Lightning Complex fire burned the only known grove of Butano Cypress
Relics of the past, a single stand of rare cypress trees once grew atop a small slab of sandstone on a remote, rugged ridge along the San Mateo County coast.
They were alone in the world. And then they burned up.
Is the grove forever gone? On an early March morning, two years after 2020’s catastrophic CZU Lightning Complex fire, a team of San Mateo County Parks naturalists ventured miles into the wilderness to find out. A Bay Area News Group reporter and photographer tagged along.
“We know they can regenerate after a fire,” said Hannah Ormshaw, assistant director of San Mateo County Parks, who led the expedition.
“But they are so specialized, and restricted in their range, that any loss would be extreme,” she said.
Setting out after sunrise, the team hiked four miles and 2,000 feet up an old logging road in Pescadero Creek County Park, then dropped into deep woods, scrambling for a quarter mile down a steep hillside littered with burned stumps and ash. The faint smell of soot still lingered in the air.
Their quest: to find survivors of the sole stand of Butano cypress, a variety of Hesperocyparis abramsiana, a small and contorted evergreen tree with cones, needle-like leaves and a bracing balsamic fragrance. If the grove perished, the team wondered, might seeds have somehow survived?
Genetically unique, the grove grew on Butano Ridge, a 1,000-foot spine of ancient marine rocks in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“This tree is found only in this one place in the whole world,” said Jodi McGraw, a biological consultant and rare plant expert. “That makes it unique, and it’s important to conserve such an extraordinarily rare species.”
Records show that the cypress grove was already mature in the early 1900s when first visited by famed Stanford botanist William Dudley, who collected its cones for his historic archive of California flora, now stored at the California Academy of Sciences. The grove’s location was lost for decades, but re-discovered in 1949.
Cypress were once much more abundant in California, flourishing when our climate was cooler and wetter. Fossil evidence shows that cypress dominated local forests.
But during the past 20 million years, as mountains were uplifted and the climate turned arid, theses vast cypress woodlands largely vanished. The trees can’t compete against tougher and more droughtresistant chaparral and coastal scrub species. They succeed only in rocky and nutrient-poor soil, where little else grows.
Now, guided by a map, the team searched for the 10-acre grove, an “arboreal island” of an estimated 5,000 trees. The trees have siblings, called Santa Cruz cypress, in four other small groves in Santa Cruz County, according to a 2009 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study. But the DNA code, oils and cone size in the grove are distinctive.
Because these “islands” are geographically isolated, the trees have undergone gradual genetic changes to create the present-day varieties of the species, according to Ken Hickman, a wildlife researcher hired to help the cypress search.
Along the route, hopes were buoyed by the vista. The burned forest was dense with other species of young plants — ceanothus, flannel bush, peak rush rose, brittleleaf manzanita, Hickman’s checkerbloom and fragrant California hedgemint — that thrive in ash and sun.
Fire is not an enemy of cypress; in fact, periodic wildfires have shaped the reproductive strategy of these trees, said David Greenberger, conservation management specialist with Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.