New forest rises from ashes

CUYAMACA, Calif. -- Atop Cuyamaca Peak, imperious Santa Ana winds shook the blackened skeletons of burned trees and chaparral as Shane Coles poked about, looking for reasons to take heart.

A coffee berry shrub whose dead stalks rose to a height of 6 feet had sprouted new green shoots already a third of the size of those burned. A big, squat Coulter pine, dead of fire, dangled half a dozen empty, football-sized cones over the rocky edge of the mountain. "Hopefully, they dropped their seeds and some of them will take," Coles said.

A year ago, the historic Cedar wildfire all but obliterated the majestic mountain forests of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, resetting human expectations for many generations to come. Of the site's 25,000 acres, only 300 escaped burning, in the worst fire ever to strike a state park.

Like a family that has weathered a year of birthdays and holidays since the death of a loved one, the people attached to Cuyamaca Rancho have completed a cycle of grieving.

"We all knew a big fire was going to happen," said Coles, who retired this year after 16 years as a ranger at the park. "We just hoped we'd be lucky, and it wouldn't happen in our lifetimes. It's part of the adjustment process to start accepting the landscape as it is."

Recently park officials conducted a two-day scientific symposium to mark the first anniversary of the conflagration, one of several simultaneous wildfires that burned nearly 740,000 acres and killed 26 people in Southern California last fall.

The symposium was titled "The Cedar Fire and Cuyamaca Rancho State Park One Year Later: Recovery Expectations and Realities." It was an early attempt to identify some of the plants and animals that are winners and losers on the altered landscape and address how the park's natural regeneration is likely to unfold.

It also signaled that the time for emotionalism was past.

The park is sometimes referred to as "San Diego's playground" (it is about 40 miles east of the city). Ordinarily its tree canopy would be taking on the yellow-green of autumn at this time of year. But with a million mature trees estimated to have died and countless others damaged, there is little such color change this year.

Since the park reopened in May, visitation has been down 75% from its pre-fire annual rate of 600,000 people. "But our day use is really picking up," said Laura Itogawa, Cuyamaca Rancho's insistently positive superintendent, "because people are realizing we're open and we're beautiful."

A Renaissance

Rebirth and new life are apparent in the exuberant green sprouting from the stumps and branches of burned oaks and in the fire-following plant species that, with the forest canopy gone, are literally having their day in the sun.

Since spring, Cuyamaca Rancho has been continuously in bloom. Currently, California fuchsia and scarlet monkey flower smear portions of hillsides and gullies in red.

"We're going to have great wildflowers for the next five years," Coles said as her SUV bumped along a fire road choked with sticky manna, a marijuana-like fire-follower whose purple tubular flowers will set a feast for hummingbirds when they bloom next spring. "This summer I saw wildflowers I never saw before."

In the park's lower-lying West Mesa area, Coles found numerous robust baby pines, some already 14 inches tall. As if aware of their fragile future, the tiny trees huddled like frightened infants near the giant corpses of their parents, which, even in death, provide some protection from hot sun and drying winds.