Meet our newest team member, Bob Yeager. Below is his somewhat heartbreaking and inspiring Sequoia story.
Bob acquired his love and respect for the natural environment from his parents who took him and his two sisters of family holidays in natural parks and forests at first in the eastern United States and Canada. Visits to Yellowstone National Park in the Rocky Mountains and to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California instilled a need to live near big mountains and the amazing coastal redwoods and Giant Sequoias and triggered his move from the Washington DC area to San Francisco in his late 20’s.
Fast forward to was 1997, Bob was about to turn 38 and was flying around the country working as a business consultant in the financial services industry. His love of hiking, wild camping and mountaineering led to a search to find a home in one of the many mountain communities in the Sierra Nevada mountains. When he found a cabin in a small community at the end of a steep windy road in Tulare County, CA he knew Sequoia Crest was the place for him. The community of Sequoia Crest consists of about 200 building lots and at the time about 60 homes that sits within the borders of the Alder Creek Giant Sequoia grove. It had been developed by Claude (Sonny) Rouch who had purchased the 600 acre section to log the red fir, white fir, sugar pine and cedar trees that grew alongside the giants.
Jump again to September 12, 2020. For 23 years Bob has hiked, biked and skied amongst the giants and the miles of surrounding forests in what had been designated the Giant Sequoia National Monument in April 2000 as part of the effort to protect the many groves in the area. The Save the Redwoods League has purchased the Alder Creek grove from the Rouch family and become the neighbour of the Sequoia Crest homeowners. Sequoia Crest has grown to having 102 homes. Bob has been living in London since December of 2015 with his wife Uta, an artist and Professor of Fine Arts at Newcastle University. He and his wife spend several months each year visiting their home in Sequoia Crest and all their friends in the community there.
While in London they were watching the daily updates as the Sequioa Complex Fire (aka Castle Fire) moved towards their community. As the fire seemed certain to reach the community, they make a pledge to develop art works to increase awareness of the neglected state of the California forests and to begin planting trees as soon as possible to kick start the process of recovery for the community.
On September 13th the fire destroys 50 homes in Sequoia Crest including theirs, the majority of two nearby communities, miles of forests and nearly half of the Alder Creek Grove.
The pandemic was raging but Bob and Uta flew to the US in December 2020 and initiated conversations with the local USDA Forest Service team responsible for managing the National Monument; with CalFire the state organization that maintains a seed bank and grows seedlings for their replanting projects; and Save the Redwood League who had suffered major fire damage on their property as well. Forest Service and CalFire agree to provide advice and possibly seedlings but admitted it would take until the 2023 planting season before they could organize planting projects. STRL also acknowledged that they would need until 2023 to remove the dead trees and prepare the land for replanting.
David Milarch of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive (‘AATA’) contacted the community and offered 150 7 year old ‘baby giants’ to the community as well as assistance in planting them but there was a problem there as well. The young trees would need protection and watering to survive the first five years of living ‘in the wild’ as their root systems developed. The logical place to plant the trees was on the properties of the people who had lost their homes to the fires and not the people who still had homes in the community. When Bob and Uta learned that the Property Owners Association had declined David’s offer as they did not think what was left of the community could support the planting and caretaking needed they were determined to find a way to change that decision. As Uta began her work on developing a series of art Bob began reaching out to the members of the Sequoia Crest community, both those who had lost their homes and those who had not. He asked everyone if he could plant trees on their property and run irrigation lines to them. He put together a budget and asked everyone to contribute what they could. Gretchen Fitzgerald of the Forest Service made a presentation to those of the community who were interested. On the first evening of October 2021, less than a year after the residents of the Crest were allowed back to the community, they along with the team from AATA planted those little giants. Two years later they are nearly two meters tall and expected to grow more than a meter each year.
Through the rest of 2021 and through the winter months into 2022 Bob worked to organize the next planting event while Uta developed the Fire Complex series of art exhibits in Los Angeles and on Instagram @fire_complex. Bob expanded the scope of the planting to include the other two communities and worked with CalFire to obtain a donation of 6000 seedlings in a mix of giant sequoia, sugar pine and ponderosa pine. CalFire connected him with Terren Brown of the Porterville Rotary club. On the weekend of April 30 – May 1 2022 well over 100 Rotary Club members joined property owners and other volunteers from the area to plant these seedlings on the properties of those who had lost their homes and within a section of the Alder Creek Grove managed by the USFS.
Uta’s photography and moving image works were exhibited on paper and digital billboards in Los Angeles, London, and at COP26 in Glasgow. Here 15 minute multi-channel video work ‘Cull’ was awarded the grand prize at the 2022 Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, the Charles Wollaston Award. The results of the community planting effort organised by Bob and Terren were a critical part of the tour given to member of the US Congress by the USFS that has resulted in the creation of the Save Our Sequoias Act currently moving through channels that would provide as much as $325 million to the USFS for projects to reduce fire risk in the Giant Sequoia National Monument. In the Spring of 2023 the planting efforts in California has been continued through large plantings by Save the Redwoods League and the US Forest Service and Bob and Uta had returned to spending the majority of their time in the Europe.
Bob sharing his story during a talk on site at our most recent Great Reserve planting day.
Bob reached out the Henry Emson of the Great Reserve Foundation in May of 2023. He participated in his first Great Reserve Sequoia tree planting in July before spending August in Sequoia Crest checking in on the results of the plantings there and starting discussion for another planting in Spring of 2025. His current focus is on developing a crowd funding initiative with London based hiking groups and exploring the use of Giant Sequoias as avalanche deterrents by farmers in the Austrian Alps in conjunction with Uta’s current art project that is scheduled to open in April 2024 at In Situ Innsbruck.