Each spring State Parks hosts a California Trails and Greenways Conference for trail professionals At the 2023 conference held in the last week of March the Santa Cruz District and Big Basin Volunteer Trail Crews were recognized for their work in preparing the trails for the park's reopening last July.
The idea came about when Larry Tienery, a former Basin maintenance worker who went on to become a maintenance chief in the Big Sur area and has been on the conference awards committee in the past. He contacted the Trail Crew's Mimi Guiney and said it would be a good idea to nominate the Basin trail crews for all the post fire work. A bit of history - Larry was living in the park residence home that was crushed when the large redwood on the edge of the campfire center fell in the late 80's. He was away at the time and his dog escaped injury as it was in an area of the house not damaged.
So Mimi ran with the idea - writing up a nomination for the District and BBVTC crews (see Mimi’s recommendation below), the conference awards committee decided our joint work was worthy of recognition. Chris Pereira, the District trails supervisor, picked up the award since he had already planned to attend the conference.
The Trail Crew has been especially fortunate over the years to receive support from many Basin and District staff, but it's nice to know our efforts are appreciated at the state level as well. Of course the scale of the work the Crew has done over the past two years would not have been possible without the many new people who have joined since the CZU fires. Ironically, Peter mentioned during the last workday that over half the crew out that day were new, adding 'and younger to!'
So thanks to those who joined since the fires and provided a big lift, and the veterans who have been around for decades as the Trail Crew celebrates its 54th anniversary this month.
Redwood Loop, Dool and Sunset Trails Reconstruction Project
Nomination narrative – Merit Award: Development
Santa Cruz District Roads & Trails Crew, Big Basin Volunteer Trail Crew
In August of 2020, the CZU Complex Fire burned through over 90% of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the original park in California’s State Park System. While redwood forests are well adapted to fires, this catastrophic event destroyed almost every building, campground, and human-made infrastructure in the 18,000+ acre park, killed countless other trees and plants, and obliterated virtually every bit of the 80+ miles of trails for which Big Basin is known.
Conditions were so dangerous – there continued to be smoldering stumps and root fires well into 2021, and fire damaged trees continued to fall unexpectedly – that no trail work was begun in the park until late autumn of 2021. Finally, the State Parks’ Santa Cruz District Roads & Trail Crew and the Big Basin Volunteer Trail Crew were allowed to begin the daunting task of finding and recreating the first few miles of trails to allow limited public access to the park.
The Big Basin Volunteer Trail Crew (BBVTC) was started in 1969, during the push to create and open the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail, linking Castle Rock SP to Big Basin and allowing hikers access from Skyline Blvd. through the state parks to the Pacific Ocean, 37 miles away. The crew held a work day each month, year round, and worked with State Park personnel to keep trails clear and maintained. Each spring they sponsored an annual Trail Day, which brought up to 500 volunteers into the park for a massive ‘spring cleaning’. This eventually grew into the state-wide (and now national) Trail Day program! For many years, throughout the 1970s and 80s, BBVTC also sponsored an end-of-season Trail Clean-up day, to clear trash and litter from the trails of both Castle Rock and Big Basin Redwoods State Parks. So the crew was well prepared and poised to get back into Big Basin and get to work! It even decided that with the magnitude of the job, they would come every other Saturday for the foreseeable future.
Step 1 would be to recreate the park’s Redwood Loop Trail, a 0.6 mile trail through some of the most iconic, old-growth trees in Big Basin. The trail includes the famous Mother of the Forest, Father of the Forest, and many others named during the early 20th century when naming significant trees was in vogue. The trail wanders along some of the oldest and largest trees in the forest and is enjoyed by close to a million visitors each year. Opening the Redwood Trail required building many dozen burn piles to clear out fallen debris, and then rebuilding split-rail and other fencing to delineate the trail itself. It also required rerouting some drainages to allow rainwater to flow to Opal Creek without undermining the new trail, or any of the still-standing trees.
While 0.6 miles isn’t a very long trail, there was so much debris that on some days the 12-18 trained volunteers managing only around 150 – 200 feet of progress! Dead snags needed to be brought down, stumps needed to be chainsawed out, and old fencing and signage needed to have every nail, wire and bit of metal removed to make the wood safe for the burn piles.
The State Park Trail supervisors would identify where they wanted the burn piles to be located, and in late spring they did the burning as well. There were also some California Conservation Corps spike-camp crews who helped in various locations throughout the park.
In July, 2022, the Redwood Trail was re-opened for limited numbers of park visitors to walk once more. Still, the work wasn’t done; throughout the summer one of the BBVTC’s critical jobs was to remove as much non-native, intrusive vegetation from the grove as possible, before it took hold in the fragile ecosystem. To that end, tens of thousands of Russian thistle plants, seed pods and unopened blooms, as well as French and Scotch broom plants were dug up, bagged and destroyed.
Simultaneously, Step 2 began as the focus of the work shifted to the Dool Trail. The plan was to open this second trail to allow a longer and more rugged hike of around 3 miles. Again, the main thrust was in clearing and creating dozens more burn piles. BBVTC and the CCC crews managed to open the Dool Trail in about a month.
Then, in August, Step 3 began as the focus shifted to the first mile of the Sunset Trail. State Park’s crew flagged the trail, which was so overgrown with ceanothus and other understory as to be almost impossible to find. This lower end of the trail, between the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail and Middle Ridge Fire Road, is an important link to the park’s backcountry and provides significant access to other trails and fire roads. By December, the final bit of the lower Sunset Trail was ready to open.
In all, BBVTC had 89 individuals contribute a record 3,673 hours just in the calendar year 2022. This is triple the number of hours volunteered before the CZU Complex Fire. When added to the State Park’s Trail Crew and CCC Spike Camp Crews, there have been a total of tens of thousands of coordinated hours of work on just these 4.5 miles of trails. Considering that Big Basin has another 75 miles of trails (or so) to tackle, this is clearly not a short-term project! But the gratification is as immense as the giant redwoods among which the work is done, and the happiness of park visitors as they hike past is indescribable.
Extensive photos and narrative of the project are available at https:bbvtc.org.