![]() ![]() ![]() And though he couldn’t yet grasp it, the tree had been there a very long time. He wondered how the firefighters would ever rescue him if he got caught up there. It was so tall, the young Bonfante had to crane his neck to even see the branches. ![]() The tree was also tremendously thick, several yards in diameter, and ramrod straight, as if someone had placed the column of a European cathedral in a California backyard. It cloaked the tree in great jagged plates, as if whittled by a cosmic knife, but under his hand it felt soft and a little fuzzy. As a kid, he would play on a half-acre by the creek and at the base of a most unusual backyard tree. He grew up here, in a fog-drenched town near the coast called Felton, and loves it too much to leave. A heavy-equipment specialist, he runs bulldozers around fire hot spots. Now 37, with black sideburns and a broad mustache, he’s a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire. He started at 17 as a fire department volunteer. | Courtesy of Dan Bonfanteįor most of his life, Dan Bonfante has fought fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains. On a swiftly changing planet, it raises questions about whether the oldest and toughest things can survive.Ĭal Fire’s Dan Bonfante stands at the base of the Mother of the Forest, one of the famous redwoods damaged in the CZU Lightning Complex. How this tragedy came to be is a tale of how heat, mismanagement and climate change are transforming the West. The CZU fire complex burned more of these trees than have ever been burned, in a fire hotter than ever known among coast redwoods. The world’s tallest living thing - and one of the biggest - the coast redwood is also spectacularly old, with many specimens born before Jesus Christ. The fire delivered a scorching blow to a shaggy and mysterious tree called the coast redwood. One citizen of the forest will feel the effects for ages. The CZU Lightning Complex, as it would come to be known, had immediate consequences, burning down almost 1,500 buildings, forcing the evacuation of 77,000 people and killing a 73-year-old recluse named Tad Jones. ![]()
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