Towering over the coast, straining for sun as they’ve done since before there was such a thing as California, the old-growth giants of Big Basin Redwoods State Park stood in flames on Friday. John Gallagher thought of his sons. Darryl Young thought of his father. Laura McLendon thought of her wedding day.
“It was evening and the sun was just starting to slant through the trees,” said Ms. McLendon, a conservationist in San Francisco who married her husband in the park three years ago next week. “We could hear birds. It was magical. Like a time out of time.”
Now the 118-year-old state park, California’s oldest — the place where Mr. Gallagher hiked with his children in June, where Mr. Young learned to camp in his childhood, and where Ms. McLendon repeated her vows in a stand of 500-year-old redwoods — has been devastated. Park officials closed it on Wednesday, another casualty of the wildfires that have wracked the state with a vengeance that has grown more apocalyptic every year.
From the Southern California deserts to the Sierra Nevada to the vineyards and movie sets and architectural landmarks left by modern mortals, little of the state has been left unscathed by wildfire. In the past several years, infernos have scorched the Yosemite National Park, blackened the Joshua Tree National Park’s palm-strewn Oasis of Mara, damaged the Paramount Ranchand eviscerated Malibu summer camps beloved for generations.
Spanning 18,000 acres north of Santa Cruz, the park is home to the largest continuous stand of old-growth coast redwoods south of San Francisco, and was created in 1902 during a statewide movement to save forests that were being razed as California boomed in the decades after the Gold Rush. Its giant trees were the backdrop in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as Kim Novak strolled with James Stewart, and its headquarters, a one-story building built in 1936 from stone and redwood logs, are included in the National Register of Historic Places.
California’s Department of Parks and Recreation said that the park had sustained “extensive damage,” including to its headquarters, “historic core” and campgrounds.
( Full article at – https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/big-basin-redwoods-ca-fires.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience&smtyp=cur )
