Rebirth in a Fire-Scorched Park

On Saturday, a species missing from Cuyamaca Rancho State Park since last October’s ruinous wildfire at last returns.

The public, banned after the Cedar fire burned all but 300 of the park’s 25,000 acres, will be permitted onto some campgrounds and trails, beginning at sunrise.

What those returning will find is a vastly altered landscape on which bright green springtime regrowth strains to draw the eye from mile upon mile of charred forest, and human optimism labors against the reality that Cuyamaca Rancho will take several generations of Homo sapiens to restore itself.

No California state park ever has been so thoroughly wrecked by flames, according to park officials. Upward of a million trees died. In most places, the soil’s organic layer burned away and a blanket of soft, gray-brown ash made the ground look like the surface of a distant planet. The few smatterings of remaining green almost shocked the eye.

Today, Cuyamaca Rancho is two different worlds divided by elevation. Tall annual grasses and rainbows of wildflowers with fairy-tale names -- tidytips, creamcups, baby blue-eyes, goldfields -- sway in the breeze in the park’s lower-lying meadows.

Above this gaiety, however, Cuyamaca’s three mountain peaks loom massive and autumnal, brown and black with burned soil and dead pine trees, some of which were hundreds of years old.

Along California Highway 79, which divides the park 40 miles east of San Diego, crews in bright orange Asplundh Tree Expert Co. trucks cut and clear dead trees so that new utility poles can be set.

The spitting roar of their chipping machines echoes through stands of lifeless trees. It seems a kind of dirge for the lost forest.

Optimistic Approach

To the park’s staff, whose lives are most tightly bound up with Cuyamaca Rancho, the spring bloom has been a powerful tonic. They share a determined optimism.

Having endured a colorless winter, they find encouragement in every smear of meadow wildflowers, in each black skeleton of chaparral that has sprouted a messy skirt of green, in every dead-looking oak that has issued bright shoots from the armpits of its upward-angled branches or hung itself with new catkins, the seedy, thread-like flowers awaiting pollination to grow into acorns.

“It was so inspiring to see these trees bloom out that we thought were dead -- not only greening out, but blossoming, which is the ultimate sign of life,” said park Supt. Laura Itogawa as she stood before an oak dripping catkins at the park’s Green Valley Campground.

“For us, this is beautiful. ‘Lookit! Life!’ For the general public, it’s going to be, ‘Wow, lookit! The burn!’ ” she said. “But of all the species we have, there are none that aren’t coming back. In fact, some protected plant species are coming back in far greater numbers and in greater expanses than we’ve seen before.

“And jays, hawks, owls, vultures -- everybody’s back. So many rats, mice and gophers survived the fire underground that the predators -- like coyotes, bobcats and foxes that have come back -- are doing well. The deer were slim during the winter, but now they’re fattening up on the new growth.”

For Itogawa, the crucial moment came shortly after the fire when she visited the park’s West Mesa area, where 70 deer and other animals burned to death.

Viewing the carnage in light of everything else that had occurred -- her own house was destroyed -- she felt herself coming undone.

“I just had to bite my lip and say, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ If I looked at the loss of my house personally, and what happened to the park personally, that would be too much. So I’m focusing on matters here professionally,” she said.

There are corners of Cuyamaca Rancho, spots that burned lightly or not at all, where optimism seems perfectly justified.

Driving the East Mesa fire road (also to reopen Saturday), park ranger Bob Hillis pointed to a massive round oak tree about 50 feet high whose foliage extended to a girth of similar measure. Like many of the smaller trees around it, it seemed untouched by the fire.

Hillis hiked to a higher elevation and surveyed the area. He stretched an arm toward a draw filled with the bright green of new oak growth.

“You look at these trees,” he said, “and it’s like, ‘What fire?’ ”

Miles away on the other side of Cuyamaca Rancho, in an area called Airplane Ridge, researcher Michael Wells last week went looking for pine seedlings.

Of 800 Coulter pines Wells had studied on Airplane Ridge for his doctoral dissertation in the 1990s, only three survived the flames. The Cedar fire all but wiped out Cuyamaca’s pines, including some of the most stunning specimens at higher altitudes, where pines thrive more readily than oaks. Wells estimated that pines and other conifers made up 30% to 40% of the forest and that up to 95% of them had died.

Oak trees often can survive immolation. They contain protected buds beneath their bark and on their roots, and these sprout after their foliage has burned away.

Signs of Intensity

The buds of pines, however, are on their extremities, vulnerable to fire. Thus a defoliated pine cannot sprout. To produce a new generation, it must rely on seeds its cones released in the aftermath of fire and those previously cached in the soil by birds and squirrels.

On Airplane Ridge, the fire must have burned so intensely that it destroyed seed-bearing cones and seed caches. Wells found not a single pine seedling. The tall dead pines, some as old as 200 years, had failed to reproduce. They are now encrusted with shellfish-shaped fungi extracting residual photosynthetic energy from their corpses.

“I’d guess this area is going to an oak woodland in the future,” Wells said, as he fingered a partly charred pine seed he had found.

Even those oaks and pines that were regenerating from their tops were not beyond danger. The critical question, Wells said, was whether they could generate sufficient foliage to produce enough carbohydrates through photosynthesis to keep the tree alive.

Experience has shown, he said, that trees that lose 40% or more of their foliage often have difficulty surviving long-term.

Up on Cuyamaca Peak, at 6,500 feet the park’s highest, Wells continued his search for pine seedlings.

In one barren area he found more than 35 infant trees scattered over an acre, some cheek-by-jowl with deformed, coal-black stumps of chaparral.

Each was no more than 2 inches tall and resembled a tiny fragile umbrella skeleton that had been turned inside out. The trees’ cotyledons -- delicate needles that existed when the plants were inside their seeds -- now stretched toward the abundant sunlight streaming through the defoliated corpses of the seedlings’ towering parents.

“What’s encouraging,” he said, “is this area looks to have been burned pretty intensely, but even burned down to mineral soil, there are still some seedlings here.”

Numerous experts have trooped through the ashes of Cuyamaca, trying to divine the future of its forest. Their predictions, said Itogawa, often have been conflicting.

“The truth is fluid,” she said. “We’re learning to sit back and see what happens. The forest will be different, no doubt about that. But it will be living, green, pretty.”

Amid that green, however, thousands of expired trees will stand for many years as their roots slowly decompose. Because they are leafless and, in many cases, de-branched, wind and snow will have difficulty gaining enough purchase on them to speed their toppling.

Experts and lay observers alike agree on one thing: Cuyamaca’s forest won’t achieve its former majesty until everyone now alive is long deceased.

Last Saturday, Earth Day, nearly 500 volunteers came to Cuyamaca Rancho to tidy campgrounds, groom trails and set new signage. Similar activities were conducted at other state parks, but none drew such an outpouring of voluntarism as did Cuyamaca, according to state officials.

Near the end of the day, volunteer Starla Rivers of San Diego took a rest at the summit of Stonewall Peak and looked out over the meadows below. She’d driven through the park on Route 79 in February, and the unrelenting destruction she saw left her dispirited.

“But now, seeing the oaks sprout, seeing the grass, it makes you think there really is going to be a rejuvenation.”

Blessing and Curse

The worst fears park officials had after the fire -- that heavy winter rains would cause massive mudslides -- were not borne out.

Such rains did not come, sparing the land, but continuing the decade-long drought that could hinder the forest’s recovery.

Nature, however, is also reductionist, ever subtracting evidence of last year’s fire.

That is most evident along the streambed on West Mesa where the 70 deer and other animals perished. Shortly after the conflagration, the corpses lay, in hideous poses, everywhere on the barren land.

Today, only two or three partial skeletons can be found, scavengers having done their work.

The skull of a large buck killed by the fire is still there, although separated from its skeleton.

Where it once lay on denuded ground, it now rests in a lush meadow of green grass, pink storksbill and blue miniature lupine, and the mountain breeze that blows over it smells no longer of ash, but of flowers.