewer sequoias, but they had grown taller.

Hanson let out a gleeful howl when he found one rising 2 feet above his head, representing 2 feet of growth every year since the KNP Complex fire.

The pattern illustrated his grand conception of the sequoia life cycle.

“In a mature giant sequoia grove, like what we’ve been hiking through, on average you’ve got two to three large sequoias per acre and very little regeneration,” he said.

A high-intensity fire every 200 or 300 years releases a multitude of seeds from the dying giants. It clears the earth of duff and debris that would interfere with germination, leaves behind a nutrient-rich layer of ash to fertilize the seedlings for years to come, and opens the canopy to sunlight the young trees need to thrive. Competition for light, water and nutrients immediately sets in. The new trees dwindle as the weak die and the strong thrive.

“And they will continue to dwindle with every century until you get the next high-intensity fire that will kill not all but most of them, and then you get a new giant sequoia stand and it will be completely dominant for another 200 years or so,” Hanson said.

On that timescale, human intervention is irrelevant.

Flames rose into the treetops and killed almost every tree over 300 acres on the southern edge of the Redwood Mountain Grove in the Sierra.

(Gary Kazanjian / Associated Press)

That’s a bet that Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, is not willing to take with the nearly 40% of the world’s giant sequoias under his care.

“If we don’t do a good stewardship here, or we say, well, we’re going to be totally hands off in wilderness areas, 40% of the population we’re taking off the table, and that is at risk,” Jordan said during the rebuttal hike.

To counter Hanson’s theory, Jordan assembled a team including two forest scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, a Park Service forester and a public affairs officer. Jordan used an analogy to make the case that high-intensity fire is not uniform. There’s “torch,” at the high end of high intensity, when flames rise into the forest crown and incinerate everything. And there’s “scorch,” at the low end, when radiant heat, not flame, kills the crown but leaves dead foliage in place.

“The difference between the torch and the scorch is key to this whole thing of regeneration,” he said.

His point was that the abundant regeneration that Hanson shows off represents scorch, where heat opened the cones to release the multitude of seeds. In the torch zone, he said, the flames killed the seeds along with the foliage, leaving little regeneration.

On the hike, Lukas Bell-Dereske, science coordinator/ecologist for the parks, led us past the log Hanson had crossed to an area that the map indicated would be in the torch zone. It was selected for planting because of the sparse natural regeneration. Bell-Dereske pointed out some seedlings strategically located in moist and protected spots to give them maximum chance to survive.

Recalling my experience with Hanson, I suggested we go off-trail up the brushy slope. As we pushed our way through, saplings appeared on all sides, hidden until we came within a few feet. How many? Not a lot, but not a few either. In a 2023 census of 69 preselected sites in the grove, Hanson counted about 2,600 trees per acre in one plot and 14,000 in another.

Either way, their fate lies in an unforeseeable future.

“The question everybody wants answered we can’t answer because we don’t have the data to do it,” said Adrian Das, research ecologist with the Western Ecological Research Center, as he stood amid the ceanothus. That question: “How many seedlings do you need so if you lost 50 giant sequoias, how many seedlings do you need to get back 50 thousand-year-old giant sequoias?”

In Das’ view, that includes some planted by human hands. Hanson says the answer is none.

At its worst, discourse over the fate of Sequoiadendron giganteum is an academic fistfight. At its best, it’s poetry trying to make sense of the unknowable.

“I think the ecosystem is speaking very loudly,” Hanson said.