The trees that fire can't kill

In California's land of the giants, charred, hollowed-out redwoods continue to thrive, blaze after blaze after blaze.

The California redwoods are full of trees that bear burn scars like this one. Eventually, this burn mark could become a cavern large enough to live in.

A few hours north of San Francisco, you’ll find the Avenue of the Giants, a stretch of forest that holds some of the tallest trees in the world.

These 300-foot behemoths have survived many things. Logging, primarily, but also wildfires and human fires and the fires of tourism and climate change.

Logging is still a dominant industry in Humboldt County, but it is an area in transition from timber to cannabis and now health care. We didn’t get all the way to Eureka, but we got close, my family escaping the holiday in Austin in favor of a drive up Highway 1 just north of the Bay through Sonoma and Mendocino counties.

This is an El Paso-to-Austin’s distance from the current fires, but it’s clear that fires are constantly shaping this ecosystem.

Most evident on the trees are these enormous burn marks. Every third tree has some kind of fire scar, which, over time, can become a hollowed-out trunk that is called a basal cavity. These black, charred caves make these trees more susceptible to insects, strong winds, and future burns, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them.

These trees seem to be thriving even with a hole that goes all the way through.

Many trees have been hollowed out by repeated fires over the years. But even with this kind of a burn scar, this tree in Founder’s Grove has continued to grow.

We first saw these trees after our long drive up the Highway 1. We’d been on curvy roads for hours, so it was surreal to step out under the canopy of these giant trees stretching toward the sky. It was raining softly when we pulled into the tiny parking lot. The trees dwarfed everything.

We walked quietly on the brown duff that had fallen from limbs hundreds of feet above us and found trees we couldn’t encircle even if all four of us held hands.

Soon, we found those fire scars that were big enough for all of us to hide inside and stay dry from the rain.

I later found out these tree caves are called goosepens because early settlers housed their domesticated animals in them. In the 1950s, a man, a hermit named Don McLellan, famously built a three-story home inside one.

Inside these towering trees, you’ll often find burned-out trunks of trees that are still very much alive. People carve into the charred bark, a kind of hieroglyphics that likely goes back to before the logging era.

With only the sound of water falling on the trees, my eyes focused on the carvings on the charred wood. Indecipherable etchings. Initials and glyphs. A kind of hieroglyphics that date back who knows how many years. Messages that burn away with each round of fires. Human stories written where the tree’s story should be.

But trees don’t know “should.”