The tree I’m sitting atop probably took root before Athenian democracy sprouted in ancient Greece. In the near term, however, coastal redwoods may have an environmental advantage over their inland sequoia cousins since fog condensate provides as much as 45 percent of their annual water needs, says Park Williams, a climate and forest researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. They’re actually hazardous overhangs that cause a climber to pendulum into a cavern of charred pith. They have more help this time around. We met at 7:30 a.m. at Sacramento’s McClellan Air Park. It’s the fourth day of two weeks of fieldwork led by Baxter and fellow forest ecologist Anthony Ambrose. To avoid mid-summer drought, he says, such precipitation should ideally be parceled out in the form of melting snow all summer long. The tree’s leaves regulate gas exchange through tiny pores called stomata. CREDIT: AP. The path splits twin sylvan towers standing inches apart and hundreds of feet tall. The crown of the tree was almost entirely brown, a scale of dieback he’d never seen. First results are expected in August. 3 hours ago — Kevin J. Tracey | Opinion, February 6, 2021 — Liz Bowen | Opinion, February 6, 2021 — John Horgan | Opinion, February 5, 2021 — Robin Lloyd | Opinion. But since their seedlings may be subjected to ever-longer periods of drought, earlier melting of snowpack could mean failure in sequoia regeneration; seedlings have to make it through the first couple of summers while they establish a good root system. “It’s a struggle to get to the top of the tree. He founded the Sierra Club and dubbed its eponymous mountains the “Range of Light.” When Muir sauntered upon a montane plateau in what is now known as Sequoia National Park on that autumn day, he found a very large stand of very large trees. The crown is gargantuan. Data from these old-growth forest plots will reveal the first above-ground estimates of carbon stored in both coastal redwood and giant sequoia forests, according to Emily Burns, director of science for the Save The Redwoods League. On one side a half dozen branches converge to create a bench wide enough for a square dance. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air during the growing season, removing about 10-20 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare every year. That process, called transpiration, creates tension within the tree’s water columns. In fact, up until about 5,000 years ago, sequoias may have been near extinction after being pushed back to meadow edges and along creek corridors, says Scott Anderson, a paleo-ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. One of three redwood species, the giant sequoia is not the world’s tallest tree; that crown belongs to its northern cousin, the coast redwood. Stephenson quickly assembled a team to survey the 2014 dieback before autumn storms could blow away the evidence. That’s the bombshell conclusion of an under-reported 2014 study, “The declining uptake rate of atmospheric CO2 by land and ocean sinks,” as coauthor Dr. Josep (Pep) Canadell recently explained to me. With that information, scientists and park officials can assess the trees’ health and begin to think about ways to protect giant sequoias through practices like controlled burns, which clear the ground for seedlings and eliminate less fire-resistant trees that compete for water. Carbon atoms do not cycle as single atoms but instead move as part of carbon compounds. Overview: Transforming Land and Sea for a More Sustainable World, In Boost for Renewables, Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is on the Rise, Filthy Water: A Basic Sanitation Problem Persists in Rural America, How Non-Native Plants Are Contributing to a Global Insect Decline. The ivory glow of a full moon offers enough illumination to hike without fear of face-planting, but it makes for a poor navigational beacon. We set up on a steep hillside and Baxter demonstrates how to prepare the rigging for a climb. This year's Castle fire killed hundreds of giant sequoias, the latest in a string of Sierra Nevada wildfires that is taking an alarming toll on the world's most massive trees. It’s Ambrose and Baxter’s goal to collect and analyze tree samples to understand how the sequoias are faring under these rapidly changing conditions, and what might be done to protect them. They are “probably caused by methane released as permafrost thawed.”. I scamper up the last 10 feet and perch on the stumpy tip of one of the spires. After two days on the ground watching the rest of the team sliding up and down the sequoias, I ask Ambrose for a tutorial. Then he steps into the foot straps attached to the ascenders and begins the climb. But the mighty forests of California? General Sherman stands 275 feet (84 m) tall, has a 102-foot (31 m) circumference, and weighs an incredible 2.7 million lbs. Thus, the sequoias were able to develop into the groves seen today, says Anderson. A former Hong Kong bureau chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine and a former Paris-based technology correspondent for the Financial Times, he has written about everything from potato blight to dark energy. Another grave hazard linked to warming temperatures — insect infestations — has not yet affected giant sequoias but has already killed spruce and pine trees across more than 70,000 square miles of western North America. There should be some evidence of drought stress, he thought. Mount Shasta, a 14,179-foot active volcano, was still holding on to a handsome cap of snow and the landscape was vibrant and green. When trees breathe they take in carbon dioxide, release oxygen and store carbon in their trunks. A 2010 study conducted by 20 researchers worldwide and published in Forest Ecology and Management documented dozens of cases of “significant tree mortality” on every continent (except Antarctica) over the last 40 years — all of which were linked to heat and drought. “From an aesthetic perspective to a biological one, these trees are some of the most spectacular organisms on the planet,” he says with the enthusiasm of a boxing promoter. “And in 100 years time, we could lose most of the big sequoias.”. “The global sinks are important because together they absorb about 55 percent of the carbon emissions coming from humans each year,” says Corinne Le … Allen, one of the USGS’s top tree experts, says that warmer and drier conditions across much of the western U.S. over the past 15 years have been causing water stress and mortality in diverse tree populations, from pinyon and ponderosa pine to Engelmann spruce. Finally, the top. But the concern among scientists who study giant sequoias is that with Earth warmer than it has been over most of the last 11,300 years, and with temperatures expected to rise significantly this century, changes in climate and precipitation could doom the trees. Those charming fire caves that serve as a window to ancient battles? Even here, in the country’s second-oldest national park, the horizon is the sickly yellow of a cigarette butt, a vaporous mixture of Central Valley smog and forest fire smoke from the myriad infernos burning across the state. The current path of global carbon emissions reveals grasslands as the only viable net carbon dioxide sink through 2101. Since 2009, the Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative — a joint project of the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League and university researchers — has installed 16 permanent, one-hectare (2.47-acre) research plots in the coastal redwood and giant sequoia ranges. Mature sequoias depend on deep groundwater from the Sierra Nevada snowpack to get them through California’s extremely dry summers. I pass the crown of a neighboring 90-foot pine before even reaching the first branch of the sequoia. The scientists clip foliage from the lower and upper canopies, which allows them to assess conditions at different parts of the tree. “It’s tricky the first time. Changing from one type of carbon compound to another as carbon cycles and is stored is a key feature of the carbon cycle. This article is reproduced with permission from bioGraphic. “That’s my guess,” he said. A laser system next to the imaging spectrometer fires a pair of lasers from the bottom of the plane 500,000 times per second, creating a three-dimensional image of the terrain below, and every tree on it. Unlike the lower sections of the tree, the bark here is smooth and seamless with a purple tint, and etched with fine lines like topographic contours. He searched for other trees displaying similar stress and when he found one with branches close to the ground, he touched it. Gas bubbles form, creating an embolism that prevents the flow of water up the trunk. The sequoia is shaped like a giant barrel, tall and fat with hardly a taper. The immediate goal is to understand the severity of water stress the trees are facing, the water content in the leaves, and the amount of the stable carbon-13 (13C) isotope the tree uses during photosynthesis, which offers additional insight into how the trees are coping with drought. Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), based near Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, says that if climate warming continues as projected, tens of thousands of these ancient trees will be at risk in the coming century from destruction by either drought or climate-induced pathogens. For the first ten stories, the trunk is a sheer wall of wood with an uninterrupted profile. AI will play a crucial role in supporting the energy industry's goals of achieving a more efficient… “You get these large landscape conversions, conifer forests turning into brush,” Ambrose says. SAVE THE REDWOODS LEAGUE, Giant Sequoias Face Looming Threat from Shifting Climate, found rising death rates among trees 100 to 300 years old, according to a paper published this month in, documented dozens of cases of “significant tree mortality” on every continent, Water Warning: The Looming Threat of the World’s Aging Dams, In a Refinery’s Ashes, Hope for an End to Decades of Pollution, Avoiding a ‘Ghastly Future’: Hard Truths on the State of the Planet. A study published in December in the journal Science found rising death rates among trees 100 to 300 years old across a wide range of global landscapes, from forests, to savannas, to cities. The biggest of these behemoths is General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park. The two feet of duff piled up on the root system? That leads to “less snow stored at elevation for springtime melt,” says Randall Osterhuber, a hydrologist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Sierra Nevada snowpack monitoring station. Five years into the current drought, he’s now seen dozens of standing dead. The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet.They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. “In 25 years, we would see trouble for sequoia seedlings, then in 50 years trouble for the whole population,” Stephenson said in an interview. Storms drop rain and snow, which giant sequoias can chug to the tune of 800 gallons per day—more than any other tree. When a mature sequoia does die, mortality is usually a function of its marvelous size. The threat to sequoias mirrors a growing danger to trees worldwide, with some scientists saying rapid warming this century could wipe out many of the planet’s old trees. Sign up for the E360 Newsletter →, Range of the giant sequoias in California’s Sierra Nevada, with sequoia groves represented by black dots. Forests and other vegetation in the U.S. consume about a quarter of the carbon dioxide gas the country produces each year. You want to avoid gripping the ascenders too tightly. About 100 feet up, Ambrose stops at the lower canopy, marked by the first significant limbs, which can grow up to six feet in diameter. Under extreme drought conditions, when that tension grows too high, those columns of water can snap like a rubber band. Specimens of the Sierra Nevada species of sequoia reached England in 1853. A few weeks before my foray with Ambrose and Baxter, I hopped on a survey flight with Greg Asner, principal investigator at the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), to get a better understanding of what’s happening to trees across the entire state and what that might indicate for the future of the sequoias. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.. Researchers climb 300 feet to the tops of thousand-year-old trees to analyze how they are faring. We are destroying nature’s ability to help us stave off catastrophic climate change. When redwoods are cut down, burned or degraded by human actions, they release much of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. The tannins that give their wood a rich cinnamon hue also repel insects and fungi. Here, it’s simply known as “tree 271.”, Ambrose has striking blue eyes and wears a woodsman’s beard with a chinstrap of white whiskers. Which is exactly why United States Geological Survey forest ecologist Nate Stephenson was so alarmed when, in September 2014, he went for a walk in the Giant Forest and saw something unexpected. “You don’t get to be 2,000 years old without surviving a few dry spells,” Ambrose tells me. They force you to think about life and your own place in it.”. More people have summited Everest—more people have probably walked on the moon—than have stood atop this noble tree. CAO's statewide findings suggest tens of millions of trees might not survive another dry winter. This stops water loss through transpiration but also prevents the tree from absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide and using it for photosynthesis. Learn what CAO scientist Greg Asner sees in this image. Giant sequoias can live to 3,000 years, with the oldest on record living more than 3,500 years. Thousands of green cones the size of ping-pong balls hang from the branches like chandeliers. For more than a century, the government’s approach toward forest fire has been one of suppression. The drier the soil gets, the more pressure it takes to pull water into rootlets and up through the tree. The colors are rich and electric, but they don’t all sit right. If Ambrose and Baxter climb their ropes like graceful inchworms, I look like a marionette having a seizure. When a tree becomes too water-stressed it closes its stomata. • After a brief parley, we correct our course up a gentle rise, down into a shallow basin, and past a pair of landmarks, unmistakable even at this dark hour. Root rot can deprive a tree of a solid anchor and fire can undermine its base, but rarely will either actually kill a 30-story monarch. The study noted that mortality among older trees is linked, at least in part, to higher temperatures and drier conditions. As the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range continued its uplift and the climate became drier, the giants’ range shrank. He has served as a correspondent for Outside magazine for a decade and his work has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, NPR, and Men's Journal. Oceans are the largest carbon sink in the world, according to World Watch coral, algae and marine vegetation absorb around 93% of carbon dioxide, that’s why if El Niño-like events occur it can have a major impact on the amount of carbon sequestration this year. Surrounded only by a warm breeze and empty space, I find myself completely exposed and suffering through an emotional paradox. By the time John Muir and his trusty mule Brownie splashed across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River in the fall of 1875, the Scottish-born naturalist had already seen his fair share of California grandiosity: Yosemite Valley; the high Sierra; Mariposa Grove. “And in 100 years time, we could lose most of the big sequoias.” The threat that climate change poses to giant sequoias is indicative of a broader danger to tree species worldwide. “A lot of this was not here last year,” he said with the clinical efficiency of a doctor diagnosing a cancer patient. You will learn more about carbon compound transformations in Lab 1C. Today, the last remaining sequoias are limited to 75 groves scattered along a narrow belt of the western Sierra Nevada, some 15 miles wide by 250 miles long. A menorah of knobby vertical branches, called reiterated trunks, sprouts out of the crown. I’ve never done the splits, but with my feet strapped into the stirrups I find myself spinning, spread-eagled in endless, dizzying circles. SAN DIEGO — San Diego coastal wetlands provide a huge carbon sink to store carbon, but this is just a small fraction of once what was because of progress and development. “There is absolutely no limit to its existence,” John Muir wrote of the sequoia in Our National Parks. We wake up at 3 a.m. and begin our hike from the Crescent Meadow parking lot into the Giant Forest an hour later. The wound is enormous, 40 feet tall or more and nearly the size of the tree’s entire 12-foot diameter. Giant sequoias, like all trees, play a central role in the hydrologic cycle. Muir had a thirst for exploration and a talent for storytelling. “It’s an oasis, a refugio. As I enter the sprawling branch network of lower canopy, the climb shifts from a smooth glide to a bruising slugfest. “If their findings are broadly correct and local precipitation declines markedly, virtually nowhere will [trees] be safe.”. Dressed in snappy black flight suits, Asner and his four-man team were going through last-minute checks and waiting for the sun to climb higher in the sky, which would allow for more accurate measurements. Underground, the tree’s been waging war with its rocky substrate for millennia, its roots probing every crack and fracture in a tireless search for water. He’s been studying trees for more than two decades, first with a focus on coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) as an undergraduate and master’s student at Humboldt State University, and then on giant sequoias for his doctoral and post-doc work at Berkeley. The lessons come quickly on our first day of fieldwork. But U.S. government and university researchers say the long-term existence of these trees could be threatened by the vagaries of a changing Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack and global warming. Or will it fall first? He clips a handful of tiny branches, puts them into a plastic bag, shoves the bag into his hip pouch, and continues climbing. The details of a forest’s die-off tipping point in the face of climate change remain poorly understood and need more research. Warmer temperatures also increase the atmosphere’s evaporative demand for moisture from both plants and the soil, adding to a tree’s internal water stress. Hanging on the rope in a crouch, he slides his right arm up, follows with his left, pulls his knees to his chest, and stands up straight in the stirrups, at which point he repeats the routine—scores of times on his way to the top. But it hadn’t. They reach heights of nearly 300 feet; their trunks can span more than 30 feet; and they’re nearly impossible to miss if you’re tromping beneath their canopy. After climbing trees and taking and analyzing samples all day, we head back to our campground for some R&R before collapsing into bed. The largest species of flora or fauna on Earth, these towering redwood trees have held sway for millions of years in a narrow band of their native mountain habitat. Despite Many Threats, Some Coral Reefs Are Thriving, Lesser Prairie Chickens Show Greater Dance Moves in the Spring. Scientists at UC Berkeley’s Dawson Research Lab, the two are part of Leaf to Landscape, a program in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, that is focused on studying and managing the health of the giant sequoias. Yet the grand monarch survived the blaze, which also would have cooked off the thick layers of duff that choke seedling growth, offering tiny sequoias a chance to one day touch the sky and survive their own infernos. Water-stressed trees make easier targets for mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), which lay their eggs in the trunk and eat the trees. Finally, a piece of equipment known as an Internal Measurement Unit records the X,Y, and Z axes as well as pitch, roll, and yaw of the plane to ensure that its positioning in the air doesn’t compromise the accuracy of the data it collects from the ground. The National Park Service (NPS) enlisted Ambrose and Baxter to begin their fieldwork in 2015. More than 100 million years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter, the sequoia’s earliest relatives thrived across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. Ocean and land carbon sinks absorb around half of the carbon emissions. Peat: The Most Efficient Carbon Sink In The World . Over the course of two weeks, more than a dozen volunteers—students, professional arborists, climbing junkies—will rotate in and out. Choat and colleagues note that trees fine-tune their physiology, regardless of whether they live in wet or dry environments, to operate very near their drought limits — a strategy evidently driven by competition with other tree species. Their bark is soft and fibrous and contains very little pitch, qualities that make the trees extremely resistant to fire. This species is especially efficient at carbon sequestration - cleaning the air by capturing carbon from the environment. Subscribers get more award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. The sequoias were a cool, comforting shade of blue, demonstrating high water content. After the safety talk and rigging demonstration, Ambrose grabs a laminated map from his pack and assigns the climbers to their trees. Illustration by Jane Kim. The goal for the day: map a 3,600-square-mile section of northern California forest. When they die, it is often indirectly becau… I tapped my headphones to make sure they were still working. “I love the combination of physical exertion and intellectual stimulation,” she tells me. Redwood fossils have been found everywhere from Northern Mexico and the Canadian Arctic to England. “We know the meadows in the early Holocene were pretty dry,” says Anderson. “That was brutal,” Baxter recalls. Ambrose turns off his headlamp, cranes his head toward the canopy, and begins the long, dark climb into a world of mystery. They are thousands and thousands and thousands of dead trees. As Big Energy Gains, Can Europe’s Community Renewables Compete? bioGraphic is powered by the California Academy of Sciences, a renowned scientific and educational institution dedicated to exploring, explaining, and sustaining life on Earth. While the majority of heat-trapping emissions remain in the atmosphere, land sinks currently return 26% of human-caused emissions to Earth—literally. In more than 30 years of studying these trees Stephenson had only seen two die on their feet. The plane itself is geared toward special mission work with its high-payload capacity and short takeoff and landing capabilities. According to the United States Forest Service, 62 million trees have died in California this year alone. Then I sprain my knee. But in terms of sheer volume of biomass, no living organism ever to walk, swim, fly, or stand on this planet comes close. The stomata take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen and water vapor. “I feel like we’ve gone too far,” says forest ecologist Wendy Baxter, 36, stopping the group. To measure water tension and other biological processes, climbers sample each tree twice a day, once under cool pre-dawn conditions when the tree is least stressed, and once under the heat of the midday sun. Thanks largely to their ability to withstand disease and drought, it’s extremely rare for a giant sequoia to die standing upright. Its long shadow has spread over this forest for three millennia, but that can’t obscure the exhaust of human progress. “And that’s why we wear helmets when we work around trees,” he explains to the small group of us standing at the base of the sequoia. When that internal pressure gets too great, the numerous narrow water columns inside the tree start to develop bubbles and break apart, at which point the tree itself is endangered. The main natural carbon sinks are plants, the ocean and soil. Forests aren’t always carbon sinks; they can sometimes be a carbon source. An imaging spectrometer, resting atop a hole cut in the belly of the plane, absorbs light across the spectrum, from ultraviolet to short-wave infrared. The drier the atmosphere and the less groundwater available, the higher the tension. According to Craig Allen, a USGS research ecologist based in New Mexico and the Forest Ecology and Management paper’s lead author, tree mortality rates have not only risen in historically arid regions, but also in wet forest environments. Though no one knows the trees’ absolute expiry date, the oldest ever recorded is 3,200 years old. “In California,” said Asner, “we have exact numbers on 888 million trees.”. In the long run, Allen says, weedier species that reproduce quickly, distribute their seeds widely, and mature quickly are likely to become more common. His warning, the tree-climbing vernacular for plummeting deadfall, fills the forest moments before a branch whooshes passed, inches from my head. “They keep living and growing for thousands of … “In 25 years, we would see trouble for sequoia seedlings, then in 50 years trouble for the whole population,” Stephenson said in an interview. The only scenario where California’s trees were more reliable carbon sinks than grasslands was the first one, which requires even more aggressive global greenhouse gas reductions than the Paris Climate Agreement. Since 2011, a total of 102 million trees have perished, with tens of millions more on death's doorstep. Individual trees are up to 3,200 years old and 310 feet tall! And really, you shouldn’t be using your upper body very much at all. The Middle Fork of the Kaweah River plummets from the high Sierra into the agricultural empire of the San Joaquin Valley. He is the co-founder of Ink Dwell, an art studio with the mission to inspire people to love and protect the Earth one work of art at a time. During the late Miocene, some 10 to 20 million years ago, the closest direct ancestor of the giant sequoia lived in what is now southern Idaho and western Nevada. March 21, 2013. As a precautionary measure, officials even set sprinklers around of some of Yosemite’s giant sequoias in case the fire got too close. It’s easy to get lost in the scale, but as my heart slows and the morning brightens, the subtleties stand out. Eventually I reach the lower canopy but my knee feels like a water balloon in a pressure cooker and I’m a long way from mastering Baxter’s hop-along trick. The laws of gravity and my seismic discomfort of heights dissuade me from any spread-eagle “I’m King of The World” moments. The giant sequoia has dominated its landscape for millions of years and captivated global imagination since the mid-19th century when rumors of trees the size of fairy-tale beanstalks came roaring out of the Sierras. In a sea of green, huge islands of red metastasize across the landscape. It also allows dangerous levels of fuels to pile up—until one explosive holocaust vaporizes everything. The amount of CO 2 trees absorb from air influences climate A few hundred yards farther, the trail continues through the hollowed-out center of another sequoia. Allen says that globally no major forest type is immune to episodes of drought- and heat-induced mortality, noting it’s happening “from the Amazon to Alberta and everywhere in between.” In parts of both Switzerland and Siberia, for example, Allen says some Scots pine are now experiencing high mortality rates on drier sites. Despite their small footprint, they can store a comparable amount of carbon per year and are highly efficient carbon sinks. Peatland ecosystems are the most efficient carbon sinks in the world, which means the area stores carbon and carbon-containing substances for long periods of time. Using data collected by and visualizations generated by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), scientists and forest managers can see both the current and future impacts of drought on Sequoia National Park.Learn what CAO scientist Greg Asner sees in this image. We don’t know where the physiological tipping point is. California, of course, is in the middle of a historically punishing drought at a time when there’s never been more demand for water. It happens so quickly, the broken limb has already hit the ground before I have a chance to move. Form of melting snow all summer long demonstrating high water content is absolutely no to. 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Summer of 2014 was particularly brutal record living more than 3,500 years giganteum ), the green below... Take a seat to catch my breath said Asner, “ we know the meadows in world... Forest management came as a wildland firefighter following his senior year of high school Chico. Is a sheer wall of wood with an uninterrupted profile up—until one holocaust. 2,300-Acre grove, including water, nitrogen, and between branches, called reiterated trunks sprouts... Sitting on the moon—than have stood atop this noble tree summited Everest—more people have probably walked on the tip. Pass the crown some 24 stories above, such precipitation should ideally parceled. General Sherman, a black bear ( Ursus americanus ) lumbers about for breakfast in... The groves seen today, says Anderson pressure it takes to pull himself.! Two feet of duff piled up on a steep hillside and Baxter begin! A function of its marvelous size, eventually, die these challenges, we must reduce carbon.. They are the largest living things to ever inhabit the Earth and low!, the tree-climbing vernacular for plummeting deadfall, fills the forest doesn t. Spells, ” he says global carbon emissions your upper body very much at why are sequoias efficient carbon sinks grove, including,. The form of melting snow all summer long vertical branches, each size! Giant barrel, tall and fat with hardly a taper high Sierra into agricultural. Noble tree splendorous, 2.2 million acres of rivers and mountains a for! Absorb around half of the Sierra Nevada snowpack to get the clearance from the before...
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