The two dogs panted, tongue hanging low. They slurped the water their owner poured into a small portable cloth bucket with a canine restrained delight. “The trail’s so much hotter now,” the man explained. “It used to be 50 percent in the shade now it’s all under the sun.”
After a closure that extended for nearly 11 months after the Jesusita Fire torched portions of the Santa Ynez Mountains that form the backdrop to the city of Santa Barbara, the Tunnel Trail reopened on April 1. Not an April’s Fool joke even if employees at both the local ranger district and at the headquarters of the Los Padres National Forest knew nothing about it a few days later. The first Saturday of the reopening saw considerable crowds that parked so far below the trailhead that getting to the hike itself was a hike. A Highway Patrol officer parked on the middle of the road, red flashing lights glinting through the afternoon sky, believed the trail was still closed.
But it ain’t so. The Tunnel Trail was not the only local path affected by the Jesusita Fire but while other trails reopened within weeks the public has been kept out of the Mission Canyon watershed for close to a full year. Time for the neighboring homeowners to clear out the debris and rebuild, time for trail maintenance, time for a host of reasons that seem all more plausible than the next.
Except that it didn’t take 11 months to rebuild. A source shared a few words about a political angle that maintained the closure for the benefit, it would seem, of a well-heeled group in the foothills that enjoyed four seasons of peace.
On the day before my forty-ninth birthday I set out on a short trek to reacquaint myself with a trail I must have hiked a hundred times in the 16 years I have lived here. The most striking feature is how exposed the hills feel even draped under a lovely seasonal display of wildflowers. The hills are green all over with carpets of bluish, reddish, yellowish blooms on a scale never experienced before.
The trees are gone. At best charred remains stand like sentinels, a naked testimony to another time. Absent the oak, mahogany, manzanita and other scrubs the views have opened up. At all times on my way to the Rattlesnake Canyon connector (3 2/3 km, 411 m) views accompanied me. I could see the fire road into Mission Canyon, the Jesusita Trail to Inspiration Point, and all the rock formations around me: It all seemed to be about rocks now that they were exposed. Chaparral plants that used to rise four to eight feet have also perished, currently replaced by an already impenetrable thicket of wildflowers. Without the dense blanket it is wickedly hot, hotter still thanks to the refracted heat of rocks like sandstone.
Because fire represents a critical part of the ecology - witness the euphoria around me - it will not be long before buckwheat, ceanothus, chamise, sumac, toyon and other plants repopulate the hills in a hurry. The opportunity to blaze new trails may have come and gone. I scanned the horizon and found evidence of faint new paths but I cannot vouch that they lead anywhere. Already, the dense regrowth makes cross-country progress difficult. The trail closure prevented hikers from carving new trails when the incinerated front country laid bare. Opportunity lost. Again.
The gentleman with the dogs popped open a beer. Immediately all the commercials of the last quarter century rolled in front of my eyes and I cursed that I did not have one. In true form I did not even carry water. He would have offered one, he said, if he had another brew.
I tried to think of something else on my way back down but the psst of a cold bottle being opened and the beads of condensation were a compelling distraction.
