Four years ago, a raging wildfire burned through California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods, charring 97% of the landscape in the Santa Cruz Mountains and destroying every building and campsite, leaving ruins where beloved family memories had been nurtured for generations.
Now hikers have returned. Trails have reopened. The blackened redwoods — some of which tower 300 feet tall and date back to the Roman Empire — nearly all survived and are covered with vibrant green new branches. But none of the buildings, from the rustic visitors center to restrooms, have been rebuilt. The park still doesn’t have electricity or running water.
On Wednesday, Big Basin will take a significant step toward recovery, as the California Department of Parks and Recreation holds its first public meeting to unveil three options for rebuilding the 18,000-acre park’s facilities.
The document, called the “Facilities Management Plan,” was written by parks planners after several years of public meetings.
Its three options vary in the number of parking spaces and campsites that would be built at various locations. But they all have in common two major changes: Shifting the visitors center and main parking area out of the old growth forest, where it had been for a century, and working to reduce traffic by running a shuttle bus from a parking lot on the eastern edge of the park at an area called Saddle Mountain, at least on busy weekends and summer days.
“The real focus is to try and remove the main built environment from the heart of the redwood forest and put it in a place that’s less vulnerable to fire, and less impactful to the redwoods,” said Chris Spohrer, superintendent of the Santa Cruz District of State Parks.
The open house meeting to detail the three options is scheduled for 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Simpkins Family Swim Center & Live Oak Community Center, 979 17th Ave, in Santa Cruz. It is free to attend, with no prior registration required.
State park officials also are collecting public input about the plan through Wednesday online, at reimaginingbigbasin.org.
Spohrer said another public open house will be held next spring. Then parks officials will choose a preferred plan by next summer. The hope is to begin construction in 2026, he said.
Since the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, which began Aug. 16, 2020 with lightning strikes, recovery has been slow but steady.
Two years ago, visitors were allowed to return after downed powerlines, burned buildings and charred vehicles were removed. Parking reservations, which can be obtained through the park’s website, are recommended, particularly on weekends.
Overall, 38 miles of trails and fire roads have reopened to bicycles, hikers, and horse riders. Rangers in state park uniforms greet visitors from a temporary kiosk near where the old 1930s-era log-cabin visitors center once stood.
Environmental groups who helped establish and enlarge Big Basin over the years say things generally are moving in the right direction.
“Ecologically the forest has been recovering really nicely,” said Sara Barth, executive director of the Sempervirens Fund, a non-profit group in Los Altos whose members helped convince state lawmakers to save the park in 1902 when loggers were cutting down its ancient trees for fence posts and railroad ties.
“The infrastructure has been much slower,” she said. “In many ways very little progress has been made. I wish the pace was more rapid. But the scale of what was lost was so vast. And I applaud state parks for thinking carefully what it should look like going forward and not just rebuilding the way it was.”
One key feature of the new plans is to use the Saddle Mountain property, a 17-acre parcel that Sempervirens purchased in 2007 and which state parks still has not transferred into its ownership, as the new hub for visitors arriving at the park, with a new visitors center and a shuttle bus stop.
Next to Saddle Mountain is another key property, Little Basin, a 534-expanse which was a former campground purchased by tech pioneers Bill Hewlett and David Packard for company retreats in 1963. On that property, Hewlett and Packard served steaks to employees and joined softball games as part of their morale-boosting “HP Way” through the 1960s and 1970s. In 2007, Hewlett-Packard sold it to the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto environmental group, which transferred it to state parks.
Under the three options, there would be between 42 and 79 car camping spaces at Little Basin, with 14 cabins for campers. As for parking, currently there are 70 spaces in the main Big Basin lot near the old headquarters site. That number would range from 50 to 96 spaces in the future, with between 120 and 150 at Saddle Mountain.
Not everyone is embracing the new plans. Neighbors who live near Saddle Mountain say they would prefer the buildings to be reconstructed in their old locations.
“We’re worried about traffic, noise, and people wandering onto other people’s properties,” said Jesus Beltran, a mechanical engineer who lives near Saddle Mountain. “State parks could be more efficient about how they rebuild in the old growth area. Most people will end up there anyway.”
Others say the fire gave society a new opportunity to rebuild the park facilities in a way that will restore more quiet to the famous stands of old-growth redwoods.
“Everything form the pavement that prevents water to getting from the roots of the old-growth trees, to the buildings, and fuel tanks and flammable material that goes along with it puts the resources at risk,” said Sam Hodder, president of Save the Redwoods League, an environmental group in San Francisco. “Letting visitors enjoy a more healthy forest ecosystem, not burdened with a lot of infrastructure will create a better experience and a more healthy redwood forest.”
