But when it’s time to nest, the species makes the wildly improbable choice to fly more than a dozen miles into towering coastal forests from here to Alaska. The mottled, robin-size birds spend most of their lives at sea. The change boded ill for the 400 to 500 Marbled Murrelets that congregate offshore here each spring and summer-another of Halbert’s responsibilities. Mailboxes and a melted payphone stand among the ruins of the catastrophic fire that destroyed Big Basin headquarters. When the CZU Lightning Complex Fire was finally contained in late September, it left a scar encompassing 86,500 acres, including 97 percent of Big Basin. 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 had come here for generations. On Tuesday evening several fires tangled into a single shrieking fury that raced through the treetops. It stayed low to the ground, clearing out brush and accumulated dead branches, trees, and other debris, just as she’d hoped. 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. 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. At first she thought the flames might do some good. Halbert had just cut into her bathroom wall for a remodel when she heard the news. 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. 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. Maybe 20, maybe 30? “There is no way you can look at this and go, ‘Everything is hunky-dory.’” “How many trees do you see that have greenery in their canopy?” Halbert asks. From ridgetop to ridgetop, the view is mostly skeletal black trunks. Halbert parks at a high overlook and leans out the window. The ambient temperature rises, and verdant understory gives way to burnished copper. The reprieve is brief: When we enter the burn zone, it’s as if someone has peeled off the roof. On a 90-plus-degree day in July 2021, Portia Halbert steers her Prius into the park through a tunnel of dense forest. But now there’s little shelter to be found here. A place cool and damp and dark, crowned with frequent fog and layered branches of redwood, Douglas fir, oak, and madrone. People who love Big Basin Redwoods State Park remember it as a refuge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |