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Signs of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire are still visible in and around the coastal corridor where San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties meet. Staggered skeletons of bare trees line the side of the road off Highway 1, a stark reminder of the flames that tore through 86,509 acres of land in 2020. Blackened bark dots redwood trees along Butano State Park’s Little Butano Creek Trail, which reopened this fall for the first time since the fire.
And inside the Pescadero park are literal signs of fire – notices for visitors about a controlled burn and forest restoration work with the aim of “returning the forest to a state in which it is more resilient to fire.”
More than four years have passed since the CZU Fire was fully contained, but its impacts are still being felt at local state parks. Recovery has been measured in milestones not over months, but years, a process of navigating multiple agencies and permits, environmental impact reports and sensitive species.
Over 100 miles of trails were damaged, with bridges, retaining walls and other infrastructure needing rebuilding via labor-intensive handwork in remote terrain. The water systems at Butano and Big Basin Redwoods state parks were destroyed, limiting camping to eight backcountry campsites at the Butano Trail Camp and a small interim, walk-in campground on the coast side of Big Basin for the foreseeable future. Big Basin, California’s oldest state park, lost its visitor center, museum and store.
All told, over 24,000 acres burned in Butano, Big Basin and Año Nuevo state parks, leaving behind tens of thousands of dead trees and limbs. The redwoods, while still standing, sustained the greatest impact in Big Basin, where the flames were more hot and intense due to weather conditions when the fire hit.
And in the midst of all the restoration work, California State Parks and partnering agencies have turned their attention toward strengthening the resilience of forests to wildfires and climate change.
In October, California State Parks and Save the Redwoods League released a new plan outlining the actions needed to restore and protect Butano, Big Basin and Año Nuevo state parks following the CZU Fire. Known as a Forest Management Strategy, the document calls for ecological restoration by thinning out dense forests to promote the growth of larger trees and using prescribed burns to mimic natural fire patterns on more than 2,000 acres of parkland.
The plan represents a turn toward a more multi-pronged approach in wildfire prevention in the CZU Fire’s aftermath and takes into account a notion that sounds like an oxymoron: the concept of a “beneficial burn.”
“There were some very severe impacts in Big Basin because it burned at very high intensity,” said Tim Hyland, natural resource program manager for the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks. “But in Butano State Park, the fire was actually hugely beneficial.”
A lightning-quick wildfire
Hundreds of lightning strikes hit the coastal mountains on Aug. 16, 2020, igniting the Waddell Fire near Waddell Creek along with three other fires on what would become the northern edge of the CZU Fire, according to a 2023 report in California Fish and Wildlife Scientific Journal, a quarterly scientific journal published by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Two days after the fires began, a change in wind conditions caused the three fires to quickly expand and merge with the Waddell Fire.
The end result was a fire that burned at an intensity and scale not seen in the Santa Cruz Mountains in hundreds of years. While Año Nuevo State Park did not sustain as much damage (the fire for the most part stopped at Highway 1, Hyland said), Big Basin was hit early and hard, the fire stoked by low humidity and high winds. More than 97% of the forest area burned at a state park known for its ancient coast redwoods, some of which are 1,000-2,500 years old.
Will Fourt, a senior planner for the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks, said flames reached higher than the treetops at Big Basin – over 300 feet – “completely altering the forest” and leading to a significant loss of tree canopy, the ground area covered by trees when viewed from above.
“That was not a fire that we typically thought of as happening in a redwood forest,” Fourt said. “That was a very intense fire, it burned very quickly. So that basically burned the entire park in less than a 24-hour period.
“These trees are able to survive that, but we have lost a lot of canopy,” he added. “It’s very stressful ecologically.”
California State Parks ranger Ziad Bawarshi, who manages Butano, Pigeon Point Light Station State Historic Park and the western half of Big Basin, said the relative humidity had increased by the time the CZU Fire hit the forest at Butano State Park, resulting in a loss of understory – small trees, ferns and other ground vegetation.
“The fire behaved very differently at Butano State Park as opposed to the high-intensity burn at Big Basin,” he said. “The weather improved by the time the fire reached Butano, creating conditions for a much healthier and beneficial burn.”
California State Parks interpreter Elexis Padron was living in Half Moon Bay when the CZU Fire started and said she distinctly remembers when the lightning storm hit that August night and how the wildfire forced her family to evacuate from Felton. She said seeing how the blaze burned in Butano State Park “adds a different dimension to understanding that fire.”
“At Butano, the fire was a lot less intense, less hot, and it burned like a beneficial prescribed burn,” she said, referring to the practice of using controlled fires as a form of land management. “While you can see the effects of the fire – you can see charred trunks on the Six Bridges Trail – I don’t think the word that comes to mind for most people, they don’t think of the word devastating like they might think at Big Basin.”
The tree canopy at Big Basin is starting to return, Hyland said, and after five to 10 more years the fire’s impact on the canopy “won’t be quite so noticeable.”
“I’m staring at (the) redwood forest right here at Butano. And since it did burn through this stand at low intensity, the canopy is all still intact, like it’s still shady,” he said. “And that was the same fire, right? Except different fire behavior, different response.”
Rebuilding the visitor experience
Driving in from Saddle Mountain, Big Basin looks a far cry from the shady park it used to be. The dense canopy is mostly gone following the CZU Fire. In its place are bright green furry sprigs crawling all over the blackened trunks and branches of burned redwood trees.
“That’s what some of the rangers say,” said Fourt. “They say that they’re Dr. Seuss trees.”
These redwoods pepper the landscape along the 20 miles of reopened fire roads and 8 miles of trails, including part of the Skyline to the Sea Trail and the Redwood Loop Trail. The Mother and Father of the Forest, the tallest and one of the widest trees in the park, respectively, still stand and visitors can see them in the old growth forest from the Redwood Loop Trail. It will be years before the remaining 80 miles or so of trails and fire roads reopen completely.
In both Big Basin and Butano state parks, the fire burned down bridges and stairs, and the two subsequent wet winters damaged retaining walls and downed trees. And trees continue to fall. Since the fire, one bridge connecting the old lodge in Big Basin to the Skyline to the Sea Trail has been repaired twice, once due to fire damage and again after a tree fell on it.
Crews from the Cesar Chavez Environmental Corps and the California Conservation Corps have been working year-round to rebuild the fractured trail systems. Setting up “spike camps,” workers stay in the parks for a little over a week at a time and hike out to trails in need of rebuilding with the necessary equipment and materials.
“If you want the trail to be sustainable, it needs to be engineered,” Bawarshi said. “There’s a lot of labor involved and it takes time.”
At Butano, the majority of trails, including the recently reopened Little Butano Creek Trail, are now accessible to the public. The Gazos and Ray Linder Memorial trails are expected to reopen by the end of the year.
In Big Basin, however, the extensive damage to the trail system means it’ll take longer to fix it all. Some of the new trails are being rebuilt to allow for more water to remain in the park, Fourt said. Currently, a drainage system in Big Basin diverts water away to avoid flooding. That’s a problem because redwoods need a lot of water.
“One of the big goals for rebuilding the park is to allow that natural hydrology to occur as well, and that means retaining stormwater,” said Fourt. “So not conveying it out quickly, but letting it soak in, letting it be here.”
One trail in the old growth forest has already been rebuilt with this in mind. The trail is completely flat, but raised on a bed of rocks that allows water to flow under and pool next to it.
Both parks’ utilities and water treatment systems were also damaged in the fire, meaning restrooms remain closed without power and there is no running water. Visitors need to plan on bringing water, especially when visiting Big Basin, said Fourt. With the canopy gone, Big Basin is a lot warmer and drier than before.
And with the water systems out, all campgrounds at Butano and Big Basin remain closed except the Butano Trail Camp and one small temporary site at Rancho Del Oso. At Big Basin, there is no timeline for when utilities and campgrounds will come back. At Butano, the campground’s 39 sites didn’t burn, but they aren’t expected to reopen until 2028 as a best-case scenario. Restoring the water systems and utilities is a multiyear process to get the permitting and work done.
Construction is also limited to avoid disturbing marbled murrelets, an endangered seabird that nests in old-growth forests.
“There’s a huge population (of residents) that wants to go camping,” Bawarshi said. “We realize that and there’s a big push to get them open.”
Down in Big Basin’s old growth, which was once the epicenter for visitor resources, all historic buildings were lost in the blaze. A black shipping container serves as an information center in lieu of the park headquarters, and all that’s left of the historic lodge is its stone fireplace and chimney. The old stage is also gone.
There are no plans to rebuild any structures in this part of the forest. Having structures near old trees simply isn’t good for them, Fourt said. The heat emanating from burning buildings during the fire severely impacted some of the old redwoods in close proximity. There’s the other concern of needing to have defensible space around structures, which will alter the forest floor and its ecology, Fourt said. Having to protect buildings also complicates the process of prescribed burns – an essential tool in maintaining a fire-resilient forest.
State Parks plans to rebuild a visitor center at the Saddle Mountain entrance. By next summer, a finalized version of the Facilities Management Plan will outline specifics on the visitor center, a tribal facility at Little Basin, new campgrounds and the shuttle system.
How visitors access the park will change. Much of the parking in the old growth will be reduced. Reservations are highly encouraged, especially on busy weekends, with few first-come, first-served spots planned.
“This is the reason this park exists, because this old growth redwood forest here. It has a very significant ecological value,” Fourt said. “And having a lot of paving that’s needed for parking vehicles has a lot of effects on that redwood forest … And so reducing that in the heart of this area is going to be much better for the health of the forest in the long run.”
Visitors have the option to catch the Scotts Valley bus – whose service has increased from twice a day to five times a day on weekends – or the free Saddle Mountain shuttle, where there’ll be paid parking readily available once the visitor center is rebuilt. Alternatively, visitors can leave their cars for free in Scotts Valley, but will pay a bus fare to ride into the park. The bus runs through December and returns in the spring of 2025.
“We’re moving forward as quickly as we can with it, but it will take several years to rebuild the park,” Fourt said, emphasizing that there is no timeline for when the work will be completed in Big Basin. “During that time, we will continue to have access to the park and (are) expanding that access as areas are made safe and accessible.”
Fighting fire with fire
At the end of October, smoke plumes rose above Pescadero from Highway 1. It wasn’t hot that week, and with good relative humidity and rain expected over the weekend, California State Parks crews, with support from Cal Fire, conducted a prescribed burn at Butano State Park.
Prescribed burns aren’t a new tool for forest management – they’ve been a part of Indigenous practices in maintaining land for thousands of years. And according to Hyland, they were the main tool State Parks used to manage its open spaces before the CZU Fire, but they weren’t doing it enough.
After the CZU Fire, State Parks and a forestry consulting firm found that the forest was too concentrated. Trees were logged at the turn of the century and they grew back denser than prehistoric times, Hyland said.
“It kind of gives us the rationale for more actively managing these forests to thin them in order to make them more resilient to an increasingly drying and warming climate,” Hyland said.
“One of the things we can do about that is to selectively thin these forests and do some understory treatments, both mechanical and with prescribed fire to open them back, to get them more to historic, prehistoric stand structure where they’ll be more resilient to future high-severity fires,” he added.
Successful prescribed burns are weather-dependent and need the right amount of grasses, needles and little sticks, known as fine fuels, to move the fire over the forest floor safely. A warming climate and over a hundred years of fire suppression have made it difficult for these conditions to be met.
Now, four years after the blaze, prescribed burns won’t work in Big Basin because there aren’t enough fine fuels. With the canopy burned, there’s no more pine needles dropping to the forest floor. Instead, large ceanothus bushes have taken over the park due to the extra sunlight streaming in.
Hyland said it’ll be years before State Parks does controlled burns in Big Basin due to that lack of fine fuels.
“Doing prescribed burning in this changed setting is very challenging because I really want to get in there and burn and take those fuels. But I can’t because they won’t burn,” he said.
And the concern is that the ceanothus will die off in 10-15 years and there will be “a crazy amount of fuel” for a wildfire to spread, he added.
“And by the time (the fuels) will burn, they will be just very, very scary,” Hyland said. “So introducing mechanical techniques to dig ourselves out of this hole is really critical.”
Crews will need to use machinery to manage the fuel buildup – targeting dead, dying, diseased and dense vegetation – before they can go in and burn. Hyland said they’d like to work through 200-400 acres a year in Big Basin for the next few years. In Butano, hundreds of acres of land have already been mechanically treated. They’ll continue to use mechanical techniques in both parks and follow up with prescribed burns regularly as conditions permit.
‘Why not leave it alone?’
While many may feel that it’s best to let nature be and not interfere, that notion goes against historical precedent. A sign near the Butano visitor center detailing the forest management work addresses that sentiment under the heading “Why not leave it alone?”
“Indigenous people managed this land for over 10,000 years using low-intensity fires, and before that the land was grazed by large herbivores,” an excerpt from the sign reads. “By the turn of the 20th century, humans were extinguishing fires and clear cutting the forest. This has left us with smaller and weaker trees that are more vulnerable to disease and wildfires.”
Thinning unhealthy Douglas fir trees, understory and overly dense vegetation gives redwoods and oak trees more space and less competition, reducing fuels and making the forest more resilient to fire amid a changing climate.
While the smoke from prescribed burns sometimes triggers complaints and health concerns, mechanical removal of trees can be a particularly polarizing subject because, to some people, “as soon as you cut a tree down you’re a logger,” Hyland said. (California State Parks is prohibited from selling or profiting from resources on parkland.)
“I think it’s the whole conservation ethic that grew out of this extraction of resources for monetary benefit and it was important to stop it, but I think we’re learning that we can’t just put a fence around something and walk away and expect it to function the way it did before,” he said. “That’s why State Parks’ focus is on functions, on natural processes and fire being one of them.”
And with more prolonged dry periods caused by climate change, the new forest management plan incorporates a more multifaceted approach to address a changing climate more directly.
“The first part (of developing the Forest Management Strategy), to take it chronologically, was that we recognized that our past management – although we had done some prescribed burning which did result in reduction in impact as it was intended to – wasn’t sufficient given a changing climate and the impacts of 100-150 years of fire suppression,” Hyland said.
While officials believe ongoing forest management work in the wake of the CZU Fire will better prepare parklands should fire ever return, the cherished coastal redwoods’ resilient nature also helps them withstand wildfires. Redwoods are naturally resistant to fire because they’re high in tannin and don’t produce resin, and their thick bark protects and insulates them.
It was a point State Parks interpreter Padron underscored in the first guided hike she led with the agency at Butano in January 2022, months after the park reopened following the fire.
“It felt really special and meaningful because I got to take people through a part of the park where you could see the effects of the fire,” Padron said. “I got to connect the resilience of redwoods to the human experience in a way that I hope was hopeful and maybe inspiring in some way, or helping people see fire in a new perspective – that it’s not inherently bad or destructive.”
She also shared another key to redwoods’ resilience – their shallow root systems intertwine with the roots of other redwoods to increase their stability.
“They are literally supporting each other and holding each other up through storms,” Padron said. “If that isn’t a beautiful example of community I don’t know what is.”
