Nature Teaches Fire Recovery : Untreated Areas of Caspers Park Are Doing Better Than Laguna Burn Area

Take away the human tragedy, the devastating fires that wiped out thousands of acres of wilderness in South County last year are providing a fascinating test of nature, say wildlife biologists.

Where much attention has been focused on reseeding the blackened hills near Laguna Beach homes, nature has been allowed to run its course in the 4,500 acres scorched by fire in Ronald W. Caspers Regional Park near San Juan Capistrano.

Almost five months after the blaze, the results are coming in for both areas: As usual, Mother Nature seems to know what she’s doing.

In Caspers Wilderness Park, many of the formerly charred hillsides are now blanketed in a thick, green carpet of grass. From the gnarled, blackened trees, new growth is sprouting and being consumed by deer craving the fresh young shoots.

“The human loss associated with fire is devastation,” said Trish Smith, a biologist for the Nature Conservancy in Irvine. “But what happened in Caspers is not a disaster, but rejuvenation; not destruction, but a natural process of rebirth. But even so, I’m amazed at how fast the terrain has regenerated here.”

The 366 homes dramatically lost in the Laguna Beach fire on Oct. 27 turned attention away from what happened to the vast unpopulated areas scorched when a wave of flame swept over Ortega Highway.

The toll was heavy: more than half the 7,500-acre Caspers Wilderness Park burned. Another 15,000 acres in adjoining Cleveland National Forest burned in the same fire.

Many of the 49,000 annual visitors of the park who bike, hike and ride horses over Caspers’ 30 miles of trails were hit hard by the fire.

Alice Sorenson visited the park nine days after the fire when “everything was very charred and smelly,” she said. “If I were to use a word to describe the park, it would be ‘moonscape.’ ”

But even then, “if you looked very close, you could already see signs of life peeking out from some of the bushes,” said Sorenson, an equestrian who is a member of the county trails advisory committee. “The park was already coming back to life.”

Fortunately, the fire stopped at the edge of Bell Canyon and San Juan Creek, where the richest concentration of live oaks, sycamores and other wildlife in the park are located.

But in fire-blasted sections of the park, the rapid recovery of trees, bushes and grass is due in part to deep root systems developed by plants used to living in desert-like conditions.

“Three or four months ago, this park looked pretty bleak,” he said. “The way everything is regrowing, there’ll be very few signs of the fire in five years.”

Most of the 14,000 acres burned in the Laguna coastal area were also left alone, Smith said. Those wilderness acres are doing much better than the residential areas treated by hydroseeding (a mix of mulch, seeds and water sprayed by hose) and aerial seeding, she added.

“In some areas, (seeding efforts) seem to be inhibiting natural regeneration,” said Smith, whose nonprofit conservation group is managing 16,000 acres of Irvine and Laguna Beach coastal wilderness areas owned by the Irvine Co. “In some sense, it helped keep the soil in place for a period, but in terms of recovery, it doesn’t seem to be doing the job.”

However, supporters of the reseeding program have pointed out that initial growth has already helped protect the damaged hillsides from mudslides during recent rains.

Studies are being conducted to measure how the burn areas recover “so we can learn lessons from what happened in the fires,” Smith said. “We can learn how to manage fires better.”

Wildlife biologists say that fire is a part of a natural cycle that helps rejuvenate the land. For example, several plants have tough-skinned seeds that only germinate after fire burns away their hard outer husks.

“There are species of plants you won’t see until we have fires,” said Pete DeSimone, manager of the National Audubon Starr Ranch Sanctuary, which had about 450 acres burn in the Ortega fire. “Fire helps nutrients return to the soil,”

“Some areas burn on a regular basis and that’s what they deal with so that’s what they adapt to,” he said. “Like our land adapts to drought conditions, it adapts to fire.”