Big Basin Park Burned in 2020; See it Now
SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA
It all began with a wild night of hot lighting, streaking across the sky, thousands of strikes peppering up and down the coasts of California. [see my post, Burning 2020]
I woke up with my head clogged, and the most confusing not-snow spiraling lazily down to collect in drifts. The sky bruised, the light streaming through the windows tinged sepia, sallow and sharp when swallowed.
Outside was fire. Fires almost everywhere, in every direction your car could go to escape Santa Cruz — a town wedged at the base of the redwood mountains, bordering the deep cold unexplored Monterey Bay. Fires burned along every highway - north on 1, south on 1, and all along the Santa Cruz Mountains, nearing 17 and 9.
I spent that awful week fire blogging, windows shut in 100 degree heat, no AC, listening only to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, sleeping during the day, unwilling to relax until the winds shifted.
Nearly 1000 homes were wiped off the map in those fires.
The ash fall ?
Bits of the missing homes, bits of the forest. Almost all of Big Basin State Park burned in the 2020 fires.
Here are my photos, two years after the flames.
Park FacilIties
Almost all of the park’s buildings were lost in the 2020 fire. Most of the infrastructure (pipes, water, power) destroyed.
Park ranger booth at the temporary entrance. Across the street, you can see the burn scars reaching up dozens of feet.
The redwood loop trail is the only trail completely open to the public.
This modular pop-up building serves as a temporary HQ for ranger talks. There are no tree tops to absorb sound: strange new acoustics in this park make it easy to hear the ranger in the resulting echo.
Seeing the fire hydrant parked in front of this burned tree, it seems so clear: We owe those trees.
“Everywhere is chaos in motion, frozen just out of focus. If you look away, will it move? Will another bit come crumbling down, will latent sparks breathe anew?”
It’s been two years, and I can still smell it.
It is violent and chaotic and in places precise. Rough burnt charcoal scraps, torn sheer from the trunk. And a mercy felling: a not smooth stump already fraying.
Burnt burls.
new growth emerges along the spines of the seemingly dead.
A somber reminder of the park’s erased history.
burn scars behind the missing visitor lodge.
generations of hikers took these steps to the visitors center, now only stones remain.
Perhaps it’s because tree huggers are kind folk; perhaps this is why we hear about renewals of redwood forests reborn from flame. But it’s death; death of the elders. Here is their long last act; growing their children. The trees sprout in rings from their life giving originator, the children are 6 feet tall at two years old.
Camping at big Basin state park campground, 2019.
There was a conversation among the trees, before the fires. Conversations we couldn’t hear.
We could sleep at their feet, waken under their boughs, and feel our sense of time slip away.
Who could have a worry as big as our redwoods?
