‘We’re not dead yet’: Big Basin redwoods scorched, but not lost.
The news was heartbreaking. California’s oldest state park, home to coast redwood trees as tall as skyscrapers and dating back to the Roman Empire, suffered extensive damage in this month’s massive fires.
Big Basin Redwoods State Park, as it has been known and loved for generations, “is gone,” reported the Sempervirens Fund, a redwood conservancy that helped found the park in 1902. “We feel like we have lost an old friend.”
That sorrow rippled across the United States, as Americans faced the possibility that one of the country’s most beloved natural treasures could be, or “ever-living sequoia,” have endured for centuries. And this spring, they will undoubtedly sprout mini-trees around their bases and start to leaf out. The blackened sentinels, towering in the park about 45 miles south of San Francisco, “will very quickly recover,” says Mark Finney, a research forester at the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana.
