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Three months after the biggest wildfire in more than 100 years roared through Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, new drone video is showing the extent of the damage — but also the rebirth, which amazingly already has begun.
Shot Nov. 10, the footage depicts scenes from high above the massive redwoods that could appear devastating to the untrained eye. Vast swaths of redwood forest in California’s first state park, a beloved landmark where some redwoods tower more than 300 feet and date back nearly 2,000 years, are brown, their leaves scorched by the heat of the flames in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire on Aug. 19 and 20. Other parts of the landscape are still green. Some are burned black, like a World War I battlefield.
“There are sections that burned hot where you will have patches of 100% mortality,” said Jim Campbell-Spickler, a forest canopy biologist at Humboldt State University who shot the footage for Save the Redwoods League in San Francisco. “But most of redwoods survived. Even three months after we are already seeing sprouts on some of the trees.”
The close-up footage of the famed Mother of the Forest and Father of the Forest trees, located near the park headquarters where nearly 1 million visitors a year pass through, shows some damage. Both ancient trees are charred along their bark. Part of the top of the Mother of the Forest, which was 293 feet tall, broke off. The Father of the Forest, which is 250 feet tall, shows damage where flames clearly reached the top of its massive height. But both trees will live on, Campbell-Spickler said.
Not only do redwoods have bark which is a foot thick and fire resistant, they have evolved for millennia with fire. As long as at least 10% of their inner layer, called the cambium, is unburned, they nearly always regrow after fires, he said.
Save the Redwoods League plans to return to the same locations and shoot drone footage for years into the future to document the recovery of the park.
Big Basin will remain closed to the public for at least a year, state parks officials say. The fire, the biggest blaze in Big Basin since 1904, destroyed the historic headquarters, nature center, campgrounds, bridges, restrooms and other facilities. Rangers and other parks officials have been hiking every mile of trail in recent weeks, documenting millions of dollars in damage. Branches and some trees, particularly Douglas firs, which are less fire resistant, are expected to fall for months during windy winter days.
“We’re looking at hazards, not only immolated infrastructure,” said Joanne Kerbavaz, a senior environmental scientist with the state parks department. “We don’t feel that it’s time to send people into the backcountry.”
Of Big Basin’s 18,000 acres, roughly 97% burned, she said. Large ferns, huckleberries and other plants in the understory of the forest should grow back to a decent size in a year or two, Kerbavaz said. Chapparal on the drier hilltop areas of the park also will recover quickly. Green growth is already visible in some charred areas, and rains last week will accelerate it.
“Everything that can sprout is sprouting,” she said.
The drone footage clearly shows early green shoots that are beginning to appear on the trunk and branches of the Mother of the Forest and other burned old-growth redwoods.
Neither Kerbavaz or Campell-Spickler said there was anything they saw in the footage that gave them major concern in terms of the redwoods’ recovery. Kerbavaz noted that after the 1904 fire, people thought the park was destroyed. The same thing happened at Yellowstone National Park after lightning fires in 1988 charred 793,000 acres.
But she said it will take decades, generations probably, for Big Basin to grow back entirely the way people remember it.
“These are thousand-year-old trees living on the roots of thousand-year-old trees,” she said. “For us 100 years is a long time. For the trees, it isn’t.”
Although Big Basin’s landscape is resilient, its buildings are not. Kerbavaz said state parks officials do not yet have a final damage estimate.
Private organizations have raised more than $566,000 for the park’s immediate needs and to help its rangers and staff, many of whose homes burned. Sempervirens Fund, based in Los Altos, the Mountain Parks Foundation in Felton, and Save the Redwoods League, Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks and other groups continue to raise money. A large portion of the rebuilding costs are like to come from the federal government through FEMA disaster funds, while the state is also expected to provide millions.
“This is a place that we love dearly. It is a place of extraordinary beauty,” said Sam Hodder president of Save the Redwoods League. “We are learning now to see that beauty in a new way, and understand the resilience in the forest as we watch it recover.”
