Looking Back on 2.5 Years in Big Basin
Half a decade ago, the CZU Lightning Complex Fire ignited in the Santa Cruz Mountains and burned 86,000 acres over 37 days. At the core of the fire’s devastation was California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park. 97% of the forest area burned, nearly every single park structure destroyed, and redwoods that stood for thousands of years were left charred. The fire closed Big Basin to visitors indefinitely.
During the closure, trails succumbed to typical post-fire challenges. Landslides occurred because of the loss of stability after tree roots burned and overgrowth from fire-following flora (like Whitethorn Ceanothus) created dense, head-high walls of greenery across trail corridors.
California State Parks has worked tirelessly to rebuild infrastructure and make the park a safe place for visitors to return. For the better part of the past two and a half years, we have had the opportunity to partner with their team and support their effort to reopen the park. We’ve helped revive the 3-mile Hollow Tree Trail – and it’s finally reopened to allow visitors back into the trail corridor.
Project Timeline
Our work on the Hollow Tree Trail can be (loosely) broken down into three phases.
Summer 2023: Corridor Clearing
The first phase of our involvement on Hollow Tree Trail was focused on uncovering the trail corridor post-fire. We began work in the forest on June 21, 2023 and for the next three months, our crew brushed the trail corridor and removed hazard trees that posed the most immediate danger to crew members and future park visitors. With most of the canopy still gone from the fire, the working conditions were extremely hot and dry. These were the days when you got home from the jobsite and scrubbed your entire body of dust and ash and pulled whitethorns out of your clothes. It was a humble first step in reviving trails after a fire.
For those of you into numbers…rough calculations landed us somewhere around 210,100 square feet of trail corridor cleared and ~892 hazard trees felled. It was a busy summer.
Winter 2024: Trail Revival
A little over a year later, on December 2, 2024, we started the second phase of the project and returned to new deadfall littered along the trail. It’s impressive how many branches and trees fall onto a trail over the course of one year. The dead trees that remained standing were more rotten and hazardous than they had been before. We regularly watched and heard trees drop all around us throughout the winter’s work. Hard hats stayed locked onto heads, and though we had some close calls, everyone made it home safe.
With the trail corridor roughed in from our 2023 work, we began more detailed trail restoration work. We brushed more ceanothus, felled any standing dead trees that were considered hazardous by California State Parks, and began recutting in the original trail tread. We had our mini Bobcat E10 lead the grading of the new trail and did all the finish work and switchbacks by hand. Hollow Tree was beginning to look like a trail again!
2025: Bridge Building
In February 2025, we got our first shipment of bridge materials and started the final phase of the project, building six bridges and one puncheon to make Hollow Tree Trail accessible to hikers. The bridges ranged from 16-28’ and are mostly made of fiberglass, which is much more resistant to rot and fire. The fiberglass is also a bit lighter than wood, which proved valuable when transporting the large stringer beams along the trail. We worked down the trail, building the decking for each bridge one by one. We intentionally left the handrailings for last so we could easily transport wider loads across the bridges. This work was extremely labor-intensive and continued right up until October of 2025.
A few highlights from this phase of the work (which you’ll see in the photo below) included: building a redwood cribwall to raise the footer of a bridge, highlining fallen logs to clear a bridge site, and reusing old concrete abutments.
Thanks for the Support
It’s nice to reshare photos and show off our work a bit, but the real purpose of summarizing the effort it took to reopen Hollow Tree Trail and share it here is to say thank you for making it happen. This work was made possible by support from California State Parks’ FEMA Funds and Wildfire Resiliency Funds and our generous community. As a nonprofit, everyone who is part of our community has supported this project. Whether you’ve donated, volunteered with us on the trail, told a friend about us, or even liked a post on social media—you’ve helped make it possible. Thank you for that.
The California State Parks team is working diligently to get the entirety of Big Basin Redwoods State Park back open to the public, and we’re on standby for our next phase of involvement. In the meantime, check out 3 ways you can get involved now:
1. Support our ongoing efforts on local trails.
2. Go visit Big Basin Redwoods State Park!
3. Stay up to date with the ‘Reimagining Big Basin’ project
More On the Hollow Tree Trail:
Check out some more blogs and videos from our work over the years in Big Basin:
• Blog: Tag Along with Us to Fell a 200’ Hazard Tree 🔗
• Blog: 4 Years Since CZU, Trail Recovery Still Underway 🔗
• Video Long: Fire Relief 🔗
• Blog: We’re Back in Big Basin! SCMTS Crews Prep Backcountry for Prescribed Burn 🔗
• Video Short: Pre-con hike Reel 🔗
• Video Short: A day in the woods Reel 🔗
• Video Short: A day on the job reel 🔗
• Link: Reimagining Big Basin Project 🔗