Reforestation not taking hold in land burned by Station fire
Saturday, April 7, 2012 - 23:30
in Earth & Climate
Last April, U.S. Forest Service crews planted nearly a million pine and fir trees across thousands of acres scorched clean by the devastating 2009 blaze. Most of them shriveled up and died within months, as skeptics had predicted.Federal forester Steve Bear stood on a fire-stripped slope of the San Gabriel Mountains last week, trying to find just one pine sapling, any sapling, pushing through the bright green bedspread of vegetation.