This story aired in the August 18, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
A rare storm unleashed thousands of lightning strikes above the Bay Area and the Santa Cruz mountains, igniting several small fires. After the fires burned for a couple of days, high winds whipped the blazes together, forming the CZU Lightning complex fire.
The fire killed one person, destroyed hundreds of homes, and consumed roughly 86 thousand acres… including almost all of Big Basin State Park. But, the fire also marked a new beginning for California’s oldest state park.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: The Santa Cruz Mountains had not seen a major wildfire in decades. Forested areas like Big Basin State Park were full of fuel — stuff like dead leaves and fallen branches. Big Basin was primed to burn.
But California State Park Ranger Alex Tabone remembered feeling somewhat optimistic, when the CZU fire first started.
ALEX TABONE: For the first few days, you know, us in the fire management world, we're kind of excited. We were like, “Wow, we got a lot of fire on the ground — places that we would never get a chance to do our prescribed fire.” Things were going pretty good.
REPORTER: Prescribed fire is the process of burning sections of a forest or grassland. These are small fires, set intentionally and watched closely, to reduce that build-up of dead plants that can feed wildfires.
ALEX TABONE: So then the 18th rolls around and I was assigned to help out on a dozer line construction down by Waddell Beach on the ocean side of the park and it was kinda going sideways. Wind was picking up. We got a big fire whirl on the line that we were on.
REPORTER: The crew had to abandon the line.
And for Alex, things were getting very intense. The fire spread at incredible speed — up to a thousand acres each hour.
ALEX TABONE: So I got pulled from the beach to join a bunch of other park rangers that were actively evacuating people from the park. It was just rushing from campground to campground [saying] “Don't pack your stuff. Take only what you can't live without and leave immediately.”
REPORTER: People left tents left behind. Half-eaten meals remained on picnic tables. Campers joined nearby residents who were also fleeing — residents like Francine Van Meter.
FRANCINE VAN METER: That night I looked out over the San Francisco Bay and it looked like Mordor. Clouds went roaring by so fast and the trees were bending at 30 degrees. I knew it was not gonna be a good day for fighting fire.
REPORTER: By this time, Alex was in the residence area of the park — near where he lived.
ALEX TABONE: So we're like starting to get ready to try to attack this fire. And I turned and looked up the hill and there was about a hundred foot tall wall of flames marching down the hill at us. And I just looked at my fellow rangers and I was like, “We're leaving, it's time to go.” And [we] drove out and on the way down drove past my house and was like, “Well, if it's there in the morning, it'll be there in the morning. And if it's not then it's not.” And [we] headed out.
REPORTER: Alex's wife made it, with their cat and their chickens. That was it. Their home did not survive.
For generations of Bay Area families, Big Basin is a special place — the site of annual camping trips and awe-inspiring hikes. And just down the road my family owns a tree-filled off-grid haven. We call it “Mini Basin.” After the fire, Mini Basin looked like a moonscape. The crowns of charred oak trees hung low, like they were in mourning. I climbed a steep hillside and sank nearly to my knees in ash. It felt like walking through deep snow.
Research shows that climate change is ramping up the intensity of California wildfires. But the way the state had managed Big Basin also contributed to CZU's severity, because for decades after its founding in 1902, suppression was the norm. Fire was the enemy.
That changed well before the CZU hit. Big Basin had started doing some prescribed burns. And now the park is embracing the practice even more. But to understand the park's — and California's — relationship with fire, I talked to Mark Hylkema. Before retiring in 2023, he was an archaeologist with the state parks.
Mark told me Native Americans used fire in the Santa Cruz mountains for millennia.
MARK HYLKEMA: There are meadows within the trees. They would burn those regularly. The native grasses had seeds that were harvested and milled into flour for food. It's also where their browsers were: the elk, the antelope, the deer, and so forth.
REPORTER: Burning helped keep the meadows healthy and prevented them from getting choked by trees.
MARK HYLKEMA: And so there was a value in their world to light it on fire. In the redwood forest, they would burn selectively where the fern grottos were because they used the new shoots for their basketry and other fiber materials, which they were dependent on.
REPORTER: When the Spanish colonized California, the missionaries used force and coercion to convert the region's Native people and restricted their culture and practices,including using fire to regenerate the grasslands and forests.
MARK HYLKEMA: The Spanish Governor of California, Pedro Fages, wrote “We are prohibiting the Indians from burning because they have no other animals to look after other than their stomachs.” And they light these fires, which was affecting the browse for the cattle.
So they passed the first laws prohibiting Native people from burning. That was in about 1790.
REPORTER: When California became a state, the prohibitions on burning remained. And Mark says that meant areas like Big Basin built up a lot of fuel.
MARK HYLKEMA: This park has burned before. In the 1890s there were catastrophic fires, and again in the early 1900s, catastrophic fire.
REPORTER: Just two years after Big Basin opened, a wildfire moved quickly toward the oldest groves of redwoods, forcing visitors to evacuate. Firefighters stopped the fire. Back then, most foresters thought fire was harmful to forests. And of course, timber companies didn't like fire;it cut into their profits. Yet, those timbermen didn't want to see all the trees cut and sold.
MARK HYLKEMA: Some of the founders of the park were loggers. They had already preselected trees that they thought should serve as a museum.
REPORTER: In fact, that was the park's founding motto: "To be preserved in a state of nature."
But Mark points out that this idea that Big Basin's forest was untouched wilderness was wrong.
MARK HYLKEMA: This actually was never a wilderness until we stopped tribal people from managing the land. Then it became a wilderness. But that was part of the ideology we all had about what parks should be, frozen monuments in time. They're not. It's a very plastic thing in nature, fires come and go.
REPORTER: Over time, park management realized: fire serves a role in Big Basin's stewardship.
JULIANNE DIRKS: My name is Julianne Dirks and I'm an environmental scientist with California State Parks.
REPORTER: Julianne explained that here in California, our state parks were among the first to start doing prescribed burns. Back in the ’50s, an ecologist from UC Berkeley, Harold Biswell, began studying the positive effects fire can have on forest health. He eventually taught park employees in the Santa Cruz Mountains how to apply fire safely. Big Basin's first prescribed burn was in 1978.
JULIANNE DIRKS: And so we had been doing burns on the perimeter where there's not a lot of structures and we can put fire on the ground and just let it go, safely.
REPORTER: The park didn't do these burns very often, a few each decade. And they never did them here in the heart of the park, because it was home to historic wooden buildings, like the park headquarters and museum.
Park managers figured: doing prescribed burns around the old growth would reduce a wildfire's severity if it ever reached the grove. But they were wrong.
JULIANNE DIRKS: Here in the heart of the old growth loop with all these structures where fire hadn't been put on the ground, it burned very intensely.
REPORTER: And the historic buildings were destroyed.
But Julianne says the CZU fire showed something important:
JULIANNE DIRKS: When the CZU hit, we realized all of our work in the areas that we did prescribe burn, it was a less intense fire.
REPORTER: So now, as Big Basin rebuilds, the park is making big changes: more burning throughout the park. And in the old growth grove, there won't be buildings or campgrounds. But there will be prescribed burns.
And for that, the public has a chance to lend a hand.
On a recent morning, I'm surrounded by volunteers, who are donning their gloves and getting their tools ready for an event called a “Fuel Reduction Workday.”
DYLAN MCMANUS: Hey, good morning everyone. Welcome. Thanks so much for being here.
REPORTER: Dylan McManus oversees interpretive and education programs in the Santa Cruz District of the State Parks. He does a lot of public events like this one.
DYLAN MCMANUS: On the fuel reduction workdays, we simply gather certain debris, certain fuels, and organize them into burn piles in preparation of a prescribed burn.
REPORTER: That burn will happen some time in the winter or spring
DYLAN MCMANUS: But we're also just exploring creative options to engage our local communities. That's kind of why we made these workdays available for public signups. It's a really powerful way, I believe, to get folks hands-on experience with very tangible land management practices.
FRANCINE VAN METER: You can drag [a tarp] over and then dump it on. And that way it'll be some safety space in between people. And if folks are using power tools, give them at least a 10 foot radius.
REPORTER: That's Francine, the local we heard from earlier. Her house made it, and now she spends a lot of time volunteering in the state parks.
FRANCINE VAN METER: These redwoods are amazing and there's few of them left and we do have the ability to preserve them.
REPORTER: To preserve them in a state of nature, which includes fire.
Back at my own Mini Basin, I've seen the regenerative power of fire firsthand. That moonscape is now lush and green. And the redwoods are flourishing once again.
