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'It's Hard to See Your Memories Burn': Loss From Wildfires Grows in California
Some of the ancient, towering conifers in Big Basin Redwoods State Park are a casualty of the fires that have wracked the state.
SACRAMENTO — Towering over the coast, straining for sun as they’ve done since before there was such a thing as California, the old-growth giants of Big Basin Redwoods State Park stood in flames on Friday. John Gallagher thought of his sons. Darryl Young thought of his father. Laura McLendon thought of her wedding day.
“It was evening and the sun was just starting to slant through the trees,” said Ms. McLendon, a conservationist in San Francisco who married her husband in the park three years ago next week. “We could hear birds. It was magical. Like a time out of time.”
Now the 118-year-old state park, California’s oldest — the place where Mr. Gallagher hiked with his children in June, where Mr. Young learned to camp in his childhood, and where Ms. McLendon repeated her vows in a stand of 500-year-old redwoods — has been devastated. Park officials closed it on Wednesday, another casualty of the wildfires that have wracked the state with a vengeance that has grown more apocalyptic every year.
From the Southern California deserts to the Sierra Nevada to the vineyards and movie sets and architectural landmarks left by modern mortals, little of the state has been left unscathed by wildfire. In the past several years, infernos have scorched the Yosemite National Park, blackened the Joshua Tree National Park’s palm-strewn Oasis of Mara, damaged the Paramount Ranch and eviscerated Malibu summer camps beloved for generations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/big-basin-redwoods-ca-fires.html
SACRAMENTO — Towering over the coast, straining for sun as they’ve done since before there was such a thing as California, the old-growth giants of Big Basin Redwoods State Park stood in flames on Friday. John Gallagher thought of his sons. Darryl Young thought of his father. Laura McLendon thought of her wedding day.
“It was evening and the sun was just starting to slant through the trees,” said Ms. McLendon, a conservationist in San Francisco who married her husband in the park three years ago next week. “We could hear birds. It was magical. Like a time out of time.”
Now the 118-year-old state park, California’s oldest — the place where Mr. Gallagher hiked with his children in June, where Mr. Young learned to camp in his childhood, and where Ms. McLendon repeated her vows in a stand of 500-year-old redwoods — has been devastated. Park officials closed it on Wednesday, another casualty of the wildfires that have wracked the state with a vengeance that has grown more apocalyptic every year.
From the Southern California deserts to the Sierra Nevada to the vineyards and movie sets and architectural landmarks left by modern mortals, little of the state has been left unscathed by wildfire. In the past several years, infernos have scorched the Yosemite National Park, blackened the Joshua Tree National Park’s palm-strewn Oasis of Mara, damaged the Paramount Ranch and eviscerated Malibu summer camps beloved for generations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/big-basin-redwoods-ca-fires.html
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
She said it changed him profoundly. They broke up shortly afterwards. She ran into him a few years later & he still hadn't recovered. Maybe he never did. What a "now you have it, now you don't" experience. 
