The regenerating power of Big Basin’s redwoods

https://worldsensorium.com/the-regenerating-power-of-big-basins-redwoods/

by dnetesn • 3 years ago

166 64 3 years ago

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

Big Basin is one of my favorite places on earth. If you have never been there - park down at the beach where the kite surfers like to hang out and walk up that way. It is a very long hike with some exposed areas at the beginning but totally worth the effort. You will feel like you are in Jurassic Park.

abathur3• 3 years ago

Have you been since it reopened after CZU?

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

Haven’t been since like 2015

arbitrary_name• 3 years ago

The rancho del oso entrance at waddell beach is still closed. I go there regularly and they have yet to open past the little visitor center building half a mile in off the highway.

hirundo• 3 years ago

For a few months at the turn of the century I lived in nearby Bonny Doon and was training for a long distance hike. 3x/week I'd drive to Big Basin HQ at dawn and run a loop trail through the park. Those are some of the most blissful memories I have. I'd been working in a Santa Clara cubical farm for years leading up to that. The trail head is maybe an hour away? What an amazing contrast between the corporate jungle and primeval forest. Not all "forest baths" are equal, this one was quite extraordinary. I hope it can recover in our life spans.

giobox• 3 years ago

I haven't been since the fire sadly, but even the drive through the park and down to Santa Cruz was magnificent too - amazing redwood lined curving backroad.

plussed_reader• 3 years ago

I went to Sykes camp up the Pacific Ridge trail at the Big Sur trail head in 2010, a year after the fires went through in 2009. Everything was green, growing, and verdant but push back the leaves and you'd find waxy ash everywhere. It will take time.

retrocryptid7• 3 years ago

You're talking about the "Skyline to Sea" trail. (Or the way you're talking about it, it's more like "Sea to Skyline" trail.) That is a beautiful hike, but people should be warned, it's a 10 mile uphill trek. If you're healthy, it is a beautiful hike. I'm old, so it takes me most of the day to make that trek.

kurthr• 3 years ago

The first part is pretty flat, but 5 miles in there is some real steep climbs (>15%). The total length is almost a marathon, if we're talking about the same route.

https://www.treesandtents.com/blogpost/skyline-to-the-sea-tr...

AllTrails also reports that it's closed (as do others).

https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/california/skyline-to-the...

Nicholas_C• 3 years ago

This makes me sad because I moved to the Bay Area in 2021 and to me Big Basin is just a large burnt out piece of land. I spend a lot of time down there surfing and I don’t think the park has even reopened.

stevenwoo• 3 years ago

It is re-opened though not every trail is open. The burn reached highway 1 near Pigeon Point/Ano Nuevo through Big Basin. I rode my bicycle through Butano to China Grade last week and went through 236 earlier this year to Boulder Creek.

winkeyless• 3 years ago

The park is partially reopened last year and you can definitely bike or hike in without reservation (https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=540). My friends and I were able to ride a lot of trails but the shade is mostly gone for sure.

thaumaturgy• 3 years ago

I grew up in the East Bay and was fortunate to have a camping trip there almost every Summer. Some of my earliest outdoor adventures were under, over, and around those giant trees. It really was beautiful.

If you want a similar experience now, your best bet is to head north on 101 into the Redwoods State and National Parks system, visit places like Avenue of the Giants and Women's Club Grove. All north of Garberville. Spots along the road will all be crowded from now through September, but if you do some exploring of your own, you can still find some nice quiet places full of enormous trees.

m4632• 3 years ago

You can't walk through berry creek falls anymore, it's all closed.

And I went to big basin when it was reopened, and it was a little tragic. So many enormous, but black trunks.

You can see a lot of the green growth starting around the trunks (shown in the article pictures), but it might not look lush and green again in your lifetime.

That said, there is a lot of explosive growth of flowers in the santa cruz mountains (watch out for the white poison oak flowers)

TaylorAlexander• 3 years ago

After the fire I uploaded some photos I took at the park and visitor center in 2018 to a gallery here if anyone wants to take a look!

https://imgur.com/gallery/ukxqDBf

billiam2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the CZU Fire did a number on the densest parts of the Skyline to Sea Trail. It is still beautiful but won't look like Jurassic Park in our lifetime.

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

That is tragic to hear. I am glad I was able to spend so much time there before the fire.

acchow• 3 years ago

Protip: You can actually walk through Jurassic Park at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park about 5.5 hours’ drive north of SF.

Park at Fern Canyon and walk through Fern Canyon to Fern Canyon Trail, James Irvine Trail, and Clintonia and Miner’s Ridge Trails.

Fern Canyon was one of the filming locations of Jurassic Park and the rest of the state park has stunning old growth redwood groves.

runamok2• 3 years ago

I did Skyline to the Sea Trail several years ago with my wife and it was great. https://www.redwoodhikes.com/BigBasin/S-to-S.html We actually were car camping at Little Basin the day before the August 17, 2020 fire. :-( https://www.littlebasin.com/

I too love the redwoods. I used to ride my bike all around Kings Mountain and Tunitas Creek and many other roads and just loved the experience.

When people visit I would always take them to Big Basin or Muir Woods vs. the other usual suspects.

Fatnino2• 3 years ago

I drove my car down tunitas creek and the bikers were glaring at me like I was driving on a sidewalk, lol.

thghtihadanacct6• 3 years ago

The ~4 feet of rain we had this season is helping quite a bit ... I cant dig a hole in my back yard without hitting wet still. I even doubt there are any of the smouldering roots left. Redwoods are tough as long as we arent cutting them down.

dylan604• 3 years ago

I like how this insinuates that you are digging holes in your backyard with regularity to even notice this. Otherwise, it is an odd way of saying it's wet =)

thghtihadanacct6• 3 years ago

Its still planting season on the central coast :) I dont even put tomatoes in until late April/May anymore

tylerag• 3 years ago

Redwoods are touch even when you do cut them down. The trunks will put up water shoots immediately, and you'll have another small tree in a couple of years. The problem is all the other species that live in an old growth forest can't survive in a brand new forest.

71a54xd• 3 years ago

Big Basin is by far one of my favorite state parks in the entire country.

I spent what seemed like a "brief" gap year from college working for a startup in the Bay Area and spent all of my weekends hiking / camping. In 2016/2017 there was a huge rain season that caused washouts but I was dumb enough to drive all the way over the foothills to Big Basin. It was probably unwise but I'd never seen a forest explode with life like that before. Everything from the moss, to grasses and ferns all almost glowed with color. Mushrooms erupted from the ground almost anywhere you looked. And new waterways had recently cut through the forest. It was an incredible sight to witness first-hand.

I was into hiking before, but my time in Big Basin was a low-key religious experience. It was the first time I truly looked at a beautiful forest and thought to myself "why on earth would you cut all of this down to build ugly tract homes?"

I'm sad to hear about the CZU fires in 2020, however I'm of the opinion that fires happen and no ecosystem is intended to exist as we experience it forever. As I've gotten older, I've found memories I can no longer physically revisit in the same condition are some of my strongest and most cherished. That said, I hope conservationist can help support the forest as it heals.

soperj• 3 years ago

Redwoods are serotinous. They literally depend on fire to propagate. Fire suppression is actually one of the main threats to the species.

imagainstit• 3 years ago

Coast redwoods (sequoia sempervirens) are not serotinous. Giant sequoia (sequoiadendron giganteum) are, but that's not what's in Big Basin.

Coast redwoods propagate by stump sprouting and seeds which don't require fire. Fire is important in their ecosystem for clearing out fuel but is not at all required for reproduction.

https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/http___u...

taylorlapeyre• 3 years ago

A full regenerative process and outcome, along with reformed canopies, will likely take 200 years according to the Sempervirens Fund, an organization that helped create the park and is exclusively dedicated to protecting to redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Ecological and geological time is always a reminder of how brief the human lifespan truly is. 200 years is the blink of an eye for an ecosystem, but lifetimes for us. It's inspiring to see people work on restorations that they will never be able to appreciate in their own lives.

stevesearer• 3 years ago

Related: HN led me to learn about the UK Royal Forestry Society's Redwood Grove at Leighton some time ago. http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/picturepages/leighton.htm

dang• 3 years ago

Redwood World – Pictures and Locations of Redwoods in the British Isles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047458 - Aug 2021 (60 comments)

retrocryptid7• 3 years ago

I think this page plays down the importance of fire to a healthy redwood ecosystem. The trees seem to depend on a fire running through every so often and burning out the scrub under the canopy.

Of course, this isn't how old-world forests work so when European-Americans started building cabins en masse up in SLV in the 1920's, they put them right next to large trees and we did everything we could to limit fire. While there are a limited number of structures in the park itself, almost 1500 structures were destroyed during the CZU fire in the adjacent communities. My old house was 10 miles away from the park and was across Big Basin Way and Boulder Creek from neighborhoods that were decimated. (TEN MILES from the park and they were still decimated.)

We can't have the same type of design, with houses right next to trees. Once you have people living up there, the likelihood you can convince people to do a "controlled" burn gets pretty low. Then the fuel builds up for another 100 years and it destroys EVERYTHING in its path.

And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed? Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.

This is a great article about how the forest survives fire, but the policy and politics behind how we got to the CZU fire are complex and sometimes pretty subtle.

billiam2• 3 years ago

And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed? Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild.

You can't let them rebuild in place. Your points are spot on (a new survey shows 1/3 of Californians live in the urban/wildland interface where wildfires will destroy most dwellings) and it requires new zoning, new fire legislation on fire insurance, and of course the ability of people to live in higher density through infill and careful planning. The cost of housing in the Bay Area is a closely related problem, but the bottom line is that we have to let fire move through the coastal redwoods every few decades, and that means we cannot build tinderbox houses right next to those groves.

retrocryptid7• 3 years ago

That would be extremely unpopular.

Say you bought a house in the suburbs. Everything's fine. Then someone comes in and says "Hey. We didn't know there was a problem with the soil under your home, so we're just going to come in one night and destroy it. And you don't get to sell it or file an insurance claim. And we're not going to compensate you for it. You just need to pay off your mortgage, even though we destroyed the house."

Changing zoning is a great idea, but alienating property owners from the value of their purchase is not.

The only solution I can think of is eminent domain, but it's structurally a little more difficult in California than authoritarian states like Texas that just come in and grab your house to give it to the local baseball team. So you would have to pass the legislation in Sacramento to authorize the creation of a special district to manage the confiscation of property. Then you would have to approve the funds, cause this wouldn't be an improvement district and you wouldn't be funding the district from the tax on the property. Then you have do the confiscation, and sheesh, the San Lorenzo Valley is sort of the definition of "weird deed restrictions." And once the state (or maybe the open space trust???) has the land, it has to pay for remediation so the soil doesn't wash away and cause landslides that cover the road in three feet of mud. And you have to do all this before the next big rain event so the roads don't completely wash away.

So... eminent domain isn't a bad idea, per se. But it's HARD.

(queue Jethro Tull's "Farm on the Freeway")

whyenot• 3 years ago

The cost of housing in the Bay Area is a closely related problem, but the bottom line is that we have to let fire move through the coastal redwoods every few decades, and that means we cannot build tinderbox houses right next to those groves.

There are very few people who actually live among the redwoods. This is a problem that will take care of itself as the insurance policies of those living in the most risky places are canceled. This is already happening (it has happened to me). A far greater risk is the number of people who live in a WUI and are right next to coastal sage scrub, oak woodland, and chaparral. A lot more people are affected by this because these are the plant communities that ring many of California's urban areas, and many of these communities also regularly burn; for their health, they actually need to burn.

rcpt3• 3 years ago

Right. LA Times has a good write up, Rebuild, Reburn

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-27/rebuild-...

thghtihadanacct6• 3 years ago

Groves? If you look at a map all that green between Watsonville and the city are Redwoods. Thats the grove.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

If we legalized building massive amounts of housing in California cities, this would be one of many problems that mostly disappeared.

nomel• 3 years ago

The trees seem to depend on a fire

This is more of a known fact [1]. But, it goes further than that! In California, there are several pyrophytes [2] that can't germinate without fire. [3]

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-gro...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte

[3] https://tabletopwhale.com/img/posts/LivingWithFire.pdf

TinkersW2• 3 years ago

Coastal redwoods do not depend on fire. You are confusing them with the giant sequoia.

javman• 3 years ago

Maybe not "depend on", but "adapted to" ...

"Coast redwood are adapted to fire and other disturbance. Seeds germinate best on mineral soil as is exposed by flooding, fire, or wind throw for seed germination and establishment."

"The fire return interval in coast redwood forests varies drastically with latitude, microclimate and distance from the coast. In general, forests that are further north, closer to the coast, or located on mesic sites tend to burn less frequently."

From https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/firemanagement_fir...

m4632• 3 years ago

I wonder about the area ecosystem - I think it got unbalanced after the 1906 earthquake in san francisco that caused them to (tragically) log all the redwoods.

What has grown back is groups of ~ 7 redwoods clustered around the former trunk of a felled old-growth redwood. They are more numerous and denser. I suspect with several trees competing, there will never be the thousand-year-old ecosystem again in the area.

thghtihadanacct6• 3 years ago

There are controlled burns around UCSC and towards Big Basin every year. Also, not all of the 1500 structures that burned were housing that needed rebuilt (think old sheds, etc)... and there are few to no houses in Big Basin anyway. Those owners that arent rebuilding from CZU fire have many reasons not to but rarely is it because they arent allowed a permit.

sullivantrevor• 3 years ago

i love this planet

QuadrupleA• 3 years ago

Nice that it's growing back but still sad to see - I hiked just about every mile of trail when I lived in the area. Some nice memories.

jeron• 3 years ago

I love riding my motorcycle through the mountains of Santa Cruz through Big Basin. The way the Redwoods surround you is just incredible, and the fresh air is just as regenerative as the trees themselves

The regenerating power of Big Basin’s redwoods

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