A Ravaged Landscape Is Inching Back to Life : A hiker returns to a canyon denuded by fire to witness a moment in a cycle of rebirth.

The deer showed no signs of burning.

She lay on a black cinder carpet beneath the charred limbs of a laurel sumac tree. Her chestnut coat, speckled in lines of white and black, shone. Her long head, ears up, was outstretched, as if from sniffing once-fragrant petals.

But her belly was open, undoubtedly the work of starved coyotes, and her insides gone. Only the rising sweep of bare ribs, bleaching in the sun and framing a cave for frenzied flies, marked the violence of her end.

The deer was old or hobbled and unable to outrun the blowtorch that tore through this canyon three weeks ago. Or she was perfectly healthy but confused, frightened, so doped on smoke that she simply tipped over and passed out. In either case, by taking the fall she commenced the transformation from grace on four legs to lunch for four.

Things work that way in La Jolla Canyon, a savage cleft between buckled land plates facing the ocean at Point Mugu. The landscape here is ancient and rocky and eroded and unrelentingly arid. Still, it supports all manner of plant and animal life.

Vast groves of prickly pear cactus and dagger yucca and scrub oak and bigberry manzanita are brightened at different times of the year by profusions of flowers, some candy-colored: farewell to spring, nightshade, Indian paintbrush, whispering bells, skullcap, giant coreopsis, bull thistle.

Moving within the growth are alligator lizards, wood rats, ground squirrels, jack rabbits, tree frogs, gophers, weasels, newts, moles, kingsnakes, whip snakes, rattlesnakes, coyotes, mule deer.

Fire nukes it all, flora and fauna, though most of the deer and coyotes do survive, stunned and dislocated.

At least once a month I come to these parts to walk, to hike, to think and to eat a sack lunch, even if it is sometimes taken beneath a high-up swirl of screeching buzzards. Being from another part of the country, I find La Jolla Canyon, and its gentler sister two miles to the south, Sycamore Canyon, exotic places.

Until the fires arrived, both canyons offered an out-of-hiking experience: the opportunity to navigate a sandy footpath with flowering cactus and reptiles to the left and a rollicking school of dolphins in a royal-blue ocean to the right. Meanwhile, the plants and grasses and trees of these sloping canyons, which give entry to the heart of Point Mugu State Park, were sufficient in number and variation to stun the eye, vex the memory and alter any belief that relatively rainless places are relatively barren.

Now La Jolla is charcoal, Sycamore a blotchy burn.

A LANDSCAPE REVEALED

I returned in recent days to hike, to repeat my ritual, to see how devastation had supplanted Mediterranean abundance. I went with a ghoul’s eye but an adopted son’s heart, hoping the place hadn’t left me--that its trails and surprises and mystery would still be there for the walking.

Already, this Ventura County sector of the Santa Monica Mountains inches back to life. Already, some plants here are showing the same ferocious will to live that coyotes showed to an unlucky deer.

On the Big Sycamore Canyon Trail, clumps of grass punch up through hardpack and announce themselves in eight-inch, lime-green stands. Higher up in La Jolla Canyon, hundreds of Spanish dagger yuccas--looking like charred pineapples strewn across the hillsides--shoot green stalks straight up from their bulbous bases in a process called “recrowning.”

Most striking to the post-fire hiker, however, is that everything, whether charred or showing signs of green, is visible.

The plant community that normally dominates this landscape is chaparral--dense thickets of stubborn shrubs that thrive in dry, rocky soils and typically include laurel sumac, toyon, California lilac, coffeeberry, gooseberry, scrub oak, poison oak and yucca.

Chaparral is key to this landscape for a host of reasons but none more important than that it holds the dirt in place. Chaparral, often growing 12 or 15 feet high, hides anything within it and occludes everything beyond it from view. It’s virtually impossible to penetrate--unless you’re on a footpath cut right through it, such as the La Jolla Canyon Trail.

With hillsides covered in eerie chaparral skeletons--still-standing laurel sumac looks like so many skinny, black arms waving to the sky--other riches of La Jolla Canyon are more plainly seen.

This couldn’t have been more disconcerting to Zenaida Wills of Port Heuneme, a La Jolla hiking veteran with two young daughters in tow. Standing just below a small waterfall a mile in from Pacific Coast Highway, she gestured toward the stream that meandered out into the valley below. “I didn’t know this was here. I mean I did know it, of course, but it was hidden. Seeing it all is so strange.”

Wills’ husband, Jim, however, a mile farther up the trail, had reached a clear opinion of land so naked. “I’m disgusted. It’s all gone. They say it’ll be back. And I guess that’s true--God takes care of his own. But it’s rough seeing it this way.”

Not so for George Dodds, a mountain biker from North Hollywood, who was plainly ecstatic while cruising through burned-out Sycamore Canyon. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing to a facing hillside that in October wore a sweater of muted green, gold and lavender and now resembled the hard, gray back of an armadillo.

“The hills have a new contour, it’s so clear,” he said. “And to know everything will be back. It’s wonderful.”

Maybe. Probably. I hope.

For now, nothing could be more alien and melancholy than the Vermont winter scene visible well above the La Jolla Canyon waterfall and just before the opening to La Jolla Valley meadow. White ashes blanket the ground beneath the live oaks and sycamores that line the stream bed. The trees burned at high temperatures but still stand. In the shadows of late afternoon, they are skeletons slouched over mottled snow, a chilly group of haunting survivors.

BRIDGE TO RENEWAL

Milt McAuley knows virtually every mile of every footpath in the Santa Monica Mountains. He’s 74, hikes five days a week and has published numerous books on trails and natural growth in the Santa Monicas--among them a guide to hiking in Point Mugu State Park.

McAuley, a retired Air Force pilot and a wry soul, is given to understatement. While he expresses genuine regret for those who suffered loss in the recent fires, he becomes animated when discussing the ecological consequences.

“The fire is of general benefit, and this was the biggest burn I have ever seen. Most vegetation here is chaparral. Unlike grass communities, which die and are absorbed by the soil and regenerate, chaparral doesn’t deteriorate. It stands there for 40 years taking nutrients from the soil. It stagnates. And the land doesn’t regenerate.”

Except by fire.

And fires, McAuley argues in his book “Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains,” have raged through these parts more than 500 times since the last Ice Age, roughly 11,500 years ago. As a result, fire establishes in severe terms the plants that will make it, those that will not and those that must be present at specific times to ensure ecological stability.

State parks ecologist Suzanne Goode takes an even longer view. “A lot of intricate little relationships among these plants have evolved over millions of years. Fire has had much to do with it. It’s folly for us humans to tamper with it.”

McAuley, along with Goode and Point Mugu State Park rangers, expects an explosion of springtime flowers, a number of them blooming only because the recent fires cracked open their seed husks. These are plants whose seeds in some cases lay around for a century or more--”waiting, if you wish to anthropomorphize them, for a fire to crack them open,” Goode notes.

Although the first natural role of such fire-dependent wildflowers is to hold soils in place while chaparral re-roots and generates growth in ash-fertilized ground, the obvious benefit to the hiker is aesthetic.

McAuley expects entire hillsides of bleeding heart to appear, constituting “a foliage of poppies on an immense scale, plants that are eight to 10 feet high with small, white blossoms that have two red dots deep within.”

Steeper hillsides, especially those facing east, will be covered in fire poppy and wind poppy, both rare plants with delicate, chalky petals that flower only in the year following a fire.

The wild card of the bunch will likely be the giant phecelia, a 3-foot plant laden with large, lavender-blue blossoms. McAuley cites “millions of phecelia seeds” spread throughout the Santa Monicas and waiting to be scorched. Why a wild card? “We don’t know where they will be,” McAuley explains.

In homage to the ubiquitous, primal chaparral, the most ironic flowering will be that of the plant that grows annually within chaparral but goes unnoticed because it blooms only after chaparral’s destruction by fire: the white star lily. Noted for its striking, slender-leaved, starlike blossom, the lilies grow to three feet and, says McAuley, “are kind of startling when you happen upon them.”

STARK BEAUTY

Springtime prognostications notwithstanding, there is much to happen upon and be startled by right now in Point Mugu State Park.

Valley, canyon, hillside and mountain pathways have never been more decipherable for hikers. There is no vegetation to block them from view, though some are obstructed in places by fallen trees and steeper switchbacks are undermined by loosened rocks.

The quality of light has changed throughout the day. A charred landscape absorbs rather than reflects light. Surfaces that were softened by green trees, yellow flowers and mixed growth now look hard, black, veined, foreboding. Still, if you have a taste for black-and-white movies or photography, you’ll find the burned canyons and hillsides quite beautiful: severe, to-the-point, emphasized in their weight and play of angles.

From both the Overlook Trail above Sycamore Canyon and the lower third of the La Jolla Canyon Trail, the Pacific Ocean has never looked bluer, the sunset never more saturated in deepening pumpkin hues--but then that’s what happens when you frame such colors in simple grays and blacks.

Indeed, I was so held by this new look that I misjudged my way home one night from deep within the park’s interior. I reached the waterfall in La Jolla Canyon at sunset only to find that the charred canyon walls denied me reflected light from the sky, which was still quite bright. Indeed, the walls seemed to suck in all available light. Creeping down steep switchbacks into a black canyon was like a descent into the bowl of a Weber barbecue, the top coming down fast.

Even so, as I hit the wide path below to make my way to the valley floor, I felt an exhilaration distinct from that experienced on pre-wildfire hikes perfumed by abundant coastal sage or wild fennel rubbed between the fingers. Instead, I realized I was walking through a cycle’s moment, the rebirth of a place. The ridiculousness that the trigger for such a great event was most likely arson trailed me like an unseen bobcat.

I passed the deer’s resting place and wondered how much more of her was gone since seeing her the day before. The blackness was filled with the white noise of crickets. From where? From when? Clearly, more living things than deer and coyotes made it through.

Immediately it became apparent how well Zenaida Wills had instructed her 9-year-old daughter, Jazzen, who joined the family’s return to La Jolla.

Jazzen had come to this canyon before the fires to see lizards, mule deer, squirrels, rabbits and hawks. But on her hike through the burned-out canyon, all she saw was a single, tiny lizard, and even that represented a thwarted joy.

“I was gonna catch it,” she said. “But my mom said, ‘Leave it alone.’ ”