Natural History Wanderings

The Mercury News Reports

Wildfires this summer devastated California’s historic first state park, Big Basin Redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But just 35 miles away, where another blaze burned a state park in the Bay Area, the results were dramatically different.

Roughly 55,000 acres — an area nearly twice the size of San Francisco — burned at Henry W. Coe State Park near Morgan Hill in August and September. But while California’s record summer of wildfires blackened Big Basin’s beloved redwoods and destroyed its historic visitor center, gift shop and campgrounds, a fire that charred nearly two-thirds of Coe park spared its buildings. In the end, the fire was an overwhelmingly positive event for California’s second-largest state park, biologists say, one the best things to happen to its landscape in years.

The mostly slow-moving flames cleared out enormous amounts of dead grass and brush across spacious valleys, ridges and hillsides. If there are decent rains this winter, the rejuvenation could sprout wildflowers all across the park and in other areas in the Diablo Range that burned

Read more at How one Bay Area park benefited from this summer’s big fires