bulldozer

May 01 2009

May Roundup 2009 – Fire recovery observations and Open House reminder

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for Saturday, May 9^th for our Open House. We’ll open the gates at 9:00 AM and there will be plenty of parking at the turnout just south of Big Creek Bridge. We are rushing to finish grooming the trails, and will even have an historic trail to Dairy Canyon open by that time. Wear sturdy shoes and bring water and a snack. We’ll also have some scientists on hand if you want to talk about trout or sea otters or condors. Plus, we’ll be showing videos of our underwater habitats in the library. Our Reserve Manager, Mark Readdie, has been putting on his wetsuit and capturing footage of the trout in Big Creek, as well as life under the kelp forest in the Big Creek Marine Reserve. This is a viewpoint some of us may never see first hand, and the admission is free! You can also walk down to the beach for that picnic lunch you’ve been planning. We hope to see you then!

We’ve been guaranteed by Mother Nature that the weather will be perfect for Open House. We sure have been on a weather roller coaster for this past week. It was blowing fifty knots and cold on Sunday; a record high of 80 degrees on Tuesday; and this afternoon is foggy and 57 degrees. The barn swallows are a little confused, but they are nesting just the same. It’s a little difficult to find the bugs in the fog, but all of the swallow pairs have settled on which nests they’ll call home for the next five months. We hope they have better luck this season than last, when the fires interrupted their second set of babies.

We’ve been noticing other impacts from the fires, such as the disappearance of our little buck and our foxes (Mark says he still has foxes at his house…but he has chickens too!) Our theory is that the mountain lion population increased when their habitat burned in the wilderness. Since last fall, we haven’t seen the usual number of smaller animals, such as foxes, skunks and deer. Then, Mark found several mountain lion scat piles near the confluence of Big Creek and Devil’s Creek (see his blog at http://bigcreekblog.ucnrs.org). All together, they contained nine claws and a tooth of a 1-2 year old mountain lion, leading us to believe that a large mountain lion had digested a smaller one. A large male will stalk a smaller male to preserve its territory, but the big cats will also start to eat each other if they run out of the smaller food. We have seen several bobcats – alive, though, and hope that the cats work it out so that there is a rebalancing of the animal populations on the Reserve.

We also recently went up on the bulldozer line on Dolan Ridge to revisit that habitat. It provides a wonderful comparison of burned vs. unburned vegetation. The poppies and lupine in the burned areas are magnificent! At the end of the day, almost 100 species were identified, including 15 new species for the Reserve, with five of those 15 identified as fire followers. Now, the botanists are working on their theories of how these species got to that area; whether they were germinated through fire activity, bull dozer activity, or by some other means. Nevertheless, it is very exciting to find them and to be able to add to the diversity of the Reserve. You can look forward to seeing pictures of the recovering vegetation during our Open House, or hike up there and see it with your own eyes.

We’re looking forward to sharing all of this with you….and more. And yes, the tree frog is still in the toilet. In fact, another male tried to challenge our little guy for this prized location. Our guy won, and the other fellow had to move back out front to the pond. They are still out there singing, so we’re sure to have lots of tadpoles soon!

See you at the Open House!

Terry Hallock and Feynner Arias

Oct 20 2008

Chalk Fire definitely NOT contained anymore!

Well, I went down to Santa Barbara to get married and in the meantime the Chalk Fire flared up and is now really, really knocking on our doorstep. It is really repeating the pattern of the 1999 Kirk Fire now. Apparently, somewhere around the 15th or 16th the fire crossed Hare Canyon and by the 17th had moved into the upper watershed of the north fork of Limekiln Creek. They are now trying to hold the fire along the ridge from Cone Peak to Twin Peak, west along that ridge to Ojito, south to the Big Oak along the Gamboa Trail and then down the old Pine Ridge Trail to connect to the dozer line they have put just east of the Hermitage, off their road. They have been firing off the Hermitage break east toward the approaching fire from Limekiln and that seems to be going well. You can see the backfire on this perimeter map, along the dozer line above the hermitage, separate from the main fire and moving toward it.

The tricky part is moving above there and tying it in to Twin Peak. From Highlands Peak and the Canogas trailhead on the Reserve, Gage has been checking the ridge surrounding Vicente Creek since Saturday and Jen and I checked today.

Here is a picture taken from the road just past Canogas trailhead.

Still no fire on our side but that window is wide open. We could see a bulldozer working next to that big tree on the ridge in the center of the photo. The story is that they were going to use the helitorch to put a black line along the other side of that ridgeline and back it up with helicopter support. We saw a helicopter flying up and down Vicente Canyon, dumping water just over the ridge and could see black smoke billowing up at a pretty fast rate. We were expecting flames to show up any minute. Gage has been seeing that also for the last 2 days so they seem to be slowing it down. As I type at 6pm there is a helicopter picking up water just off the mouth of Big Creek.

So it’s not here yet but I will be watching it daily to see if they hold it.

By the way, Big Sur Kate has good photos from her house on the opposite side of this fire. Check her blog out at http://bigsurkate.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/chalk-update-101908/

Sep 28 2008

Chalk Fire starts evening of September 27, 2008

Feynner called this morning (Sunday the 28th) to say that there are ashes falling at Whale Point. Not a nice way to wake up. I got online and found out that a wild fire was spreading away from the South Coast Ridge road, near Nacamiento Ferguson road. There was certainly no lightening last night so I assume it was human caused. The fire grew during the day, moving up toward Chalk Peak. After checking all the fire news sites (Inciweb, NWS satellite, Xasauan Today, BigSurKate, Wildlandfire.com), we drove up the road to the hermitage to get a vantage to the south. Here’s what we saw from the picnic tables there. That ridge in the foreground is Stone Ridge. It seperates the North (or West) fork of Limekiln Creek from the middle fork.

Then I drove down to Pacific Valley in the afternoon to surf with friends. I was surprised to see that bulldozers had already cut a fire break from the highway up to Prewitt Ridge.

Aug 01 2008

August Roundup 2008 – Basin Complex Fire

I remember standing in the boutique at the Phoenix Shop in Big Sur on Saturday, June 21^st, when that big, dark cloud came rumbling over the coast. I was looking at the panorama of the coastline, thinking that nothing good could come of those horrible lightning bolts. There was nothing I could do about them either.

One of the bolts struck the hillside, just beyond the first ridgeline, and it took only seconds for the first puff of smoke to materialize. It would never have occurred to me that weeks later, that same little flicker would still be burning, miles away in the back of Carmel Valley. That one bolt of lightning had decided to strike in the steepest terrain; in the most inaccessible spot on the coast. And that little flicker would become the largest flame in the history of this area.

While the Reserve was still ten miles to the south of the fire, a survey team paid a visit early on in the event. It was clear that the fire was advancing to the south, and the team was searching for the right place to construct a containment line on that boundary. After reviewing the Reserve’s GIS maps and discussing its fire history, the group concluded Dolan Ridge was the right place. A dozer line on Dolan Ridge had saved Big Sur from fire coming from the south in the Kirk Complex fire in 1999. This time, it might save the Reserve, the New Camaldoli Hermitage and the town of Lucia to the south.

It took several more visits by the “dozer command”; bushwhacking a trail through the poison oak and mature Ceanothus; and constructing an escape route for the dozer operators who would be coming down from the Coast Ridge Road to convince the IC that this was a safe proposition. But once convinced, they made the commitment to contain the fire at that point. The Big Creek drainage is nearly as large as that of the Big Sur River itself. If the fire could not be contained at Dolan Ridge, it would burn for weeks more down the coast.

While the fire eventually did burn all the way to the line, it was held there after several ferocious battles. The fire crew set several backfires to reinforce the line, with flames leaping 100 feet in the air around Eagle Rock. The fire even tried to sneak into the Reserve at the southeast corner, near Cone Peak, but, again, fire crews held the line on the western and southern boundaries.

We saw the impact of the fire after the first week, when the skies were full of smoke and ash. The Barn Swallows and Funnel Spiders were having a difficult time finding bugs, both in the air and on the ground. There were also very few bees to be found. On a sad note, we lost several adult swallows and two nests of eggs when the cabin was gelled and wrapped in fire-retardant fiberglass. The swallows in the other buildings have carried on, and the second clutches of babies are now starting to fledge.

We have also observed new California Quail chicks in the yard. One family has two fathers and one mother, plus four juvenile chicks. And to our delight, there is another “communal” family of two fathers, two mothers and thirteen chicks. At one point, all thirteen chicks were crowded under one set of parents, trying to stay warm in the morning fog. The parents sat near each other, on the ground, making a tent of their wings and feathers for the chicks. It looked like two birds with twenty-six legs.

Folks have asked us what might have happened to all the animals in the back country. When we hiked up the Dolan Ridge recently, we saw lots of mountain lion tracks; and the trails on the Reserve are covered with scrape marks. We are sure there are lots of new cats in the neighborhood, and all of them are attempting to mark their new territory. They will all be competing for the smaller animals in the food chain in the coming months.

That survey of the dozer line on Dolan also revealed one more promising sign: there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of little green shoots sprouting out of the scorched earth. This is one positive result of a fire occurring so early in the season: there is time for the plants to reestablish themselves before the winter rains come.

While the community of Big Sur came together to support one another during this event, there will be many lessons learned, and ways to improve in the future. Big Creek Reserve has burned several times in the past fifty years. This time, it was allowed to be an island in the firestorm.

Terry Hallock and Feynner Arias