People who love Big Basin Redwoods State Park remember it as a refuge. A place cool and damp and dark, crowned with frequent fog and layered branches of redwood, Douglas fir, oak, and madrone. But now there’s little shelter to be found here.
On a 90-plus-degree day in July 2021, Portia Halbert steers her Prius into the park through a tunnel of dense forest. The reprieve is brief: When we enter the burn zone, it’s as if someone has peeled off the roof. The ambient temperature rises, and verdant understory gives way to burnished copper. Halbert parks at a high overlook and leans out the window. From ridgetop to ridgetop, the view is mostly skeletal black trunks.
“How many trees do you see that have greenery in their canopy?” Halbert asks. Maybe 20, maybe 30? “There is no way you can look at this and go, ‘Everything is hunky-dory.’ ”
The transformation of the rumpled valley below began the previous summer with a heat wave that struck the Central California coast, where Big Basin encloses an 18,000-acre swath of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lightning storms rolled in the night of Saturday, August 15, 2020, strafing the state with thousands of dry strikes—and starting 27 fires in and around the mountains.
Halbert had just cut into her bathroom wall for a remodel when she heard the news. At first she thought the flames might do some good. A senior environmental scientist with the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks, Halbert has worked with prescribed burns since her start with the agency in the early 2000s. The professed pyromaniac was thrilled when one of the fires entered an area of Big Basin she had hoped to burn to improve wildlife habitat, saving her the trouble. It stayed low to the ground, clearing out brush and accumulated dead branches, trees, and other debris, just as she’d hoped.
Then the winds came. On Tuesday evening several fires tangled into a single shrieking fury that raced through the treetops. Within 24 hours most park infrastructure was gone, including a small town’s worth of buildings that has served up to one million annual visitors, some of whose families
