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.
Like Big Basin, she’s growing back. It’s been nearly six years since lightning strikes sparked the climate-change-exacerbated mega-blaze. Big Basin partially reopened in 2022, letting visitors see the still mostly denuded forest. In the years since, trail crews and organizations from across the state have worked hard to return the park to the place people remember. Today, about 17 of the former 85 miles of trail are open to the public, with more on the way.
This is the beginning of a multi-decade process to reimagine the park. As those larger plans take shape, visitors can once more spend hours with some of California’s largest trees and witness how a park is remade after near-total destruction.
The park has already come far from what Pereira, roads and trails manager for California State Parks’ Santa Cruz District, remembers from the fall of 2020. Once most of the flames died down, he and a team of seven others hiked every single trail, taking stock of the barren landscape. Embers still smoldered underground. Parts stank of burnt plastic from incinerated culverts. “You could really see what was ahead of you, and that all your other projects that you’ve been planning for years now are shelved,” Pereira says.
They chronicled places where trails had collapsed from burned-out tree root systems and bridges needed to be rebuilt with firesafe materials. Even as his crews began work, the forest kept changing: Trails vanished as fire-following plants exploded onto the landscape. Within four years, ceanothus went from being an occasional sighting in the park to taking over.
These nitrogen-fixing, fire-dependent shrubs are relatively ephemeral, and they die as maturing redwoods shade them out. But decades of fire suppression saturated the soil with ceanothus seeds. They’ve now taken their first chance to sprout in years, overwhelming open spaces and growing thicker and taller with each passing year.
To get trails visitor-ready, conservation corps from across the state have been chainsawing through vegetation, toppling charred trees, and hauling rocks. It’s work on a scale—and with a budget—Pereira has rarely seen before. “It’s been an interesting transition from always being on a shoestring budget . . . to just being flush with money,” he says. The state has fronted the funds, which will eventually be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to do the work necessary to reopen all of the trails.
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With up to 40 people working across the park at a time, trails reopen every six months or so: Crews from Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship and other groups wrapped up work on a three-mile stretch of Hollow Tree Trail in October 2025. (It was temporarily closed again in January due to storm damage.) With help from the California Conservation Corps, Pereira hopes to open the Sequoia Trail and a connecting overlook to the popular Sempervirens Falls by April. (However, you won’t be able to walk down to the falls because the stairs burned down.)
Behind the scenes, even bigger changes are brewing. Big Basin’s Facilities Management Plan, released last year, summarizes a years-long process that asked tribes, nonprofits, and the public about what they wanted from a rebuilt Big Basin. The plan moves the main visitor center away from Big Basin’s old-growth grove—where most iconic buildings burned down—to build a new shuttle stop, interpretive center, and gift shop at Saddle Mountain, a few miles away at the park’s main entrance. In the reimagined park, visitors will learn about post-fire forest management along trails and at new signage. They can ride shuttle buses around instead of driving—a move envisioned since at least 2013, but one that had been much harder to implement when historical infrastructure was still standing. That’s phase one. It’ll take at least five years to get there, estimates Will Fourt, senior parks and recreation specialist at State Parks. Eventually, there’ll also be a new multiuse tribal center at Little Basin, including a communal kitchen and an interpretive trail highlighting tribal uses of the landscape. But that’s phase two, even further out.
For the foreseeable future, the park is a chance to witness a work in progress. Walking the Redwood Loop, we see branches stacked in neat piles, which will eventually be burned. We dodge puddles as Fourt, Pereira, and Hammack discuss how water, too, is part of the plan. Eventually, they want to replace sections of this trail with boardwalk and to keep as much water as they can in the old-growth grove, helping to hydrate the trees as climate change dries out forests.
There are many plans for this forest, and, as in almost all conservation work, there’s not nearly enough money. While FEMA provides support for in-kind disaster recovery—rebuilding the same structures and trails that existed before—changes to the structure of the park will require State Parks to secure funding from other sources, especially as its budget and workforce have dwindled over the years. Nonprofits like Sempervirens Fund, Save the Redwoods League, and others are already playing vital roles. This funding Tetris game will likely continue for years.
From the Redwood Loop Trail, I take my leave of Fourt, Pereira, and Hammack and turn onto the reopened Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail. The forest around me is full of birdsong: dark-eyed juncos peeping, Pacific wrens chirping, an occasional raven letting out a deep caw. The only interruption is, every so often, a loud crack: another dead tree falling, another part of the park to clear one day.
I think about how much work it has taken to reach this point. The rains have felled many more dead trees, and I keep stopping to clamber over them, my hands darkening with charred bark. And yet, according to Fourt, some people visiting Big Basin for the first time don’t realize there was ever a fire at all.
I’m so lost in thought that the barricade comes as a shock. The trail terminates abruptly in a pile of logs, shadowed by a tall, impenetrable thicket of ceanothus. I look at the old map I have with me: This was a junction where the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail lived up to its name and descended toward the sea. But for now, this is just a Skyline trail. The coastal connection is many years away.
I take the other fork and turn back toward the parking lot. That’s a path for another day.
EXPLORE
Big Basin State Park
- The draw: Old-growth redwoods recovering from a historic fire in California’s oldest state park.
- Trails: Multiple options for 0.6- to 4-mile loops, mostly starting from the main day-use area.
- Facilities: Temporary restrooms and an interim visitor center are open at the main day-use area.
- Getting there: 21600 Big Basin Hwy, Boulder Creek, 95006. Parking fee.
