Cal Fire Division Chief Rich Sampson walks through an area of Pescadero Creek County Park near La Honda, Calif., Thursday, April 25, 2024, still showing the scars of the 2020 CZU Fire. The area along Old Haul Road Trail is scheduled for a fire protection thinning project this summer.
As the executive director of the YMCA’s Camp Jones Gulch, a beloved 928-acre wooded property that has hosted children since the 1930s, Herrera was overjoyed when the camp survived. Because of the COVID pandemic, there were no children there when the fire began in August 2020. In a normal year, there would have been more than 200 to evacuate as the inferno loomed.
It’s all part of a larger, ongoing effort taking place across rural San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties to bring the forests back to a more natural condition following more than 100 years of fire suppression that left overgrown brush, dead and dying trees, and other conditions that make fires like the CZU burn much larger, hotter and deadlier than they historically would have.
“That fire blew up from 3,000 acres to 40,000 acres in a 12-hour period,” he said, pointing across wooded hillsides near the town of La Honda. “If we’d have had a major wind shift out of the south, it could have gone right over Highway 35, and burned down into Portola Valley and Palo Alto.”