High in the crown of a giant sequoia, the world becomes a cathedral of green and amber, hushed but for the creak of ancient wood and the sharp, rhythmic snap of cones being pulled from boughs. Dan Keeley, 31, moved around with a practiced, fluid economy, suspended by thin lines of high-tensile rope 200 feet above the ground on the western edge of California’s Sequoia National Park. To his left, the sequoia’s cinnamon-colored bark provided a steady presence as he leaned out over the negative space between branches.
“There is a lot of trust that goes into this work,” Keeley said, speaking over the wind. He eyed a cluster of green, egg-sized cones. “Trust in the trees, predominantly, but also trust in the system — that I’m being sent to the right trees, at the right time, and for the right reason, not all of which are always the case.”
Keeley, a lean, tanned former rock climber and arborist, is what some in the forestry industry call a pinecone cowboy, a freelance contractor hired to harvest the genetic future of Western forests. He climbs trees of important or threatened species to collect ripe cones for seeds intended to be used for reforestation.
Keeley is part of a specialized workforce that’s become the primary resistance against the rapid erasure of a Western landscape. As megafires — fueled by climate change and a century of heavy-handed forest management and fire suppression — incinerate millions of acres in the West, natural regeneration is failing. Cones from serotinous species, which open their scales and drop their seeds in response to low-intensity wildfires on the forest floor, are now incinerated in increasingly common crown fires — high-intensity blazes that leap into the canopy. Meanwhile, other species’ seeds, dropped into the soil by wind and animals like squirrels and birds, are choked underneath layers of ash or outcompeted by invasive shrubs. The future of a relationship between trees and wildfires that has existed for 350 million years now rests on the shoulders of rope-suspended climbers who collect the trees’ cones one 45-liter bag at a time.
The tree that Keeley balanced in stood in a thriving grove. Just over the next ridge, however, lay the blackened slopes of recent megafires: vast, silent expanses from which the forest had been effectively erased. In the region’s 2020 Castle and 2021 KNP Complex fires, an estimated 13% to 19% of the Sierra Nevada’s large giant sequoias were destroyed. That same year, wildfires across the West consumed over 10 million acres — an area larger than the state of Maryland. Keeley’s task is to gather seeds from healthy trees to ensure that the seedlings planted on those burn scars possess the genetic blueprint they’ll need to thrive in their specific soil, elevation and ecosystem.
A relationship that’s existed for 350 million years now rests on the shoulders of climbers who collect cones one 45-liter bag at a time.
The forces that elevated Keeley into the canopy are a blend of medieval ballistics and modern arboriculture. On the forest floor, Keeley aimed a retrofitted crossbow equipped with a fishing reel into the tree’s crown, then fired a weighted lead line over a sturdy branch, using it to hoist a thick static climbing rope up and over the branch. Cinching into a running bowline anchored against the trunk and using mechanical ascenders — cam-based metal handles that grip the rope — Keeley braced himself against the tree and pulled his way up, meter by meter, until he reached the tree’s peak.
Climbers like Keeley hoist themselves into the treetops because that’s where the cones are most plentiful, while the chance of self-pollination — when a tree’s male cones pollinate its own female ones, creating less genetically robust offspring — are lowest. (The highest cones are more likely to be cross-pollinated, or fertilized by other trees, since the process is primarily driven by wind.)
Standing on a branch, Keeley plucked a cone and used a utility knife to deftly cut it in half, revealing a cross-section of the hundreds of seeds tucked into the crevices between spiraled scales. Pulling out a single seed roughly the size and appearance of an oatmeal flake, he demonstrated how he could lay it on the palm of his leather glove and slice it in half as well, then peer through a loupe — the kind of 10x magnifying lens that jewelers use — to assess the embryo. (In practice, he often just bites the seed in half and eyeballs it.) Keeley would check one or two dozen seeds this way; if there are embryos — the miniature root and stem that will break free of the seed casing once it’s exposed to soil and water — in 30 to 50% of the seed cavities, then the seeds had an acceptable chance of becoming seedlings at the nursery, and Keeley would harvest all the tree’s available cones. If not, he’d descend to the forest floor and move on.
While up in the canopy, Keeley’s focus was almost microscopically trained on the job in front of him. The issue he was trying to solve, however, is geographic in scale. During last year’s cone-collecting season — which for Keeley runs from August to November — he logged over 20,000 miles commuting between collection sites in several Western states, akin to the range of a long-haul trucker. It’s a data point that shows not only how rare his skillset is, but how widely and desperately it’s needed.
After filling his 45-liter bushel bag full of cones, Keeley maneuvered the 60-pound load around a thick limb, attached it to a static rope and gradually lowered it to the forest floor. This seemingly slow, methodical practice, he noted, was in fact a race against time. “Our work is a response,” he later told me, to a “quiet crisis of urgency.” Keeley and his colleagues aren’t merely racing the weather, which can dictate cone ripeness, and the animals that compete to eat the cones’ seeds; they must also outrun the changing climate, which is wiping out forests faster than they can grow. Meanwhile, these pinecone cowboys — among the only people with the skills and knowledge to save our future forests — are being abandoned by the system that both employs them and needs them most.
IN 1933, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT established the Civilian Conservation Corps, and within it, what became known as his “Tree Army,” a division of the U.S. Forest Service that employed up to 300,000 men at its peak. They climbed into the canopy using boot spikes and waist ropes and collected cones for reforestation.
At the time, logging, drought and unsustainable farming practices had depleted the nation’s forests and grasslands, causing disastrous erosion.The denuded landscape was also the result of a century of forced removal of Indigenous people, who for thousands of years had actively taken care of the continent’s forests. Through cultural burning — the practice of lighting frequent and low-intensity fires — some tribes cleared the understory and promoted a diverse ecosystem and the growth of healthy trees. In many ways, the Tree Army sought to mechanically replicate the regenerative work Indigenous people had achieved by fire. By 1942, it had gathered enough cones to plant over 3 billion trees.
But federal budgets for reforestation were primarily tied to timber sales, due to a 1930 law. This worked during the post-war housing construction boom, when the agency’s labor model also shifted toward contractors, with the Forest Service stepping into an administrative management role in order to meet the country’s huge timber demand. But when timber harvesting plummeted in the late 20th century and wildfires replaced chainsaws as the leading cause of deforestation, funding for reforestation fell, resulting in a growing backlog, according to a 2022 congressional report and a 2015 Forest Service report.
This funding decline — and the emergence of firefighting as a priority — hollowed out the agency’s professional forestry core, according to the reports. From 1998 to 2015, the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce declined by nearly 40%, eliminating the silviculturists, botanists and hydrologists who monitored tree stand health and managed nurseries along with the forestry scouts and foresters who mapped backcountry stands and selected trees for cone collectors to harvest from.
The 2021 REPLANT Act attempted to enable the Forest Service to address its 4 million-acre reforestation backlog over the coming decade by authorizing up to $140 million annually on top of the agency’s small annual appropriations-based replanting budget. But the money it allocated was restricted to funding projects; it did not grant the agency the funding to hire employees to manage these projects. Today, we still lack enough foresters, scouts and other staff to gather the upfront intelligence or administer contracts, said Robert Beauchamp, owner of Sierra Cone, one of the West’s largest cone-collection contractors. The agency’s 2026 budget shows that $337 million of the REPLANT fund has not been used. (Asked about this, the Forest Service issued a written statement saying that it allocates funding in accordance with agency priorities, “including active forest management and reforestation.”)
over tree branches. Credit: Nina Riggio
“There is a lot of trust that goes into this work.”
The staffing shortage has been exacerbated under the Trump administration. In 2025, the agency lost 16% of its permanent non-fire workforce, according to a report by the USDA Office of the Inspector General, in part due to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Those employees included people who managed cone-collection contracts; Keeley says several of his jobs have been canceled due to the departure of key staff, including scientists and administrators.
The entire reforestation pipeline, from the initial scouting of seeds to the planting of seedlings, is constricted by this shortage of agency personnel, said Britta Dyer, who until March was senior director for California and the Pacific Islands at the nonprofit American Forests, which helps agencies like CAL FIRE and the Forest Service secure funding and labor for reforestation. “There is a workforce sitting there waiting to be deployed that isn’t being deployed,” said Keeley.
Meanwhile, experienced pinecone cowboys are aging and retiring, and the profession lacks a succession mechanism, according to Beauchamp. There is no school for cone-collecting; skills are traditionally passed down through an informal apprenticeship model — though that, too, has been gutted by the instability of seasonal contracts, as experienced climbers and contractors cannot guarantee new hires consistent work. While employment statistics aren’t available due to the profession’s small and seasonal nature, cone collectors are part of a 38% reduction in employment in forestry since 1994, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Forests.
The industry also struggles to offer stable, well-paying jobs, Keeley told me one day, calling from the tailgate of his truck. The Toyota’s camper shell served as both his mobile headquarters and bedroom, with a wooden sleeping platform and a cooler tucked under a nest of ropes and climbing gear. When we were together, he had rifled through the plastic bins stored under the platform to show me his possessions — journals and a camp stove, satellite phones, radios and first aid kits.
Cone collection is dangerous work with a short season and an increasingly lopsided risk-to-reward ratio. In a productive season, an experienced climber might earn $60,000 in contracts, Keeley said, without accounting for climbing gear, business insurance, gas and truck maintenance. Companies like Sierra Cone can gross over $1.5 million from contracts annually. But both individual contractors and companies deal with unpredictable delays in the harvesting season caused by factors ranging from wildfire smoke to government shutdowns, which cut the 2025 fall season by half. During delays, cones can overripen and collectors lose an entire harvest, meaning, as Keeley said, “We don’t get paid.”
Finally, the industry lacks adequate standards or certifications that help to set contractors apart. This can make it difficult for land managers to vet contractors, Beauchamp explained. The Forest Service staff who write requests for proposals (RFPs) are often young and inexperienced, he said, and budget-strapped state and federal agencies regularly accept the lowest bids for cone collection, scouting and planting. This sometimes results in new contractors lacking experience in tree-climbing winning bids, then failing to fulfill collection contracts and wasting ripe cones because they aren’t prepared for the job. When this happens, it isn’t the lost income that irks Beauchamp, but the opportunity for the forests. “You can’t just ‘redo’ a harvest after the first guy fails,” he said. “You miss the weeklong window to harvest a tree; you miss the year of replanting.” (In a written response to High Country News, the Forest Service said that, in accordance with federal contract regulations, “Contracts are typically advertised and awarded based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, cost.”)
The result is an annual reforestation shortfall that is compounding and transforming entire ecosystems. The Forest Service produces 30 million to 50 million seedlings a year, according to American Forests, a mere fraction of the 120-million annual seedling goal the REPLANT Act established. Roughly 80% of those seedlings will survive, while it takes about 220 trees to reforest each burned acre. Altogether, the agency meets just 6% of its post-wildfire planting needs annually, according to its 2022 Reforestation Strategy Report.
And that’s just on Forest Service land: Wildfires on both public and private lands have affected, on average, 7.8 million acres a year over the last decade, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In California alone, current seedling production and planting rates mean that it would take 15 to 20 years to reforest what has already been lost, while each additional fire “puts us further behind,” said Kuldeep Singh, operations manager of seed production for CAL FIRE. While the Forest Service considers a tract reforested after seedlings survive their first five years, research says that a functioning ecosystem like the one the fire destroyed won’t return for several decades.
“Small collections, repeated annually, may not seem impactful, but they’re pretty mighty once they add up.”
When a forest fails to regenerate, either because it wasn’t replanted or because new seedlings didn’t survive, it often becomes scrub-land, in a permanent ecological shift known as type conversion. The new brush-based ecosystem creates a more flammable fuel bed that resists the forest’s return, effectively locking the land into a cycle of fire and scrub. In areas like South Lake Tahoe, California, for example, fields of 8-foot-tall manzanita and buckbrush now dominate hundreds of acres where conifers once stood. In Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and throughout the Southwest, Forest Service research says that high-severity burn areas — which are difficult to regenerate regardless of human intervention — are increasingly repopulated by invasive grasses or the flowering plants called Brassicaceae, which store less carbon and prevent conifers from taking root. This process is permanently altering the hydrology, fire cycle and carbon-sequestration capacity of the West.
During a February video call, Kayla Herriman, a national seed specialist with the Forest Service, said that the agency was attempting to fill its current reforestation funding and staffing gaps through a three-pronged approach: training employees across the agency, including those in non-forestry roles like recreation and wildlife, to climb trees; borrowing labor from other agencies, including workers not formally trained in seed collection; and hiring some private contractors. Herriman added that the acres reforested by the Forest Service have increased since 2023. “Small collections, repeated annually, may not seem impactful,” she said, “but they’re pretty mighty once they add up.”
THE L.A. MORAN REFORESTATION Center in Davis, California, sits between a babbling creek and agricultural ranching fields. It smells like a lumberyard; the sharp, tannic tang of fresh pine resin blending with the scents of woodsmoke and manure.
Before they can return their seeds to the forest, the cones in Keeley’s bushel bag take an industrial detour. Inside the facility, massive metal tumblers hummed. Over the course of 24 to 72 hours, the tumblers shook the seeds loose from the cones. Workers cleaned them and then either tucked them into meticulously labeled bags that identified species, stand and elevation — planting a tree from a 2,000-foot elevation site at 7,000 feet is often its death sentence — then stored them in sub-zero freezers or else sent them off to the nursery. In the back of the warehouse, under rows of greenhouses, hundreds of thousands of seedlings sprouted out of trays inoculated with the seeds of the species requested by land managers. Conifer seedlings in the greenhouse take from one to two years to reach planting size — roughly the length of a pencil. Then they’re loaded onto trucks and driven to burn scars.
The final link in the reforestation pipeline is the job of planting seedlings. Keeley described the grueling intensity of this phase, recalling monthslong projects in Sequoia National Park where specialized forestry technicians carried 40-pound bags filled with dozens of seedlings over charred logs and up steep ash-covered slopes. The work required not just stamina, but conscientiousness, Keeley said. “You have to place each tree perfectly. If you tuck the roots wrong, that tree is dead in a year.”
Planting can provide work for tree climbers beyond the three- to four-month harvesting season, but jobs are few and far between, making it hard to earn a year-round income, said Keeley. Today’s professionally trained domestic tree planters make inflation- adjusted earnings that are 15% to 30% less than they were in the 1970s, according to the 2012 book Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest. This stemmed partly from the demise of worker cooperatives like the Hoedads, which helped negotiate wages before modern-day federal contract regulations came into effect, requiring the government to prioritize lowest-bid contracts and putting downward pressure on prices, argued the book Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest.
Today, over 85% of the planting on private timberlands and national forests is performed by migrant laborers on H-2B visas, according to the Forest Resources Association, an industry trade organization. The workers are subcontracted by forestry companies and often face abuse and exploitation, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, reportedly earning as little as 16 cents for every seedling they plant. The Forest Service responded that it “has contract officers as well as contract officer representatives in the field that work together to help ensure contract provisions are administered in accordance with laws, regulations, and guidance.” But the dynamic creates a stark disparity in the reforestation process: Specialized climbers like Keeley can earn up to $1,000 a day, while the final, critical work of restoration is performed by low-wage labor. It is a hard job that requires bending over up to a thousand times a day, often under pressure to plant higher volumes, said Dyer. “Planting mistakes do happen.” This can undo the careful collection efforts of the cowboys in the canopy.
Advocacy groups like The Nature Conservancy and American Forests are currently lobbying for the Post-Disaster Reforestation and Restoration Act (H.R. 528), introduced by Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen in January 2025. If passed, it could theoretically create more opportunities for pinecone cowboys by mandating that the Department of the Interior, which manages the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, prioritize reforestation projects like the Forest Service does. But every expert I spoke to, from cone collectors to government foresters, said that solving the reforestation bottleneck will require rebuilding the appropriate agency workforce — something that seems unlikely under the current administration. In the wake of the recent exodus of federal employees, combined with the administration’s lack of support for reforestation and other climate-adjacent projects, Dyer anticipates less federal work this season. “Contractors should, and are, bracing for chaos,” she said.
It would take 15 to 20 years to reforest what’s already been lost in California.
Meanwhile, some agencies are attempting to professionalize the cone-collection trade. In 2022, CAL FIRE, in partnership with American Forests, began piloting two-day “cone camps,” training workers at all levels, from scouting to climbing to planting, and teaching them skills like how to estimate bushel volumes, rig ropes and carry out cone-cut tests. CAL FIRE has also implemented formal cone-collection standards, in order to ensure that students are equipped to meet its contract requirements. Yet while over 300 participants have completed the program, few have pursued careers in the industry, Singh said. “Climbing trees,” he added, is still “a declining profession.” A certificate cannot change the seasonal, hazardous and unpredictable nature of the job, nor the fact that being a privateer like Keeley hardly pays a living wage.
Keeley, for his part, was still primarily motivated by his enjoyment of the work and his love for the forest. His focus, he said, was “the genetic preservation of threatened species.” It’s why, despite the challenges and weight of responsibility, he remained committed to his career — a dedication that becomes apparent when you watch him perform the difficult, delicate work of cone collecting.
When Keeley finally descended at sunset in Sequoia National Park, he was covered in pine resin, and his muscles ached from the pull of the harness over eight hours. The seeds he gathered would take at least three years to reach blackened slopes like those a mile or two away as seedlings, and the forest would not return to its previous state in his lifetime. But as he tossed the bushel bags into his truck bed, he sounded hopeful. “It seems like a slow progression towards a solution,” he acknowledged, getting into his cab, “but to a forest’s timeline, we’re making a difference.” He pulled the truck door shut and began the long drive toward the next stand.
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This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Pinecone Cowboys.”
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