Taking back the Angeles

Just as it strains the imagination to picture a universe that stretches to infinity, we struggle to visualize a quarter of the Angeles National Forest burned to the ground. What does that look like, 160,000 blackened acres? It looks like forever.

Nature, of course, takes the long view. Except for the extinction of species, little is forever. Flowers will crop up in the spring, then sage scrub and chaparral. Trees will require decades, but even that amounts to a brief moment in the evolution of an ecosystem.

Not so for mere humans. The Angeles is this county’s great escape, a place where we can walk for miles without seeing a housing development or even a car. It has running streams amid forests in a metropolitan area where the word “river” usually dredges up images of a damp-bottomed concrete trench. U.S. Forest Service teams are tallying the precise toll of the Station fire, but there is no doubt that the loss of inexpensive recreation will be huge. Many favored trails, such as pristine Devil’s Canyon or the swimming holes of Big Tujunga, might be off-limits to visitors for years, and when they are reopened will look sadly alien, populated by the blackened skeletons of pine, oak and alder. The fire appears to have burned through many of the forest’s most popular and easily accessible sites: Devil’s Canyon, parts of the Gabrielino Trail and areas around Switzer Falls.

Even more lasting damage might be wrought by landslides during the winter rains. After the 2007 Santiago fire, a slide in Harding Canyon -- one of the most picturesque spots of the Cleveland National Forest -- buried the seven deep pools of crystalline water for which the canyon was known, along with the canyon’s entire population of trout. Harding and adjacent areas are still closed to the public, nearly two years later. And that blaze was less than one-fifth the size of the Station fire.

It will take vision, patience and an enormous effort to restore the scarred Angeles, even with nature doing most of the work. At points in its past, this country had the kind of will it took to accomplish such feats on a grand scale, as evidenced by the creation of the national forest and national park systems, and the major projects undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Now, the damage wrought in these lands by climate change and more frequent fires calls on us to be up to the task again.

Southern Californians love the Angeles National Forest; sometimes they love it to death. Up to 5 million people visit it each year, from seasoned backpackers on ambitious expeditions to families strolling the shaded beauty of the upper Arroyo Seco, just above the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Its popularity and heavy use are easy to understand. Wrapped in housing tracts up to its edges, the green, open land offers respite from the beige of concrete and stucco.

Even more extraordinary is the foresight that created the Angeles along with the entire system of national parks and forests. Back when the West was an almost unbroken stretch of open land, what led politicians and citizens of the late 1800s and early 1900s (the Angeles was established in 1908) to embrace the preservation of the nation’s greatest natural treasures?

A PBS documentary by Ken Burns will answer this question in lavish detail beginning Sept. 27. An extensive segment of the six-part series rightly focuses on Theodore Roosevelt, who was instrumental in establishing the first national park, Yellowstone, years before he became president. An avid outdoorsman and hunter as well as a scholar, he added to the park system as president and set aside much of the separate forest system as well.

The preservation of this wilderness for public use and appreciation was among the most democratic accomplishments in U.S. history. In Europe, as the documentary points out, natural treasures were mostly held in private hands by the aristocracy; here, they belong to the people. A diverse array of Americans played major roles in protecting these lands. George Melendez Wright, a field biologist of Latin American heritage, almost single-handedly refocused the mission of the National Park Service from packing in as many tourists as possible to preserving wilderness in its undisturbed state. The Buffalo Soldiers, African American troops, were the first rangers in Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.

And 3 million men of varied backgrounds found food and jobs with the Civilian Conservation Corps, started during the Depression by another President Roosevelt, Franklin. They cut nearly 100,000 miles of fire roads and planted 3 billion trees, almost half the total reforestation carried out in this nation’s history.

Civilization grows so close to the Angeles that simply leaving its ash-strewn acres alone will not be enough to restore it. The landscape will need time to regrow; it must be protected from rogue bikers who see an opportunity to cut new trails across sensitive terrain, and from marijuana farmers and squatters. Any archaeological sites revealed by fire -- such as caves or petroglyphs -- must be mapped and preserved. Existing trails will need to be repaired. Tree planting will help bring back shaded forest areas. Invasive species that attempt to take hold must be rooted out. Something will have to be done about animals that have lost their habitat and show up in suburbia searching for food and water.

Such civic-minded groups as the Boy Scouts, the Sierra Club and the Warrior Society, a mountain-biking organization, will almost surely volunteer to help. That community involvement is welcome and vital, but it’s not enough. The national forests and parks have been underfunded for years and show it. Facilities are worn, the maintenance backlog is staggering, pine bark beetles are destroying woods and staffing is inadequate for policing, let alone conducting field studies and replanting natural environments.

Proper federal funding must be allocated to bring back the Angeles and protect other neglected forests and parks. More, these recent weeks of fire and many months of recession rekindle the mandate for the CCC. The forest needs the workers; the region’s youth need jobs, especially jobs that get them into a wholesome outdoor environment. The stricken Angeles, still smoldering at the edge of our metropolis, could use a glimmer of the Rooseveltian resolve that endowed us with such forests in the first place.