The landscape at Big Basin Redwoods State Park comes in two main colors these days: black and green. Green is from the growth you’d expect after weeks of heavy rain: redwood leaves washed clean, waxy-leaved blueblossom ceanothus shrubs densely covering the ground. And black from the charred bark of still-standing trees—scars of the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires, which burned 97 percent of California’s oldest state park.

But burnt doesn’t mean dead. On a sunny day in January, I walk the Redwood Loop Trail with Chris Pereira, Will Fourt, and Garret Hammack, State Parks employees all working to restore Big Basin. By the Mother of the Forest—one of the massive, ancient coastal redwoods that inspired the formation of the Sempervirens Club, now the Sempervirens Fund, in 1900—we stop and look up. She looks darker, slimmer, and shorter than before the fires, but green growth clusters around her trunk and new redwood leaves, jade green, branch out on fresh limbs. 

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Tanvi is a senior reporting fellow with Bay Nature. Her writing and reporting has appeared across High Country News, Science Magazine, and Atlas Obscura, in addition to underground murals and her mother's Facebook page. She grew up across Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and India before moving to California, where she studied ecology at Stanford University. She is a big fan of long runs and food.