Successful 2024 Fall Planting Season a Wrap

Thanks for a great planting season!

Three inches of snow outside and freezing temperatures in the forecast. Planting season is over! That's OK, as we planted over 7,000 trees over the past month! Thanks to all of our amazing partners and over 700 volunteers! We enjoyed a fun, productive planting season with only one mega wet planting day!

We kicked off our fall plantings along Pioneer Trail in South Lake Tahoe, where the U.S. Forest Service conducted a prescribed understory burn in the spring. The burn provides ideal conditions and openings for our 240 sugar pines to thrive. California State Parks also planted sugar pine seedlings in their most recent prescribed burn at Sugar Pine Point State Park this fall. Thanks to CalParks Forester, Jack Harvey for coordinating and planting 480 seedlings with his crew. 

Our biggest planting event this season took place at Sierra-at-Tahoe's Annual Clean Up Day. We planted about 500 Jeffrey pines and 500 sugar pines with the help of 200 volunteers. It was wonderful to see everyone so eager and happy to plant seedlings to help restore the Caldor Fire burn scar at Sierra!

Our most publicized tree planting was in the recent Davis Creek fire scar. A strong team of Patagonia employees came out to replant the Davis Fire burn scar around Galena Creek Regional Park. This planting event was covered by Terri Russell of Reno's KOLO-8 News.

Close to 500 local schoolchildren were involved in plantings this fall. Students from North Tahoe Middle School, Cottonwood Homeschool, and Alder Creek Middle School helped restore their local forests.  Sierra Watershed Education Partnership (SWEP) organized the school programs where students got to be outside all day learning about the forest.

Many of our plantings happened close to home in South Lake Tahoe this fall and some as far as Truckee. Luis Garcia, from the maintenance department of the City of South Lake Tahoe planted 60 trees in city parks. Cottonwood Homeschool students and their families planted 200 trees along Powerline trail. South Lake Tahoe Girl and Boy Scouts planted 200 trees near the High Meadow Trailhead. Another 400 trees were planted outside of Truckee near Sagehen Summit as a Truckee River Day restoration project and as an Eagle Scout project with a Nevada City Scout troop.

This fall, we also gave away close to 600 sugar pines to people in Incline and South Lake Tahoe, hoping to inspire folks to plant and tend trees in their own backyard.

We are grateful to the U.S. Forest Service, California State Parks,  Truckee Donner Land Trust, Bureau of Land Management, Washoe County, University of Nevada Reno and all other public and private landowners who allowed us to carry out restoration plantings on their lands.

In the Press

Watch Terri Russell's story on KOLO-8 News Reno about our planting in the Davis Fire! Over 25 volunteers, including 20 Patagonia employees, came out to plant over 240 trees! We had an amazing view of the Virginia Foothills from Galena Creek Regional Park. 

Markleeville, California

Happy volunteers from the Alpine County Forest Health Community Working Group who helped plant trees in the Tamarack Fire burn scar. With over 30 volunteers we were able to plant ~320 of our Jeffrey pine seedlings. The Alpine Watershed Group also set up a planting boundary and tagged a subset of seedlings to measure their survivability into the future. We are excited to see the results!

Tahoe City, California

Students from North Tahoe Middle School posing happily with muddy hands after planting their seedling in the rain! These girls were brave and decided against gloves. We love when we see students stepping out of their comfort zone and connecting with nature in new ways.