Our Mission
To Protect and Preserve Our Natural Resources
Implementing “No-Burn” landscape-scale treatments to reduce the threat of massive wildfires will actively restore and rebalance high-risk forested lands. We strive to do the most good and least harm to achieve the healthiest, prime-condition forest lands possible.
The protection and preservation work we accomplish TODAY is the conservation and health of our forests TOMORROW
Our Pledge
To leave the forests we have been entrusted with in far better conditions than we found them and to improve the health of the planet through all of our collective efforts.
Our Vision
Everything is connected. Protecting precious resources, such as water and wildlife, is directly related to the types of trees and the overall health of the forest. By using our Targeted Treatment Process, 106 Reforestation addresses a number of issues which affect the viability of a landowner’s property. We take an exhaustive, educated, and custom-tailored approach to each property in order to increase healthy species regeneration, improve watershed performance, mitigate wildfires, invigorate wildlife, and heal the land to its prime. We believe this can be achieved while making net improvements to the climate. Our combined efforts with our partners restores the land and reduces carbon in the atmosphere.
Why the name 106?
106 Reforestation is dedicated to the 106 acres of Pando, the Trembling Giant.
One of the world’s oldest and most massive living organisms is a grove of quaking aspens in the Fish Lake National Forest in Utah. When the Pando Clone was discovered, scientists named it with a Latin word that means “I spread.” An aspen clone starts with a single seed and spreads by sending up new shoots from the expanding root system. These shoots become trees that are genetically identical.
Pando is located about one mile southwest of Fish Lake on State Highway 25, and is believed to be the largest organism ever found at nearly 13 million pounds. The clone spreads over 106 acres, consisting of over 50,000 individual trees from one single root system.
The Pando
Mike Siaperas
Founder, CEO, 106 Reforestation Conservationist and Steward of the Forest
Mike Siaperas
Our Journey
In 2007, Mike Siaperas, founder of a Medical Services Tech Company fulfilled a lifelong dream and purchased a 600 acre ranch in the tops of the mountains that surrounded his home town in South Eastern Utah. He knew the mountain from childhood as he would often hunt those mountains with his father.
After the purchase of the land, when the snows of winter melted away into summer, he made his first inspection to the land and found it so overgrown that of the 600 acres he only found one meadow totaling about a half of an acre. The hunting grounds of his youth had grown into obscurity over the last 40 years. To literally see the property, he had to buy a bulldozer and start to clear away 100 years of overgrowth. The stands of conifer on his property exceeded 300 trees per acre and the aspen were dying.
Over the course of the nearly two decades that have passed since that day, the Ranch has grown from 600 acres to 2000 acres and today has benefited from the millions of dollars Mike has personally invested into research and development, making Range Valley Ranch a cutting edge laboratory to prove scientific concepts about forest health and rehabilitation. It also happens to be one the healthiest forest in Utah for wildlife. The deer that summer on his ranch return to the lowlands in winter with enough fat to double their survivability through the winter.
In 2017, he founded 106 Reforestation with the purpose to share what he has learned with the rest of the West. He is leading the charge to find a way to reverse the pattern of forest degradation that has fallen upon the west with a method that can be deployed widely enough that it could potentially save forests from the Rocky Mountains, to the Cascades by way of the Sierra Nevada range. Best of all from a climate protection standpoint his fully integrated concept removes aging, dying and decaying timber without lighting a match. Sick and feeble trees are captured and converted to biochar before the biomass can repatriate the CO2 into the atmosphere.
In 2011, Mike was the recipient of the Conservationist of the Year Award for outstanding work in the state of Utah. He has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the “Watershed Management Company of the Year Award” by the Environmental Review Journal. His recognition is a result of his efforts to prove out research postulated on the relationship between forest health and watershed production. Yet beyond the accolades there is still urgency as wildfires are taking western forests at the rate of 7 million acres per year.
Mike also has a devotion to our military veterans and the sacrifices they have made to protect our blessed home land that has provided so much for all of us. He has donated the use of his ranch for veterans struggling to re-emerge from military life back into civilian life to hold retreats. This has become a blessing as he sees these talented and brave men, desiring to find a way to still serve in civilian life.
In 2021, he founded a non-profit foundation to bring together veterans to promote conservation. His goal is to help them set up their own operations to use what he has learned in conservation to help retrieve our forests from the brink of disaster by providing several high elevation Reforestation companies instead of one. It is the hope of 106 that there will be hundreds of competitors working together to save our high elevation treasures on both private and public.