Makenna Haley talks about nature the way someone else might talk about a significant other.
“Nature is perfect, like its design and the way it’s constructed and the adaptations it’s undergone.”
And she knows humans can harm it.
“In this modern age of man, we’re changing it faster than we ever have before.”
And because of these things, she wants to tend to nature “in a way that keeps it strong, and healthy and able to maintain its integrity.”
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Haley is 24 and a 2023 graduate of Northern Arizona University. While she was there, she majored in biology, minored in environmental sustainability and worked in a lab called the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. After graduation, she traveled to arctic Alaska and coastal Maine doing scientific restoration and environmental surveying jobs. At NAU she was influenced by a post-doc researcher named Charlie Truettner, who doubles as a senior climate scientist for American Forests. Among the ways she aligned with his work was in the belief that “it’s integral to bring science and community together so we can make a very strong impact.”
That’s why Haley took the job she did last summer. From June to September, she hiked the mountains, forests, river banks and valleys fanning out from the East Troublesome fire burn scar in the Arapaho National Forest. Her shifts were 10 hours a day, four days a week, for $19.50 an hour, not including the time she spent shivering in her sleeping bag, in her tent, under the stars and sometimes clouds or sleeting rain. Every morning, she’d get up and do it again.
Haley was a cone scout for the Larimer County Conservation Corps, a newly created job for the corps. Her job: dive deep into the wilderness surrounding Grand Lake to Winter Park hunting for conifer cones. That’s because cones carry seeds that will grow the trees that will help the land bounce back from catastrophic wildfire. And Colorado has nowhere near the hundreds of millions of seeds scientists say is necessary to restore areas that have burned and or may burn.
But a shift occurred last summer, when the National Forest Foundation and American Forests, in partnership with the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, created a pilot program involving cone scouters, like Haley, who scour the forest for coniferous trees that produce cones full of hardy seeds, and Colorado partners including The Nature Conservancy Colorado, Extension at Colorado State University and Jefferson County came together to train cone collectors — another group that climbs trees and bags cones for future reforestation. They mobilized because only a handful of cone collection and scouting companies currently operate throughout the West, “which is not enough to meet the massive demand for post-fire planting,” said Catherine Schloegel, watershed forest manager for The Nature Conservancy.
The plan is to create a new workforce of people like Haley, who found her experiences last summer so fulfilling she’s thinking about starting her own cone-scouting business.
“Waking up in the freezing cold, scanning the trees, understanding the environment and very carefully choosing trees to pass on their genetics to the fire-scarred and damaged lands strengthened my relationship to nature,” she said. “And I was able to give my thanks by doing the best science I could muster.”
Seed production explained
(Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Ashley Fox’s full-time job is arborist/professional tree climber for the city of Aurora.
That requires a pretty specific skill set.
First, she must enjoy getting into all of the gear she has to wear to work her way up trees that can stand over 100-feet tall: hard hat, harness, mountaineering boots, climbing rope, ascender (for climbing the rope), carabiners, rappel device, sunglasses, neck gaiter and — oh yeah — a chainsaw.
She must also know how to climb a tree, tie herself to it, and get stable enough to run the chainsaw and prune all manner of woody parts. None of this is hard because she is a competitive tree climber who recently competed in an international tree climbing competition in New Zealand.
Then she must return to Earth, to do it again and again.
Her day job isn’t all that unique, however: “There’s a full trade that knows how to climb trees,” she said. But turning climbers into a workforce dedicated to cone collection in Colorado was unique until last summer, because it had never been done before.
Ashley Fox, forestry technician for City of Aurora, leaps between branches to establish a better position for pruning a honey locust tree at a client’s home in Aurora, Colorado on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. Fox was one of 30 arborists trained to collect conifer cones for future reforestation of burn scars across the state. (Tri Duong, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Municipalities are starting to pick up on the importance of cone collection, says Schloegel, but if they do collect, they often contract out the work. Boulder County Parks and Open Space is an exception, with two climbers on their three-person forestry crew. Shane Milne, forest planning supervisor, says they do it all: scout for cones in the spring and summer, monitor ones they find until it’s time to cut a few open to monitor seed development, and then, when the time is right, climb into the upper branches of both limber pine and “pondos,” he says, “because one thing about this whole cone game is typically the best ones are up top.”
But cone collecting is just part of the forestry crew’s mission. Which works out, Schloegel says, because the opportunities to collect ponderosa pine cones, at least, are almost impossible to predict and extremely limited.
Ponderosas produce cones intermittently and synchronously, in a process known as masting. Mast seeding years produce bumper crops, but the timing is mysterious. Ten years can pass with the species putting out few to no cones, and then, boom! A cone explosion erupts. And long-term predictions aren’t yet available, although Schloegel said recent reports suggest ponderosas on the Front Range mast every decade. On the southern Front Range, one study recorded four mast seeding years between 1981 and 2001. In Boulder County, six masting years occurred between 1979 and 2008.
The last observed ponderosa pine mast year on the Front Range was 2019. That’s the year The Nature Conservancy decided to get into the cone-collecting biz. The time was right. They estimate that between 1985 and 2021, around 550,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest in the Southern Rocky Mountain Ecoregion, which covers Colorado, southern Wyoming and northern New Mexico, burned at high severity and could take 83 million to 138 million seedlings to reforest.
According to research out of Northern Arizona University, there are about 100 times more acres burned than acres planted in a given year in that region. And about 40% of burned area in that same region may require reforestation, because serotinous or resprouting trees are not present, or they exceed the distance a seed can travel from a surviving parent tree.
The sex lives of ponderosas
(Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Consider the sex life of a ponderosa.
Each tree has both male (pollen) and female (seed) cones so they don’t have to go looking for love, well, anyplace. “But they do work to avoid self-pollination by locating the male and female cones on separate parts of the tree,” Schloegel said.
In May or June, small, yellowish male cones typically form near the bottom third of the tree and release big plumes of pollen. These float on the wind and land on female cones near the top third of the tree, where seeds await fertilization.
A year passes, and the forest waits.
Then, that spring, pollen tubes deliver sperm (pollen) to the eggs (seeds) for fertilization, after which the cone rapidly enlarges.
And at the magic moment — generally around 16 to 17 months after fertilization — mature cones open and seeds drop to the ground, where, after a long winter beneath the snow, the next spring a spindly little sapling may emerge. But most trees don’t produce significant seed crops until the age of 60.
Schloegel says we’re in such a dire seed shortage because we haven’t collected many seeds since the 1980s, when timber harvesting on federal land decreased, and, with it, the perceived need to replant. And the Forest Service says because wildfires and other large-scale disturbances like insect outbreaks are harder than ever to predict, current restoration efforts often have insufficient long-term planning and coordination exacerbated by limited coordination and funding.
Schloegel doesn’t have a “global picture” of seed stocks across Colorado, but she does check in regularly with private seed collectors.
They collect based on demand signals from their markets, and frequently have anywhere from 10 to 50 pounds on hand of native ponderosa pine seed, she said. “However, when planting trees, we need to know the source of the seeds (latitude/longitude, elevation), so that we can plant the ‘right seed in the right place,’ and commercial tree seed collectors do not track this detailed information, as this is not required by their markets,” she wrote in an email.
“For example, many sell to nurseries that produce trees for homeowners. Thus, we generally find that there is a small amount of available native tree seed stock in Colorado on the private market. But it is commonly missing the key characteristics about its provenance, thereby making it unsuitable for our reforestation goals.”
Those characteristics are determined by the location and elevation of the seed stock, in addition to the selection of parent trees with desirable characteristics for future generations, she added.
But tree seeds are often collected directly by land management agencies, and there is no public information about those stocks, she said. For example, each national forest in Colorado has a seed stock to support reforestation, and these seed stocks are managed by the system of Forest Service nurseries. But these seeds are not sold to the public, nor do we know the precise amounts.
And here’s a sobering fact: You need three to five seeds to plant one tree in a nursery. “So you can do some math and realize we need hundreds of millions of seeds, and we have very, very few available,” she said.
Finding and documenting cones
(Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Re-enter Fox, in September, almost ready to start collecting cones.
The Nature Conservancy and American Forests had put out a call for skilled arborists through their partner, the International Society of Arboriculture, as well as state agencies and personal contacts, broadly sharing the opportunity through email, phone calls and personal invites, said Schloegel.
Several responded, but while they were pros at running a chainsaw, they’d never collected.
No matter. It’s pretty straightforward.
Climb to the tiptop of the cone-producing tree of your choice — Haley scouted in forests with lodgepole pine, Douglas fir and Engelmann spruce. Find cones, which must be closed.
If you’re in the monitoring phase, cut some open “to look at the seed development and embryo development,” Milne said. “But you don’t want to collect the cones too early and you don’t want to collect them too late, because there’s a prime window where the embryo is sufficiently developed and you can be sure when you go there will be viable seeds that will germinate and grow into a future tree.”
Haley said she and her cone-scouting partner Akacia Schauermann found no cones ready for harvest in the areas they surveyed on Forest Service land west of Rocky Mountain National Park. But their work was vital because they were investigating places scientists from the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station believe are “scientifically the most advantageous for the traits we’re looking for in trees that will best be adapted to reforest the fire scars,” Haley said.
Those trees are often near the scars, have access to water and are exposed to sunlight, she added. Collectors focus on healthy forests that are able to sacrifice a year’s worth of cones for the greater health of the ecosystem, “which creates a feedback loop, because of the ripple effects of healthy forests,” she said. “There’s better water circulation, there’s purified air and there’s retention of soil nutrients. There are just so many factors they will benefit from.”
Wildfire now creates 80% of reforestation needs on U.S. Forest Service lands, yet only 6% of post-fire reforestation needs are met there annually, according to the Forest Service’s 2022 reforestation strategy. The work Haley and Schauermann did over the summer had big impact because they were identifying areas on the landscape where trees had light, medium or heavy amounts of cones, said Rachael Foe, director of Southern Rockies forest reforestation for American Forests, which conducts research and develops programs to conserve and restore forests across the West.
By the end of the summer, the intrepid scouts had plugged 200 data points into an app developed by American Forests and fine tuned for use in California, New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. The Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest will use the Colorado version to monitor the cones until the time is right for harvest. The data is “very specific and very precise, with no room for mistakes, because this is going to be used for future predictions and future cone collections,” Haley said.
Foe added “it’s exciting, because we’re on the cutting (edge) of developing trainings, and guides and technology that’s going to help everyone” including the Forest Service and partners involved in the effort.
And in another forest, on the opposite side of Rocky Mountain National Park, a group of climbers was about to learn all about the harvest.
At the collection
(Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
They met at the Lady Moon Trailhead near Red Feather Lakes, not far from burn scars left after the 2020 Cameron Peak fire and the 2024 Pearl fire.
Organizing partners from American Forests, Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, The Nature Conservancy, the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and Colorado State University Extension were there, along with 30 trainees and trainers from the Colorado State Forest Service.
Climbing trees for cone collection differed from production climbing, which Fox described as cutting the lowest branches on a tree for clearance, or doing tip work that involves pruning branches from their ends to reduce leverage, weight and risk of damage from storms. But the arborists were such skilled climbers already, so there was hardly any climbing training, “which was awesome, because once we did the safety talk we were able to get to work,” she said.
The only real adds to their experience and gear were information about what to look for up in the tree tops and 5-gallon buckets or burlap sacks they hauled up to drop their loot in. So, soon they were off looking for pondos another Larimer County Conservation Corps scouting team had identified as ripe for the picking — looking for cones.
When they found the cones, they gently pulled them off and dropped them into their bags or buckets. They wore gloves, “because everything gets really sappy,” Foe said. But they spidered through the branches, and when their bags or buckets were full, they lowered them to the ground where professional cone collectors from a California-based outfit called Segi Consulting, which specializes in reforestation, showed them how to extract the seeds from the cones using “a pretty much homemade cutter” — a butcher knife blade attached to a wooden plank — to slice the cones and inspect their innards looking for viable seeds.
Foe said they’re looking for a “certain kind of seed fill.”
“So, some cones will have, like, four viable seeds, and that’s not very good. Fifteen would be fantastic. But, you know, in our conifer forests, where we really need seed, we’ll take what we can get. If it’s seven or nine or something like that, then we will say, OK, because we really know there’s a need for seed.”
Schloegel said that day the climbers collected 23 bushels, so 230,000 to 276,000 seeds. And over the next two days, working for a private contractor, they collected 70,000 to 84,000 more.
Fox said it was “way more” than they were expected to collect. But their success wasn’t a big surprise to her, because “this is what we all as arborists really want to focus on.”
“A lot of the time we’re doing tree removals. So being a part of a landscape-scale reforestation project versus, like, our one-parcel landscapes, is cool. Because at the end of the day, I think all an arborist wants to do is care for trees.” And that’s what they did, albeit for future trees in future forests.
All for future forests
(Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Schloegel was thrilled to see those 30 bushels headed to a seed-cleaning facility owned by the Forest Service and then to its Charles E. Bessey Tree Nursery, in Nebraska, where they’ll be stored until they’re needed.
The harvest bolstered her belief in the possibility of creating a new workforce of cone scouts and collectors in Colorado.
The only possible problem is that seed masts take place over three to four week periods and the timing for seed maturity varies by year. It’s also influenced by the weather — hot days can cause mature cones to open, while cold, rainy periods can delay collection dates.
Who builds a workforce around something so unpredictable and that only works three to four weeks a year?
Foe called that question part of “a slew of project management challenges baked into all parts of reforestation, seed being one of them.” But she also said there are only a few “traveling seed-collecting troops,” they’re “few and far between,” and that need may be the solution to the problem.
“Most of the well-known seed collection companies are in California, and they have the ability to travel outside the state, because their collection times are different from (New Mexico’s or Colorado’s). So that will keep them employed for longer,” she added. “But I also think it’s really important to develop a local workforce.”
There are 360 million acres of forests across the West. With existing burn scars and new ones to come, there should be plenty of work to keep several crews busy.
And Schloegel says they’re already being encouraged to enroll in a national reforestation directory managed by the Reforestation, Nurseries, and Genetic Resources program of the U.S. Forest Service in partnership with Southern Regional Extension Forestry, where those seeking reforestation services (cone collection, nursery production, outplanting) can find suppliers.
Other contractors may include land managers such as the U.S. Forest Service, state lands, open space organizations, or others that have been affected by wildfire, or are planning for future forest resilience (and recovery from) wildfire, she added.
And the team that hosted the training in September expects to directly hire trained cone collectors for collection in 2026.
So maybe there is a there in there, especially for people who care for the land and want to heal it and restore it much as Haley.
All those hours she spent searching for cones, in sun, rain and wind and even ice that covered all of their gear in the fall, didn’t feel like work, she said, they felt like play.
“But I knew that this play was important. I knew that what I was doing would have ripple effects and be of reciprocality to the environment that I care about so deeply, that I get to find so much joy within.”
