SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Tahoe Science students at South Tahoe High School recently put on hard hats, picked up loppers, and put in the kind of work that makes a neighborhood safer.
Across three class periods, students cleared a Forest Service lot on California Ave. of more than 2,000 pounds of forest debris – saplings pulled, pine cones scooped, tree bases exposed, low limbs lopped. The work is called defensible space, and it’s what separates a fire that moves through a forest from a fire that moves into a living room.
Last month marked the fifth anniversary of the Caldor Fire – the blaze that reached the too-close-for-comfort edges of the Tahoe Basin and forced the entire town to evacuate on August 30, 2021. Those memories make every trash can full of pine cones feel like it matters.
Crews from Lake Valley Fire and the South Lake Tahoe Fire Rescue worked shoulder to shoulder with our students, walking them through the details of creating healthy space in the forest. How high to limb a tree. Which saplings stay and which come down. Why decaying matter on the forest floor is not the enemy…it holds moisture and slows spread. One surprising practice many students learned was that we are supposed to leave up to three inches of pine needles on the forest floor, within Zone 2, when performing defensible space.
Every truckload of debris was hauled to our partners at South Tahoe Refuse, who offer free disposal for defensible space clearing done by Tahoe Science classes.
This is the kind of hands-on learning that opens doors to a forestry career for some students, while also giving all of them a chance to care for the forest they grew up in. They left dirty, tired, and a little proud of leaving a place better than they found it. This is Career Technical Education at South Tahoe High. Not a bad way to spend the school day.
-By Erika Mathews, South Tahoe High CTE Specialist
