[HN Gopher] The regenerating power of Big Basin's redwoods
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The regenerating power of Big Basin's redwoods
Author : dnetesn
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-05-17 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worldsensorium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldsensorium.com)
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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.
| abathur wrote:
| Have you been since it reopened after CZU?
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Haven't been since like 2015
| billiam wrote:
| 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.
| hirundo wrote:
| 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.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| 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
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| 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.
| winkeyless wrote:
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| 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)
| giobox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sutro wrote:
| Pine Ridge Trail
| acchow wrote:
| 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.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _Redwood World - Pictures and Locations of Redwoods in the
| British Isles_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047458
| - Aug 2021 (60 comments)
| thghtihadanacct wrote:
| 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.
| tylerag wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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 =)
| thghtihadanacct wrote:
| Its still planting season on the central coast :) I dont even
| put tomatoes in until late April/May anymore
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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.
| billiam wrote:
| >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.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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")
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, the counties where this happened in likely couldn't
| afford to eminent domain this problem away. It's their tax
| base they'd be nuking!
|
| If it was a legitimate problem, you've described what
| happens sometimes to folks buying homes. It's a risk of
| ownership.
|
| Could be sinkholes. Could be subsidence. Could be a toxic
| waste dump.
|
| Lawsuits fly, etc.
|
| However, long term it usually boils down to aligned
| incentives. If the people at risk had to pay for the risk
| (either by taxes or directly), they'd either move - or
| cover the costs and reap the good or bad consequences
| (including bankruptcy/loss of assets).
| w7b7s7 wrote:
| The very first paragraph of this article calls logging
| 'exploitation' -- a very common view in Santa Cruz County,
| and also a very hypocritical one depending on the
| proponent, considering the fact that the very same early
| 20th Century cabins everywhere present in San Lorenzo
| Valley were themselves commonly framed and sheathed with
| redwood logged from the SC Mountains.
|
| The damage from the CZU fires was certainly intensified by
| man-made decisions, and most of these a result of the anti-
| development turn Santa Cruz County took after the late
| 1970s.
|
| Two very simple and straightforward solutions to mitigate
| destructive wildfires in the SC Mountains are to 1) allow
| logging, and 2) stop favoring existing homes over new homes
| when it comes to fire resistant requirements.
|
| One of the reasons Santa Cruz County (or California) is in
| the state it's in is people don't want to hear this.
|
| Logging: There are tens of thousands of acres of TP (Timber
| Production) zoned land in the Santa Cruz Mountains -- very
| much in areas that burned -- that have been blocked from
| logging due to years and years of environmental reviews and
| neighbor complaints. These lands could have just simply
| been logged. There would have been healthy trees left
| (clear-cutting is illegal) and overall the forest would
| have been in a much better state to resist fires. Also,
| Santa Cruz County unfortunately allows single family homes
| on TP-zoned parcels. So there are lots of TP-zoned parcels
| that will never be logged as they are really now
| residential lots in disguise. This does not help forest
| management at all.
|
| Fire resistant requirements: I'm one of the few people I
| know that has actually built a new house on raw land in the
| Santa Cruz Mountains in the last 10 years. It took me
| nearly 3 years for permits alone for an 1100 sq ft single
| story SFH built on flat ground near a public highway. This
| type of timeframe dissuades most people from new
| construction here. This is on purpose: it's what the county
| and people in the county want.
|
| The actual Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) building codes
| are very straightforward and increase the cost of
| construction by only about 10 percent. Class A shingles,
| Type X gypsum underlayment everywhere, approved fire
| resistant siding, fire+ember/resistant vents, tempered fire
| resistant windows/shutters, indoor sprinkler system,
| vegetation clearance everywhere. It was all required (and
| inspected) for me to legally move in.
|
| None of my neighbors in their 1930s/1940s homes are
| remotely as fire ready. Remotely. Lots of the homes that
| burned in the CZU fires were pretty distant from the fire
| line. All it took was floating embers setting shrubs on
| fire, and those shrubs burning and getting embers sucked
| into a vent, and many a house became a tinderbox.
|
| Yet my neighbors can sell their homes -- and there is a
| decent amount of home sales up here still -- and not have
| to upgrade a single thing.
|
| Since wildfires don't care about whether a house has been
| standing 1 year or 100 years, this is obviously driven by
| politics and not fire safety.
|
| There was a state law passed in 2021 that mandated that any
| home located in a State Responsibility Area Fire Severity
| Zone of High or Very High get a fire safety inspection and
| approval (for vegetation clearance) before an existing home
| sale. Updated 2022 CalFire maps have classified a good
| amount of homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains as High or Very
| High, so the updated maps becoming legally binding will be
| a good first start.
|
| But it's a small start.
| abathur wrote:
| > I'm one of the few people I know that has actually
| built a new house on raw land in the Santa Cruz Mountains
| in the last 10 years. It took me nearly 3 years for
| permits alone for an 1100 sq ft single story SFH built on
| flat ground near a public highway.
|
| How much did this set you back? I assume you're still
| living there? How have the fire seasons affected your
| insurance and sense of the area's longer-term viability?
| (I'm not in CA, but the redwoods have been stuck in my
| head for a while now. I've spent a lot of time
| daydreaming about moving to a few places including SLV.)
| thghtihadanacct wrote:
| Come on ... virtually all of SC county is wildlife urban
| interface. Almost the entire perimeter of city of Santa
| Cruz is Wildlife interface. No reason to eminent domain (we
| aint got that money) or refuse rebuilding. Just enforce
| fire insurance and defensible space (difficult in a forest
| but not impossible ... you take down the fuel not the
| trees).
| rcpt wrote:
| This isn't the suburbs. This is exurban sprawl deep into
| the redwoods.
| whyenot wrote:
| > 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.
| rcpt wrote:
| Right. LA Times has a good write up, Rebuild, Reburn
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-27/rebuild-.
| ..
| thghtihadanacct wrote:
| Groves? If you look at a map all that green between
| Watsonville and the city are Redwoods. Thats the grove.
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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
| TinkersW wrote:
| Coastal redwoods do not depend on fire. You are confusing them
| with the giant sequoia.
| javman wrote:
| 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...
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Sempervirens can reproduce without fire, but are healthier
| with a good fire now and again. My guess is that's one of
| the reasons the trees in big basin look sickly compared to
| the ones up north.
|
| https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s4240
| 8...
| thghtihadanacct wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| i love this planet
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| 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.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Redwoods are serotinous. They literally depend on fire to
| propagate. Fire suppression is actually one of the main threats
| to the species.
| imagainstit wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| jeron wrote:
| 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
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