A hike along the Point Reyes National Seashore’s newly reopened Bear Valley Trail, closed for nine months after last summer’s Woodward Fire, offers abundant signs of nature’s healing: A woodpecker drumming on a blackened tree, wildflowers basking in pockets of sunlight and a lingering scent of charcoal in the air.
“It’s beautiful. I’ve missed it, like part of my body was gone,” said Connie Mery, a Point Reyes Station resident and one of many hikers, equestrians and cyclists returning to the popular route from the Bear Valley Visitor Center to the ocean.
It’s the first of a series of trail openings anticipated in the coming weeks and months. For now, almost all of the 5,000-acre burn area remains closed. The Sky Trail up to Sky Camp is still dangerous due to weak and falling trees. On the Coast Trail, new bridges must be constructed. There are damaged retaining walls on the Wittenberg and Woodward Valley Trails. Along these and many other routes, new signs must be erected.
“There’s infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt, but otherwise, we’re interested in opening up all the trails that we can, as soon as possible,” said Dave Press, the park’s wildlife ecologist.
The Bear Valley Trail—the park’s Champs-Élysées, a wide and shaded former ranch road—is open to the Coast Trail, then to Kelham Beach. It traces the perimeter of the fire zone and was largely unscathed; when flames hit its damp riparian corridor—home to willows, alders and Bear Valley Creek—they didn’t race, but crept. Firefighters stationed themselves along the route to extinguish flying embers. “Just imagine, if the fire had really jumped that line, how much further south it really could have gone,” Mr. Press said.
The Bear Valley Trail understory has seen a quick recovery after the Woodward Fire. – David Briggs
Entering the trail from the visitor center, there’s no hint of the blaze. The route, once filled with large trucks and fire engines, is now smooth and tidy. But inside the forest are charred where patches where south-bound flames sought to jump the trail. Chopped logs and fuel breaks of young Douglas firs, their lower branches lopped off by firefighters, offer evidence of the fierce battle.
Approaching the ocean, long stretches of the trail are as green as ever, but the route toward Kelham Beach is far more somber, with skeletal shrubs standing starkly in carpets of lush grass.
Out of sight are steeper, interior slopes where the fire burned hotter; these will be slower to recover.
“The more exciting time will be when we let people into the high-severity burn areas of the park,” Mr. Press said. “Those areas will look very different for later generations.”
The Woodward Fire, ignited by lightning on Aug. 18 about three miles southwest of Olema, never became the super-hot inferno that some feared. That fact, Mr. Press said, will accelerate the landscape’s recovery.
Before the fire, the area was a mosaic of different habitats, and each habitat is responding in different ways, said Diana Humple, a senior avian ecologist with Point Blue. The fire also burned in a mosaic pattern, scarring some areas, singeing others and leaving much untouched.
These dynamics are critical to the landscape’s recovery. Lightly burned or unburned areas provide a reservoir of seeds that revitalize more heavily burned acreage. Grasses, stimulated by sudden nitrogen, phosphorus and sunlight, are surging from roots below ground.
Other plant species—California blackberry, hedge nettle, wild cucumber, Douglas iris and bracken fern—are returning in force this spring, said Rachel Hendrickson, a vegetation biologist working on invasive plant management and monitoring projects within the burn area. “Stump-sprouting shrubs like elderberry, huckleberry, coyote brush and coffeeberry are regenerating,” she said.
An expansion of blue blossom ceanothus within coastal scrub areas, as seen after the 1995 Vision Fire, is also possible.
One of the park’s major challenges will be dealing with weedy non-native species like thistles and mustards, which are thriving, especially in areas disturbed by firefighting. In years to come, the burned landscape will turn into scrub habitat, then coastal chaparral, before returning to forests of Douglas firs and other towering trees.
Animals may have scattered, but will return, Ms. Humple said.
Mother Nature doesn’t destroy herself in a fire. She simply reapportions what lives where.
“You can imagine that there are a lot of species that are not very far away, or even within the footprint of the fire, who can move in and take advantage as new mosaic patterns develop,” she said.
Deer, rabbits and hares were likely able to flee, and will eventually return. Where the fire didn’t burn too hot or too long, reptiles survived in burrows. Mice, voles and gophers likely also have sought underground shelters. But animals with above-ground nests, such as woodrats, probably perished.
Signs of the rare northern spotted owl have been found in five of the owl’s six former territories, according to Mr. Press. Three partially burned territories all have owl pairs: One is nesting just outside the fire zone, a second is nesting within the fire zone and a third pair that is outside the fire zone, not nesting. There’s also a non-nesting pair in the fully burned territory, and in an adjacent territory, an owl has been heard.
How will other bird species fare? In general, they’ll be helped by the sudden decline in egg-eating predators, such as snakes and rodents, Ms. Humple said. Hungry woodpeckers will get a boost from the sudden surge of insects in dead and dying trees, and will make nests in new holes.
According to previous post-fire research, the hardest-hit birds are those that rely on the old Douglas fir forests, such as brown creepers and golden-crowned kinglets. After the Vision Fire, riparian areas saw fewer chickadees and Pacific-slope flycatchers. The winners are birds that thrive on fast-growing shrubs, such as wrentits, song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers, Ms. Humple said.
As more trails open and travel becomes safer, scientists are planning to monitor the changes and conduct new research projects to chronicle these and other ecological shifts. The fire and its recovery will offer a new learning experience for park visitors, too. “We’re ecstatic to be back,” Point Reyes Station resident Kathy Hunting said.