Shady Grove : Rare Stand of Redwoods Offers Cool Refuge for Summer Hikers

With red-tailed hawks soaring high above, Laura Yingling and her boyfriend, Bryan Hunt, hiked their way across a gentle stream and down a dirt path. The Tustin couple paused to admire leaves and brightly colored berries as the sun scorched the Chino Hills nearby.

They were following Carbon Canyon Regional Park’s recently reopened nature trail in search of a rare Southern California redwood grove.

“Are we there yet?” Yingling joked, her water bottle nearly empty.

When they approached the clearing at the end of the trail, Yingling’s eyes moved up the auburn trunks of the majestic trees standing before her. Squinting, she caught a glimpse of the top of the tallest redwood, towering 90 feet above her.

“Shade,” she sighed, plopping down on a picnic bench.

The nature trails of Carbon Canyon Regional Park, home to one of only a few redwood groves in Southern California, opened last week after being closed for almost seven months. Redwoods are an oddity in the hot arid climate of Southern California because the trees need lots of water to thrive.

After last winter’s record rain, however, the Brea redwoods are flourishing.

“The water from the rain made it an excellent, excellent winter for the trees, especially for our young redwoods out there,” said senior park ranger Jeff Bukshpan, who began working at the park in 1984. “Every tree just looks really lush. They’re staying green.”

The wet weather also put the grove out of reach for park users for quite a while. For the first three months of this year, Bukshpan said, excessive rains caused the one-mile nature trail leading to the redwoods to be choked with plant growth, leaving the picnic benches under the shade of these trees vacant since last December.

“This is the wettest year I’ve seen,” said Bukshpan. “The water was coming from underground where our large dirt parking lot is. And the paths leading to the redwoods became too dangerous to walk on.” The trails finally were reopened after sunny days reduced the creek and transformed muddy paths into silt, rangers said.

These days, hikers still must hop across rocks to cross the creek where the path picks up. Months ago, the water was almost knee-deep.

Bukshpan said workers clear the path of overgrowth every winter, and the nature trail normally reopens as early as May, depending on the season’s rains.

About 200 Sequoia sempervirens in 15-gallon containers were planted at the park in 1975, Bukshpan said, leftovers from a bank giveaway promotion in 1970.

The bank had 600 surplus seedlings and gave them to some Fullerton College botany students, who transplanted them into one-gallon containers.

The county later acquired the redwood seedlings and sent them to the James A. Musick Branch Jail for the inmates to tend. Three years later, the surviving 200 trees became a gift from the county to the park when it opened.

Once five to 15 feet high, the trees now range up to 90 feet. Rangers have planted more trees each Arbor Day, and officials estimate an additional 60 redwoods live in the 10-acre grove.

Another grove of Sequoia sempervirens can be found at UC Irvine, a living monument to a former professor’s landmark research in tree cloning. About 300 redwoods, produced by test-tube cloning, were planted on the campus in 1982, but more than two-thirds died several years ago after gophers chewed through the underground watering pipes.

Bukshpan said the tallest tree in the world is a 368-foot redwood in Northern California.

The Carbon Canyon park has an irrigation line, which waters the redwoods for a couple of minutes every day and night.

According to rangers, redwoods grow better in groves because they tend to support each other.

“They’re not a real deep-rooted tree,” Bukshpan said. “Together, they can hold more moisture.”

The area around the base of the tree is kept damp, as well as the sponge-like red trunks, Bukshpan said.

“When you press your fingers against the moist trunk, water appears,” he said. “The redwoods in the center of the grove are taller, because they were sheltered by the trees in the outer perimeter and so they reach for the sun and grow faster.”

The nutrient-rich silt that erodes from the canyon also helps the trees grow, Bukshpan said.

“These newer trees we’ve planted are growing a lot faster than some of the earlier ones because of rain and the soil,” Bukshpan said.

A densely shaded part of the grove is a popular picnic spot, rangers say. Benches and water fountains have been erected, and the grove attracts many animals as well as hikers.

A wide variety of birds, including quail and crows, perch in the trees. Bukshpan said visitors have spotted gophers, skunks, opossums, coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, snakes and rabbits on the path and while hanging out in the grove.

“In dry brush, a little critter will sound like a wolf or something,” Bukshpan explained.

Loud crunches could be heard as bushes nearby started to move.

Out came Rosalinda Chacon, 20, and her friend Deana Schafer, 25. The Redondo Beach residents had been hiking through miles of thick brush and were visibly relieved to see the grove and its shade. Beads of sweat dotted their foreheads as they rested on a bench for a few minutes to drink water before continuing their hike through the cool grove.

“Now that’s more like it,” Chacon said.