Wildfires this summer devastated California’s historic first state park, Big Basin Redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But just 35 miles away, where another blaze burned a state park in the Bay Area, the results were dramatically different.
Roughly 55,000 acres — an area nearly twice the size of San Francisco — burned at Henry W. Coe State Park near Morgan Hill in August and September. But while California’s record summer of wildfires blackened Big Basin’s beloved redwoods and destroyed its historic visitor center, gift shop and campgrounds, a fire that charred nearly two-thirds of Coe park spared its buildings. In the end, the fire was an overwhelmingly positive event for California’s second-largest state park, biologists say, one the best things to happen to its landscape in years.
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The mostly slow-moving flames cleared out enormous amounts of dead grass and brush across spacious valleys, ridges and hillsides. If there are decent rains this winter, the rejuvenation could sprout wildflowers all across the park and in other areas in the Diablo Range that burned, scientists say. Next spring “should be a banner year” for orange California poppies, purple fields of lupin and others, a recent state parks report concluded.
“If it had been a really hot, wind-driven fire, it would have just cooked the hillsides,” said Wes Gray, natural resource manager for California state parks’ Diablo Range District. “Instead, there’s a mix of burned and unburned areas. If you were to design a prescribed burn, this is just how you would want to do it.”
Looking across a hillside this past week that burned in a checkerboard pattern, Gray predicted that in a few years, most hikers, horse riders and mountain bikers who pass through the area won’t realize there had been a fire there.
“These hills will be green by February,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of new growth.”
The SCU Lightning Complex Fire started Aug. 18 after a series of freak summer lightning strikes. Amid 100-degree temperatures, several different fires in the rolling ranchland and oak woodlands in remote eastern Santa Clara County, southern Alameda County and western Stanislaus County combined into one huge fire. There were some tense moments at first, particularly when 50 firefighters made a heroic overnight stand to save the University of California’s historic Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, stopping flames 25 yards away from several of the telescope buildings.
But for the most part, the fire burned in uninhabited, rugged lands that have changed little since the California Gold Rush. Stretched thin, fire crews, engines and helicopters were needed more to battle fires that were burning thousands of homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Napa County. When the SCU fire was finally fully contained Oct. 1, it had charred 396,624 acres, an area equal to the size of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland combined. It ranks as the third-largest fire in California history, surpassed only by the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire and this summer’s August Complex fire.
While there were no deaths, the fire destroyed 222 structures, many of them barns, cabins and other rural buildings.
Coe park was closed for nearly two months before reopening Nov. 6.
Apart from a few deer that may have been killed by mountain lions before the fire, park rangers so far have no reports of major wildlife die-offs. Many of the large animals, from black-tailed deer to tule elk and mountain lions, ran away from the flames and are already returning.
“There’s a difference between a wind-driven firestorm, where animals can get trapped, and this fire,” Gray said. “It was creeping along at about half a mile an hour. Any large mammal or bird could easily outrun it.”
Some smaller, slower-moving animals like skunks or raccoons may have perished. But others, like ground squirrels or snakes, burrow underground as flames pass over and should have survived, he added.
Some plants need fire to survive. The cones of Ponderosa pine trees at Coe park open when heated, dropping seeds that will grow new trees. Flames also cleared invasive weeds like star thistle, and generally stayed low to the ground, burning lower leaves of blue oaks, gray pines and other trees but not killing the whole trees.
“The land has evolved with fire, whether it was lightning fire or human fire,” said Chris Weske, a volunteer with the nonprofit Pine Ridge Association, a parks support group. “There has always been fire on the land.”
Henry W. Coe Sr. came to California from New Hampshire during the 1849 Gold Rush and eventually bought 150 acres in an area known as The Willows, which today is San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood. When his fruit tree and hops farm didn’t flourish, he bought a 479-acre cattle ranch in 1876 in the San Felipe Valley.
His sons, Charles and Henry, expanded the ranch over the years. Eventually, after Henry Jr., known as “Harry,” died in 1943, his daughter, Sada Coe Robinson, donated 12,230 acres to Santa Clara County in 1953 for a park in her father’s name. The county couldn’t afford to keep it up and sold it to the state in 1958 for $10.
Today, out of California’s 280 state park properties, only Anza Borrego Desert State Park in eastern San Diego County is bigger. Coe park has continued to expand through purchases by land trusts such as the Nature Conservancy that kept its vast landscape from being carved into subdivisions.
The 89,000-acre park is considered a hidden gem among Bay Area outdoor enthusiasts, particularly in spring. It is so big that backpackers can wander for a week and not see another person. But because of hot weather in the summer, and its remote location, the park receives a relatively small number of visitors — about 50,000 a year, compared to 1 million a year for Big Basin.
Centuries ago, Ohlone Indians regularly burned the area to clear brush for better hunting, and to encourage the growth of new plants for food and other uses. The SCU fire was the largest in the park’s 62-year history. But in 2007, the Lick Fire burned nearly as much, 47,000 acres, over the same area. And for the past half-century, parks officials have conducted prescribed burns in Coe’s backcountry, usually of several hundred acres to prevent the build-up of dead vegetation and help plants and wildlife.
“The land is already recovering,” Gray said smiling. “Fire out here is not that big of a deal.”
