RESTORE THE ECOSYSTEM HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WORK TO REPLANT FOREST.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Staff Writer

ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST - In 1962, fire swept across the Los Pinetos Ridge in the forest land south of Santa Clarita, leaving scars that still stand four decades later.

On Wednesday, a team of high school students gathered to heal those scars by planting 1,500 trees across the landscape of the Angeles National Forest ridge near Sand Canyon.

The labor was coordinated by furniture company IKEA in cooperation with the nonprofit America's Forests Wildfire ReLeaf program. The Pinetos Ridge wildfire destroyed 8,000 acres of brush and trees, and while vegetation has regrown in the area, the native trees were lost. The team of volunteers from Benjamin Franklin High School in Los Angeles and IKEA replanted live oaks, canyon oaks and holly leaf cherry saplings. The trees were supplied by the U.S. Forest Service and North East Tree Co.

The spring-break labor was part of the organization's A Million Trees for Earth Day national tree-planting effort, which urges people to ``go beyond the slogans'' of Earth Day and plant native trees.

Wildfire ReLeaf is a new nationwide program that encourages the public and private sectors to help restore forest ecosystems damaged by wildfires. The Santa Clarita-area project was one of six in the nation. American Forests is replanting trees in Tahoe National Forest, Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest and in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Jersey.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color in SAC edition only) Franklin High School students get saplings Wednesday for the Plant a Million Trees for Earth Day project at Los Pinetos Ridge.

(2 -- color in SAC edition only) Fabiola Terinidad, a Benjamin Franklin High School student from Los Angeles, plants one of the 1,500 native-tree saplings.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer