HOPE–you may wish to interpret this as a double-entendre, given the recent developments in the political circus, but in fact, I am referring to what I witnessed during an excursion–an attempt to get away from the noise of the circus–to Mount Lukens on the old Stone Canyon Trail: the vegetation is reclaiming the landscape, in its own time, following massive and repeated wildfire ravage.

I was first tempted to climb Mt Lukens from the Stone Canyon trail in 2004, after reading John Robinson’s descriptions in his Trails of the Angeles, “it is exceptionally steep” he says, “not regularly maintained but readily passable”, and “not a level stretch until you reach the summit ridge”. Doesn’t that sound like a must-do-hike? I thought so. Robinson also warns to bring plenty water, “you’re on burned slopes most of the way”, because in 1975, twenty-three years before the publication of his trail guide, a wildfire, a holocaust he calls it, raged through the area, leaving the rugged slopes barren, with little to no tree coverage. To make matters worse, in 2002 the very same area, the north-facing slopes of Mt Lukens, suffered another blaze. So by the time I got there, two years later, the recovering chaparral brushes had burned again, leaving an eerie gray and black lunar landscape, streaked with the charred and twisted remains of manzanita, laurel, the occasional valley oak and the rare spruce skeleton, dotted with patches of vibrant green rebirth: hope. Then in 2009, before any significant growth could occur, came the Station fire.

Nine years have passed, houses in the canyon floor are being rebuilt, the Wildwood campground has re-opened–though closed for the season–and the slopes of Stone Canyon, bisected  by the many switchbacks of the old trail, are once again covered with dense chaparral, and I mean dense; the trail is once again hardly maintained which makes for long stretches of bushwhacking through six to eight feet tall thorny brush that want nothing more than to make the passer-by bleed–long sleeves and long pants required. While the going is arduous it serves as a good reminder, all the more pertinent given the unprecedented wildfire damage we’ve experienced this year, that to impose a human timeframe on plant life in wild habitats, where we are visitors, is misleading. I read somewhere that it can take a hundred years for an alpine forest to recover fully from wildfire. A hundred years is a long stretch, by human standards, about twenty years longer than my life expectancy, in California, but in the wider context of life on earth, it’s far less than the proverbial drop in the bucket. It’s easy to adopt an anthropocentric doomsday scenario, amplified by the very visible and catastrophic effects of global climate change, but isn’t it more realistic to imagine that, long after humanoids have self-destructed–as in lost their dominance as a species–the planet will live on, plants will sprout and grow, rivers will swell or dry up, mountains will crumble, coastlines will change, and the statue of Liberty will lie toppled on a beach? In the meantime, it gives me great hope to think that future generations who hike Stone Canyon might describe it as a vibrant, shaded jaunt through a thick oak, spruce and pine forest, where wildlife is plentiful.

Disclaimer: None of this is based on science, just a hunch, more like, or a hopeful imagination prone to slowing things down to walking pace, appropriate for observation. Or maybe the sun beat on my head and finally boiled my brains.