Fire Ecology of Coast Redwoods and Rare Butano Cypress Regeneration

[00:00:06]what's going on everybody welcome uh to another episode of crying passing by and it doesn't uh today is coming to you from uh the redwood forest and the beautiful santa cruz mountains in elevation probably 1100 for between 1100 and 1400 feet but we're uh we're moving up now this this is a trail i've been on i don't know maybe five or six times but i haven't been here in many years probably six or seven years at least now interesting to note is that uh the main forest trees here are not the lithocorpus and uh sequoia some perverance the coastal redwood you could see the fire came true notorious fires came true maybe uh i don't know five months ago four or five months ago and there's a tan oak there's the not the lithocorpus right there oak family fegacie and you can see the damage is pretty extensive it kind of baked the soil made a nice crust out of it okay maybe like someone left some bread in the oven too long okay it looks like some burnt toast uh the base rock here is a miocene sandstone and uh you know it's it the redwoods did they did indeed get burned they got pretty toasty but you look up top they're still green up top so that thick uh that thick bark has actually done the trick it's worked pretty well you know i guess that's how they've made it through 150 million years of life on planet earth this used to be one of the most diverse places for fungi that i've ever been to you get a really beautiful uh there's some of the tan oak acorns you get a really uh beautiful and delicious species of mushroom uh known colloquially is the black trumpet that's michael reisel with the pan oaks that you could see that right there and it would come up they look like a little black uh cornucopia horn and it'll come out in about january but it's been kind of a shitty past few years for them because we just don't get enough rain anymore and that explains why some of these uh forest fires are so frequent and so bad forest fire of course is a part of this landscape but uh the frequency of them as well as the intensity of them has been greatly exacerbated over the last decade nice tan up there it's crazy to be here and see so much light coming through look at it it's crazy to be here and see so much light coming through the canopy it's normally a very dark shady forest look at this uh fabulous grandiose old bastard probably lagged you know 90 to 100 years ago see tons of stumps here they didn't leave uh they didn't leave much when they came and cleared everything out everything you're seeing all the redwoods you're seeing are primarily second growth and again it blows my mind they're still green up there but i guess they were high enough above the flames these were epic fires you know i remember breathing uh breathing in these forests five months ago when the [ __ ] smoke was so bad it was just you know blanketing the sky keeping the daylight out there you go rising from the ashes but the question is will it have enough moisture in that soil now that we're two months into our rainy season with you know barely a drop uh will it have enough moisture to keep going i don't know that's a good question you get the one two punch of uh of uh you know more frequent than a greater fire intensity uh coupled with uh intensely decreased precipitation which if it arrives at all uh arrives much later you know you start raining in october now here we are in december we had like a little drizzle but uh nothing too intense it's crazy used to not be able to even see this was a really thick forest five years ago look at it like none of the tano except survived it looks like it looks like they all died of course they got much thinner bark than the redwoods what a beautiful tree okay even though it kind of smells like jizz when it's flowering okay and online i should also mention that natholithocarpus like castanea like the chestnuts and unlike the oaks is insect pollinated it's not wind pollinated so they got a very strong fragrance which yes indeed does smell like semen you know quite a few unrelated plants do that i don't know if they're just trying to you know flush out the prudes okay which you know i can't fault them for i do the same thing oh there's the tanoak that's a there's there's a tanok that's coming back look at that you can see that look how fuzzy that the foil you just got a nice fuzzy stem beautiful leaves okay very this tissue soft still has not hardened up but you know they can be almost chestnut lead size when they're uh mature there you go nice huckleberry coming back too delicious having this is the first live one i've seen the whole hike up you get these cavities i've been trying to figure out what's going on you know because there hasn't been any any precipitation certainly not i mean there's been fog but not enough to wash out any of the divots in the hillside then i realized it's just uh it's root that burned so the thing probably smoldered for a few days i mean i don't even think they put these i mean i don't even think you had kale fire in here coming to put these the terrain is so intense they probably just let it burn probably just they probably just had a policy of containment but you could see the tree burn and then the root that was probably attached to it burned to leaving the cavity this forest must have just been totally lit i mean very smoky very ashy very ashy i could i could i could plug user in right now but i'm waiting to hear from their legal department so i'm gonna i'm gonna hold off on it there you go vex there's the vaccinium ovatum the huckleberry delicious when they're uh fruiting but it's not going to be happening this year as you can see they just you know we're actually not even supposed to be here right now the area is technically closed to uh avoid any liability or lawsuits okay don't want to get peter francis geraci on their asses and i see everything's tossed and this wouldn't be so bad if uh precipitation was a given but there's no rain in the year we're almost halfway through a rainy season there's no rain in the forecast barely had any rain lately there's another one of those uh those root cavities it's uh it's not looking good for northern california forest for really for any for any of california forests you gonna is this state gonna be uh is it gonna be sustainable to have a population of 50 million here in 40 years i don't know i'm gonna lean towards no there you go nice money shot of some root cavity burnout say that right there all the roots just charred probably took a few days to smolder but that when they did they left those massive divots kind of it's interesting from the fact that you could see how extensive the roots were you could see that that was a redwood stump that got locked probably 80 years ago these are all secondary sprouts the same tree same individual and uh looks like they're fine up at the top they're still green the tanoaks are not final tan oaks did not come out of the fire unscathed yeah there you go there's a massive root cavity i wonder what that was it looks like it was uh might have been a tano did something fall down i don't even see the tree that uh would have the corresponding tree that would have fallen down oh that panel is still alive see not the litho carpets the tanos are getting hit by uh it introduced the root rot pathogen as well a phytophthora they got the sudden oak death phytophthora remorum you know it hits coast live oaks and it hits not the lithocorpus especially bad and so you'll just see you know it's not the lithocorpus is mostly coastal it's in the coast range mountains of california and there's you know this area is up in marin if you go up there you know where all the other snooty people live you go up there and uh you'll just see forests of uh of dead pan oaks and they got this uh ceraxilon canker on them which is actually a secondary pathogen it's a fungus that hits them after that looks like a little black golf ball just erupting over the uh all over the bark this used to be such a beautiful forest man you know and i got enough long-term uh awareness at least of how these zika systems work i mean i'm still a jackass but i got enough long-term awareness of how these ecosystems work to know that fire is not necessarily bad but when you couple it with the too heavy of a population density and a decreasing precipitation regimes in hotter drier summers due to the climate change that other grandparents don't want to believe is happening then it ends up being it ends up being a little bit more serious not a root cavity right there okay moving on moving on along here we go see now see these redwoods they were at the top of the cliff they did not they did not feather it too well uh whether it to what i say you know what i mean they didn't do too well they're kind of brown up top kind of toasty but they're re-sprouting from the bottom it just this is really nice you know if you if you're in a negative mood you can really it's a nice spot to come and just kind of just bathe in it man just marinate you know just kind of get the whole post-apocalyptic thing going on kind of looks like you know that cormac mccarthy book that made everybody depressed kind of like that you know this is the cold kind of post-apocalyptic thing pretty good got it you got an arbutus coming back you got them a drone coming back there must just be enough moisture in that ground still they you know to give it the boost it needs but it could really use some [ __ ] rain god damn so now we're up on a fire road you can see there's beautiful pieces of uh redwood everywhere you know cause you gotta shank anybody uh but uh you know texture on that woods very beautiful you can see the dozer tracks they had kale fire up here had a bunch of the cal fire uh people doing her thing bulldozing driving the bulldozers around doing donuts trying to create fire breaks and whatnot uh i don't know if it did any good though the fire was pretty strange kind of just wiped out oh no there's still green up there like i said most of the redwoods came out okay but you still have the general theme of uh black and beige now here we go here's some nice post fire erratica some of that the orange fire following fungi uh it looks uh it just looks like the baby uh mycelium right now but uh you know again you give a little bit more moisture who knows what the little end up fruiting is but pretty uh pretty impressive now at the top of the ridge you could really see the sandy bottoms and again it's in due in part well do entirely treat the myosin sandstone that the coastal uplift you can see the sun over there got about two or three hours of sunlight which means we will be walking down in the dark this will be about the fourth or fifth time i've done that almost breaking my ass on those nasty switchbacks downhill and of course the pacific ocean is uh maybe i don't know maybe a mile or two to the west uh in that direction every time i come here it's just the [ __ ] brutal you know it's just the hike is really really kicks your ass yeah so this this could be a real bad year uh if we don't get any rain again only moisture that these trees are getting is due to the fog from those uh cold ocean currents offshore about a mile or two and uh you know but they should be getting rain but still apparently there's enough moisture left in the ground for you you know the tano is coming back the redwood's coming back the vaccinium is coming back the huckleberries see see that guy that redwood over there sees sprouting from those lateral buds you know do they look like little green candles oh and it wouldn't be the anthropocene without a mylar balloon what kind of knob purchases mylar balloons huh yeah there you go there's some nice green candle action you could see them just uh those uh they got all those buds on the sides of the trunk those dormant buds just lying in wait for such a catastrophic event as this so hopefully this will be the only wildfire that this uh area sees in the next couple decades you know ideally but uh but probably not you know it's just the the trajectory of california force does not seem on the up and up you know redwoods can take fire but the increased frequency they cannot take you know who knows what the fire was wearing past maybe every 60 years and somebody's at least in his coastal forest who knows the redwood forest maybe 30 years i don't know but it's it's generally you know much wetter here than it is on the inland areas or in the you know the inland mountains so i'm guessing it wasn't too frequent let's see the not the little carpets they got rocked okay they're all dead i think everything's dead this i mean this would have been theoretically the hottest part we're at the top of the ridge but the uh they're coming back okay they're coming back but again they'll just get the you know they'll get all [ __ ] up again if they don't get enough moisture this year so what a great tree it's too bad you know it's too this this is a treated that will uh in a hundred years have experienced a drastic range reduction [Applause] you got the phytophthora you got the climate change it just doesn't look good for it you get a uh northern california subspecies that only gets about 10 feet tall and has a little bit different of a leaf shape [Music] okay there you go there's a nice example of uh some dormant the axillary buds are sprouting of uh this is sequoia some perverance we'll just go and i'll show you i'll show you how how resilient the bark is what a nice uh melaleuca trees in australia do this too just really thick fibrous bark look at it not even not even scalding you know a centimeter down not even burnt look at that bright red still and that's not even you we're not even into the living tissue yet we're not even into the living tissue of the trees so that you know that explains how these trees have made it uh out of the jurassic just fine little winds picking up a little bit you know these forests it is a little depressing i'll be honest a little dark it's a little dark to be here okay signs of the anthropocene again you know forest fires are part of a california plant communities but at the interval or intensity that we're seeing them now this is somewhat unrivaled in the recent past oh look the pamphus grass burned one of our worst uh invasive species in coastal california that's nice that's nice to see isn't it you think this will come back probably bastard yeah there you go there's a nice uh nice money shot of some of that some of the parent material that all the sandy bottoms are coming from someone's driving someone's flying one of them little uh you know those planes that go down all the time those little uh what are the pipers the propel whatever the [ __ ] it's called i don't know you know but a lot of people drop in those planes you never know anyway there's that myosin standstill oh yeah look another beautiful monolith look he's got a bunch of stump sprouts coming up here gold bastard look you got some green up there too see he's sprouting he's alive he'll be fine give him a couple years as long as he gets some rain and i see that that's a shame this was one of my favorite trees just the massive uh old pan oak but it looks like he got toasted in a fire and then uh cal fire probably decided to axe him just to uh decrease the risk of him falling on the road he got burnt up where how old he was all the sauce scars make it a little hard to uh to see the rings but you could see all the tannins that gives it its colloquial name yeah he was he was a big he was a big old bastard this is my favorite trees when i used to hike up there you can see it's probably eight feet across but you know multi-trunked so he cheated a little bit but it's still pretty impressive you know probably two or three hundred years old at least couldn't make it through the anthropocene though so now we're dropping down a ridge going through a pretty special spot and so it's the reason that i used to come out here so much back in the day going through them a drone forest nice withdrawn oh it's actually all dug first they got burned up pretty bad though now some of them are still alive bit of sun's sitting on our ass though so we kind of want to hurry up you know but of course we want to be safe don't break your ass don't come down here too don't just go running down here or willy-nilly like because you're gonna break your ass now there used to be a ribbon trail uh demarcating the path to the spot i'm taking this but uh you know of course the ribbon probably burned up in the inferno but there's certainly no trail just gotta just gotta rely on a gps now see we're here at crime page by band it doesn't take a very serious you know method a methodological of uh approach to a safety okay it's always on our minds okay we're not you know not we're not doing reckless stuff we're not breaking lies uh you know we're just really we're at the forefront shall we say of uh of us safe practices safe and law abiding practices almost fell in the [ __ ] tree cap but he broke my ass oh yeah you can see it opens up here this is a magical spot we're about to go to you know even with the uh there's gonna be some bad landslides here if it does rain and i say if because it might not but even with the fire coming through it's still it's still pretty thick you know there's some pretty thick uh vegetation it's a healthy pan oak coming back oh yeah inhaling a bunch of uh sooth and ash got a nice carbon deposits in my lungs better than the rona though i guess huh okay so you can see we're coming up on a clearing a clear parcel and uh if you look up top up there you could see like right there at least you got some cypresses and it's the only spot in the world where these cypresses grow and they grow in the middle of a what the [ __ ] is this what monocot is that looks like a damn daffodil might just be a chlorogalum it could be a toxic accordion but this is all pretty shady so this is the uh the population of uh the bhutano cypress you could see this this area needed a fire ban you could see it opens up right here and it's because uh you know the base rock again is sandstone but uh in the west the the rest of the hills here the sandstone has been weathered and it forms a soil not so here not so here here it's actually bare sandstone you get the bare sandstone escarpment and that's why you get uh this extremely rare uh cypress species growing here but there's actually a lot of ash you used to see just the you know it looked like almost like somebody paved the area so there's seeds all over the ground because this is a fire dependent uh species and it needed it needed a fire pad it was you know it potentially was pretty uh pretty thick with the fuels but uh so it burned there's seeds all over the ground but of course they you know oh they just dropped four months ago when the fire happened there's we're still waiting for the uh for the moisture so hopefully it comes we'll see so so there's those little cones you can see them up there all open let's see if i can get a close-up get a money shot of one for you so this this whole area right here was uh you know it's maybe the size of a football field and it was originally how i find this grove was lost for 50 years and then a guy named dutton found it in the 50s again was first located herbarium vouchers were collected in the late 1800s then it was lost for 50 years and this guy named dutton found it in the 1950s and he was looking for a species of uh of thornment and uh he didn't uh he did i don't know if he found it here but he did find uh this rare cyprus and this is you know i've grown this uh it's one of the most vigorous cypress species it grows you know extremely fast i wonder if there's any any ones that made it through the fire probably not this was a [ __ ] high fire but you do have some doug first down there you got some dug furs and some sequoias that made it true okay there you go see there's a seed there's a cypress seed right there laying in weight laying in wait for some oh [ __ ] i just dropped it here we go for some rain which uh there's hoping it comes hold me closer tiny dancer hold my hand while i walk on a freeway that's not how the sun goes what am i talking about but you could see the little seed right there there's all kinds of them all kinds of them but apparently the fog the spot gets is not uh it's not enough they do get a lot of fog here because the ocean is just the right on the other side of that ridge but uh this was such a great spot yeah see there you go there's some of the bear some more to bear sandstone boy we are fresh this is little [ __ ] this is free uh this is you know right post fire there you go there's these oh yeah okay there you go see there's a nice close-up of those cones you can see they got scales just like the little uh pentagons or hexagons on a soccer ball oh there's still some seed dropping out oh there's quite a bit actually so these are open the uh they're you know they helped they're open outer but the scales are held together by the uh by the the resin and of course you know so these probably these these cones might have matured ten years ago five years ago who knows they'll stay attached to the tree uh laying and wait for a fire once the fire comes through melts that resin the scales pop open uh the tissue i believe is still living at least the branch is still living uh and uh you know you probably got the who knows if the vasculature of the cones is still alive now either way fire uh if it is the fire kills it melts the resin holding those scales together and the seeds drop out right there so by biogeographically this spot's pretty interesting because again it's just literally you know it's probably religious these were um perhaps more abundant in uh the pleistocene and now they've been restricted to this little football field uh patchy sandstone uh entirely surrounded by dense redwood and madron and tanoak forest and it's the only spot in the world where these uh these trees grow you know and so santa cruz cyprus you know there's i think there's four other populations but they look nothing like this one that's why this one is listed as its own distinct uh i forget if it's a subspecies of variety [ __ ] it doesn't matter but uh look at that nice beautiful sandstone right there but the other the other the four other populations of uh santa cruz cypress look nothing like this you know they're a lot more green they smell kind of lemony this one uh has a blue tint to the foliage if i can find a live tree i'll show you and that cones are about you know two to three times larger than uh the other population which is really you know four distinct groves but those are basically all the same species you know quite the distinct morphologically from uh this one oh yeah i remember this tree specifically so here's the nice bear pitch okay and see that's why they grow here because nothing can compete with them on this you know bare sandstone you're not going to get redwoods growing out of this bare sandstone that was a that was a beautiful individual right there i specifically remember that one it's been five or six years look you got the masi masto you know so all the species of cypress of california all of them are fire adapted they need fire their cones won't open with fire there's only one monterey cypress that that it's cones just open at maturity you don't you don't need the fire you get what is this i wonder what that is it's really a shame the no rain thing but look at this this bear escarpment of myocene sandstone surprised there's i don't think there's one that made it out because this is the whole population right here you can see the forest is over there that's that's one edge and then the other edge is just right over there this is the whole population of hispericippers and brahmsiana bhutanowensis and that name was uh i believe it was coined by john silva rip he was the one that realized that this was a this population was morphologically quite different uh from the other four and it probably been separated from the other four for a much longer of a period of time than they have been separated from each other so you know you got the nice whole biogeographic thing going on okay pretty interesting i think so [ __ ] none survived you know but cyber says they don't live too long anyways they how they mostly end up what like two three hundred years i think and then they just kind of die fall down you know kind of like people do but they got it they got maybe you know 100 200 years on top of us so it's it's sad you know it's it's a it's a little safe but this area needed a fire uh pretty bad you know it hadn't had one in a while the trees were quite old at least for cypresses so hopefully you saw all those seeds this will lead to a bunch of recruitment if we get the decent rain again this year i'm looking for seeds right now and that burned soil looking for any more of them oh yeah there you go so this place if we get good rain should be a wash in cypress ceilings looks like these guys weren't the mature yet see how the seeds haven't the hiss and they're still immature they're kind of like the color of popcorn kernels they should be a little bit darker the cones should be a lot bigger too sorry cypress cones take about 18 months to mature okay they're not you know they're not like some other angiosperm uh some of the angiosperm species that they share space with you know where the fruits can mature and uh you know a matter of three or four months cyprus just take you know roughly between 16 and 18 months there used to be some fremont the dendrite up there some flannel bush and that needs fire too so hopefully you get some of that coming back there's a bunch of rare plants here just all laying in weight yeah i don't see a single cypress that made it but that's fine there'll be a bunch of recruitment uh this spring hopefully hopefully it roasted there was some nice arctos stafford sandersoni that's another rare one rara manzanita eric casey let's not fall into a root cavity don't do it you could break your goddamn leg let's not fall into a root cavity what the [ __ ] was that that was a that was all that cavity it was probably all in arctostaphos burro i don't know what else that could have been just a giant manzanita burrow there's one still intact who knows which one i forget whether andersonia forms a burl or not but it's a it's an arctos teflos you delicious bastin you think he's got you think there's any dormant buds in there i think he might be dead i think that might be toast hard to say that's crazy so there's not a single living tree the entire population right now the entire extant population of bhutan cyprus exists solely in the soil seed bank and there's probably millions of seeds waiting to germinate which again could get royally [ __ ] if uh if we don't get any there's a seed right there we don't get any rain so in a way it's kind of like this tree is behaving like an annual yeah there's a cypress seed right there the whole population is gone right now but again it didn't make it here you know it it's uh oh there's a manzanita coming back how pubescent the stem is on okay but again it's the cyprus you know it hasn't made it into the entropa scene just by sheer luck you know it's got it's got adaptive strategies so you got a massive seed bank full of millions of seeds waiting to germinate uh if we get any rain and there will be just a [ __ ] thicket of cypriot you ever seen a cypress forest after there's been a big burn you've seen it with baker's cypress have seen it with tecate cypress down south that's another rare one from southern california get them down there in by the town of corona in orange county but uh you know it's a thicket when they when they all come up you know they're coming up way too close to together you know and of course they'll be thinned out just by some of them dying you know so actually sometimes they don't something like make nab cyber so i've seen you just get a [ __ ] thicket you can't walk through it's like a corn maze of cypresses and because they're growing so close together none of them get really big but if you get a couple that gets some space you know we don't have to compete with their neighbors too much they can get rather large but it'll be just a flush of green again counting on if we get rain this year still got the cones up on a uh on the branches up there must have been a half fire but again necessary this this grove needed a bed i remember last time i was here six years ago i remember saying to myself this this area needs a damn fire because it is just so thick you know all that the fire suppression you [ __ ] smokey the bear's an [ __ ] this was a good rain here i'd be so much more excited than i am now because there'll be you know there's gonna be a bunch of good [ __ ] coming up in the spring but it's been a piss-poor rain here pretty bad gonna be bad drought conditions see how they just split like that but they do that even without a fire too i planted a quite a few illegal trees in my neighborhood that came from this grove germinated off seed that came from this grove well that's all i got for you tonight i'm gonna be hiking back eight miles in the dark hope you had a nice time say hello to the pacific ocean for me if you see it over that ridge fog should be rolling in it should get pretty chilly in about 20 minutes that's what i got for you tonight have a good uh have a good rest of your evening trying to be a prick wash your ass wash your hands don't catch the rona don't kill your grandma go [ __ ] yourself bye oh yeah there's nothing like hiking steeply uphill through burn scars and a downed debris you know it's got a good moderate to high level of suckage oh at least now i don't have to go home and do my brazilian butt workout you know i can give it a rest tonight give the old glutes a rest oh [ __ ] if they're ascending 1500 feet in elevation through a burn scar okay so coming back down to the forest we could see they're doing some timber harvesting this is a uh i just counted the rings it's probably a six or seven hundred year old though redwood you know i made it through the past six or seven hundred years but it didn't make it true the antroposine and so now i don't you know it might have it might even still have been alive just severely burnt on the outside you could see actually it doesn't look like the actual bark is too uh too thick right there but either way yeah i don't know why they cut it down now who knows i mean maybe it was unstable it was on a slope but it's a [ __ ] massive it's a massive of course this is you know this is still a juvenile compared to how old they can be upwards of uh 2 500 years in some cases there's the uh just so you can get an idea of how thick those growth rings are i smell a skunk around here too i wonder if what if there's one living under this thing at the moment yeah so about one inch corresponds to ten years and then uh the whole thing is about i don't know five feet in diameter there we go okay so that bark on the other tree had been uh you know been ripped off probably by one of the machines they were using you can see it's there's some you know there you go that's almost eight inches of of thick shaggy bark on this this little boy you know you want it you know you want it come here come here come on we got a report now you know what's going on you know what's going on don't be bashful don't be bashful don't be bashful there you go you don't want to take more you stuff them all in are you going to go for it now that's nice i appreciate that don't cash it in my yard okay because that's when you forget that you put it there and then you know i got to go pull them out i got to go weed them later on all right you try wipe your little beak you're gonna stuff a couple in there no don't don't don't please don't don't stick that in the ground don't do that get like that that's nice