Redwood Reader

(A guest book is available to sign for Randy until August 7th at www.times-standard.com)
Randy Stemler, a dedicated restorationist and a cofounder and powerful voice for the Mattole Restoration Council, passed away last month. Randy was a victim of lung cancer although he was a non-smoker. He leaves behind his wife, Amy, and two children, four-year-old daughter Chloe Cascade and three month old son Conrad Reid. This April,he was honored as one of the first Lifetime Achievement Award winners from the Salmonid Restoration Federation.
I had several projects that Randy helped with. In the beginning, we didn’t know the MRC people but we had a lot of legacy damage from previous land practices. Randy walked the land and taught us about landslides and debris flows. We saw how much of the problems were from further up the watershed than our property line. We had already been tree planting for several years. We did a lot of other work he said probably wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. In 1992 we worked with Gabrielle Roach and Mickey Dulas to have the old Middle Creek bridge removed before scour caused the rotting timbers to deliver its foot of roadbed gravel into the creek. Big storms that December caused the plan to be called off even as the very thing we were worried about occurred.
I had been trying to get machine time to move Middle Creek away from a failing bank on my property. The problem, besides permits, was that we needed multiple landowners involved. Middle Creek bridge satisfied that need but was far from the top on needed repairs after the storm, and so that proposal went by the boards. I began attending MRC board meetings to figure a better way. Randy attended many of these meetings. A few years later, as we were still planting trees privately, I was asked for suggested locations for Douglas fir plantings with Mattole seed stored at Davis and grown for bare root planting at Smith River Nursery. I suggested the burned areas on my own property and it seemed like a done deal. But when we went to lay the job out we found access very difficult. We spent several days walking the various access points. None could accommodate the truck delivering the trees. Workers would have to walk in about a mile. We tried every neighbor and possible entry point. IN the end we fixed a portion of the main road. The truck stopped short of the property. From here we hired two neighbors with four wheelers to make multiple trips to the planting site to get the trees there.
The rest of the job was straightforward. We had planned to allow planters to stay at the cabin but they decided to commute since most lived in the area. Local jobs are a constant theme in neighborhood restoration work. 17776 trees went into about thirty acres of burnt land in about two weeks. I was impressed with the thoroughness of the preparation, including flagging the routes, planting areas and boundaries of the job, workers, insurance, equipment and coordination.
My next experience with Randy centered on seed collection to restore the frozen store at Davis, since twenty years had passed since a good seed year. Randy asked if we knew of good trees and we suggested our neighborhood again. Randy studied up and we got several good climbers to shake cones down. But we had poor experiences here due to low seed counts in the cones, possibly from poor pollination, and an extremely high count of damaged cones with insect larva destroying the seed before it matured. While many cones had some good seed, for commercial collection it was inferior. Randy always made sure everyone understood all aspects of these jobs.
The next year Randy had hired a professional seed collector from Sacramento. For some reason this was a bigger year than the year before and the job was accomplished and the seed shipped to Davis for continuing reforestation efforts in the Mattole. This is one of the two collections mentioned in the article about closing the Davis nursery program. We wondered if the trees fake the bugs out with a sacrifice year and a better year behind it, but it is all speculation.
Before Randy left MRC he followed up on previous tree plantings. He stopped by our house in Eureka to ask if the map of previous plantings was right, it didn’t seem like it to him. We pointed out that none of the “planted” areas shown was even on our property. He asked if that’s where the trees had gone. We told him emphatically that the trees were and still are on our property. He said we were excellent watershed stewards and we felt that that said a lot, considering the source.
Randy worked on many projects in the Mattole and Humboldt County. One area you can see his work is in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park. At Calf Creek he put in the rock armor to defend the banks. Further up he was responsible for the redwood tree planting just beyond Albee Creek. I am only familiar with a small sample of his work, but it will last more than my lifetime. Thank you, Randy.