Damn Good News: How Fire-Ravaged Redwoods Persist.

We all have particular aspects of the natural world that evoke very deep emotions in us. For many of us who live on the West Coast, the giant Sequoias are particularly precious.

Coast redwoods, or Sequoia sempervirens, are the tallest tree species on the planet. They can live more than 2,500 years, protected by thick bark and the ability to resprout, features that make these trees especially resilient to fire.

When I briefly lived in the Santa Cruz mountains in the 70s, I was surrounded by sequoias. When I’m in their presence, I feel them more as BEINGS than as plants. I think that’s a pretty common response to the tallest trees on the planet.

I was very attached to Big Basin State Park, where I walked many times and took a particularly memorable acid trip with my boyfriend Bill. I experienced an ecstatic communion with the trees, and had an intense desire to be at one with them by shedding all my clothes, those pathetic vestiges of civilization. Bill assured me he understood the impulse but warned me it was NOT a good idea. We really weren’t very far from that corrupt and tainted world. A yucky un-ecstatic human being — possibly even a park ranger — might appear at any moment! Although I KNEW that Bill was being totally uptight and middle-class, I decided to defer to his far greater number of acid trips.

So I never achieved my total Sequoia communion, I have been very attached to Big Basin ever since. I was devastated when it burned in one of the huge fires of 2020.

According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

In 2020 nearly 77% of the wildfire in the park was extremely severe, leaping off the forest floor and burning up into the green-needled crowns of these towering trees, some soaring 300 feet high. Even though most of the redwoods survived, many were badly burned. When Drew Peltier, an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University, first visited the park six months after the fire, he thought “this place is completely destroyed.”

“Frankly, it was shocking,” Peltier said, to see so many trees that “had no branches and were totally black.”

But the scientists returned in 2023 to see how the trees were doing.

Again, from the Chronicle:

Researchers studying a stand of severely burned old growth Big Basin redwoods found the trees fed ancient buds that had been hiding underneath thick bark for more than 1,000 years using carbon transformed into sugars with sunlight that shone more than a half-century ago.

“We found these trees do seem to invest in a type of fire insurance, if you will — reserves that can help them recover,” a researcher said.

Today, most of Big Basin’s redwoods look nothing like they did before the fire. Many trees lost branches the size of entire trees and are instead covered with little buds, “like fuzzy telephone poles,” Peltier said.

So ancient thousand-year-oldSo ancient thousand-year-oldSo ancient thousand-year-old sequoia buds are being fed by carbon from vintage sixty-year-old sunlight!

Nature can be humbling and inspiring — even when you’re not tripping. Just sitting and reading the newspaper can be a humbling and inspiring experience.

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