Making Their Way Back: Surprise and Renewal In Southern Oregon's Redwoods

Part Two: Many of Oregon's Fire-toasted Redwoods Are Now Demonstrating Something Miraculous; 'Epicormic Sprouting.’

Part One: in case it would be helpful to review…

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Part Two: Fast forward to April 1, 2023.

I had read last fall about one of those northernmost groves of Coast Redwoods, growing along the Chetco River that had burned in the infamous, Chetco Bar Fire. Apparently, many of the trees, despite losing all their branches to the flames were making a rather stunning comeback, pushing out hundreds, no, thousands of brilliant, green, new shoots and foliage through their charred, blackened bark and silvery, fire-killed branches. Redwoods have amazing, fire-resistant bark that allows them to re-sprout at various locations throughout their trunks, even where most of the bark has burned, a phenomenon known as ‘epicormic sprouting.’ Apparently, this is a common response after fire, and demonstrates wonderfully the resilience of Sequoia sempervirens, aka, Coast Redwood trees.

Adding to the little I’d heard of this wondrous, epicormic, re-greening of hundreds of seemingly, fire-killed trees after that monstrous fire, there were also reports that hundreds of new redwood saplings were shooting up from the unharmed roots of the burned trees, as well; basal sprouting and additionally, many other new saplings sprouting from fire-opened seed cones in all that newly, ash-enriched soil.

My soul and my eyes are always hungry for a little dose of wonder and inspiration, so after my few days with the wonderful people of Manzanita, OR, where I’d presented a slide lecture, So We Garden Like No One Is Watching, on the complex challenges facing gardeners in this new, rapid-change, climate paradigm it seemed like a no brainer to point my rig southward.

It was like a fever, that pull, calling me down the Oregon Coast on Highway 101 for even the slimmest chance to witness a bit of hopeful, woodland resurgence with my own eyes. Surely you can understand; there just aren’t that many good news stories out there in the world of forests and ecology these days. So much change and loss, and so much more on the way . I had to go.

There were healthy, new, redwood babies coming up everywhere.

Half a dozen hours of winding, two lane roads, bathroom breaks, lunch stops, a closed, US Forest Service visitor center, a closed, local sheriff’s office in Brookings and a handful of motel and gas station attendant inquiries later, I had gathered just enough information about the burn area to convince me to head, blindly and optimistically up into the mountains in hope of finding and photographing some of those elusive, resurgent redwood trees before nightfall. Not a single one of my inquiries had yielded any real news or even hearsay awareness of the sprouting miracle I was seeking, but each offered another ‘best route’ to the wasteland I’d been told this miracle was happening within and assurances that I couldn’t possibly miss the burn if I just stayed on that road. “It goes on, like, forever!” one gas station attendant said.

One learns over time and accumulated experience not to be discouraged when people look at you sympathetically or condescendingly, like you might be some sort of damned fool or misinformed dolt while you’re trying to enlist their enthusiasm and cooperation, explaining, or trying to explain just why the thing you’re seeking is so cool. Those blank stares, those bitten lips and eyerolls are just part of the adventure.

Epicormic & basal sprouting, plus (it would seem), seedlings from fire-opened cones

Not a single one of my tales of sprouting redwoods somewhere up there in the Chetco burn elicited much excitement, either. Again with the nerd stuff, I know. In hindsight some flapping, ‘buy one, get one free’ banner in front of the local Burger King would probably have generated more interest. So when I turned off the main road and headed east toward the cloud-capped mountains it still felt pretty much like a roll of the dice. But lady luck has a way of smiling upon hopeful, willing fools sometimes, just when everyone else is writing them off. And it was April Fools day, after all, so I figured, what the hell. I really couldn’t lose. I kept driving.

A hellscape landscape?

Several miles out of town, along the river road I passed that jarring transition zone I’d been promised where landscape suddenly became hellscape, switching from vibrant green forest to charred wasteland in the space of a mouse fart. There was no longer any question about finding the fire zone but I still worried that I might not recognize what I was looking for, even if I drove right past it.

Several miles and sheesh, hundreds of thousands of burned trees later, when I came upon the first few of these strange, almost wooly looking tree forms rising up through the resurgent undergrowth in a once beautiful campground situated between the road and the river, my heart jumped.

Wait! Was this the miracle I was looking for?

Epicormic sprouting on charred Coast Redwoods.

None of these odd trees were shaped quite like any wild-growing, native conifers I’d ever seen before. Maybe a bit like a Serbian Spruce. But these were definitely not spruce. I kept driving, though much slower. From the open window of my truck they did appear to have Sequoia-like leaves but from that distance, with these aging peepers I still didn’t quite trust what I was thinking I was seeing. It wasn’t until I stopped, got out and walked over to a cluster of four or five of these unusual creatures and took a really close look.

Bingo!

Like at least a few of you, I had no previous, personal experience with epicormic sprouting, no idea what it might look like in a real world setting at this stage, post fire. Truthfully, I had never even heard of epicormic sprouting until maybe six months prior. And those few snapshots I had seen on someone’s Facebook, which obviously were taken way back when those bright green, newly-sprouting branchlets were still just inches long, showed them sticking straight out of the sides of the trunks and contrasting wildly within a field of charred, black bark. They had looked almost cartoonish at that stage, the sort of verdant young stubble Dr. Seuss might have drawn upon an inky, black-barked tree in one of his outlandish children’s tales.

An additional year’s growth (I’m just ballparking a guess here), had transformed the redwoods wildly from those few snapshots I’d seen originally, making it almost impossible any longer to see the charred bark, though it surely still existed in there somewhere, between all those vibrant young shoots. There were so many of these branchlets, in fact, and they were packed so lush and tight along those charred trunks that I wondered if each tree might be striving, somehow to grow just as many photosynthetic leaves as it had previously managed before the firestorm, but absent the time it would take to grow all that thick, supportive branch structure that previously held the leaves all optimally spaced and aloft.

When I came around a corner to the cabled-off entrance I turned in and stopped, parking safely off the road at the entryway. There was not a single picnic table or building left in that fire-ravaged campground. I set up my tripod, mounted my wide-angled lens on my camera body and began wandering out through the chaotic landscape of charred trees and lush new undergrowth, eager to study this surreal, reimagined space and try to make some sense of it. I had the place all to myself, but for a chipmunk or two and some birds in the distance.

Even a noob like me can get a sense of which way the fire was moving and see how the amount of nearby fuel determined how long the fire lingered in any given spot.

Up scorched slopes in every direction, innumerable burned trees, most still standing, yet many fallen, presenting a solemn panorama that folded and undulated with the shape of the land, reaching from the blue-green tinted river below, up gullies and slopes, and past ridgetops to the weighty gray sky above.

I was less than an hour out of town, walking among clusters and groves of greened up, wooly looking, char-barked redwoods that most would have sworn on a ‘King James’ were dead just a couple of years before. Woodpeckers and warblers, and flycatchers sang and hammered, and called in every direction while breezes, rich with the fertile smells of the forest teased green-leafed berry brush and sapling branches this way and that beneath an expansive scud of rainclouds hanging low, threatening, but holding back their watery loads for the time being, for reasons known only to them; holding until this lone, hopeful, camera toting fool had seen exactly what he’d come to see, composed and captured dozens of variations of the renewal scenes he’d come hoping to photograph and, finally then loaded himself and his cameras safely back into the shelter of his truck.

As I backed out onto the forest service road pointed toward town and shifted into drive the clouds settled into the treetops and the rain began to fall.

I drove back toward town in fading light, headlights on and wipers slapping, trying to decide what I was hungry for, replaying the wonders I’d just heard and smelled, and seen, and grinning like a damned fool at my April Fool’s luck.

“Thanks,” I whispered to the auspicious day. “You really outdid yourself this year.”