Just as it strains the imagination to picture a universe that stretches to infinity, we struggle to visualize a quarter of the Angeles National Forest burned to the ground. What does that look like, 160,000 blackened acres? It looks like forever.
Nature, of course, takes the long view. Except for the extinction of species, little is forever. Flowers will crop up in the spring, then sage scrub and chaparral. Trees will require decades, but even that amounts to a brief moment in the evolution of an ecosystem.
Not so for mere humans. The Angeles is this county's great escape, a place where we can walk for miles without seeing a housing development or even a car. It has running streams amid forests in a metropolitan area where the word "river" usually dredges up images of a damp-bottomed concrete trench. U.S. Forest Service teams are tallying the precise toll of the Station fire, but there is no doubt that the loss of inexpensive recreation will be huge. Many favored trails, such as pristine Devil's Canyon or the swimming holes of Big Tujunga, might be off-limits to visitors for years, and when they are reopened will look sadly alien, populated by the blackened skeletons of pine, oak and alder. The fire appears to have burned through many of the forest's most popular and easily accessible sites: Devil's Canyon, parts of the Gabrielino Trail and areas around Switzer Falls.
Even more lasting damage might be wrought by landslides during the winter rains. After the 2007 Santiago fire, a slide in Harding Canyon -- one of the most picturesque spots of the Cleveland National Forest -- buried the seven deep pools of crystalline water for which the canyon was known, along with the canyon's entire population of trout. Harding and adjacent areas are still closed to the public, nearly two years later. And that blaze was less than one-fifth the size of the Station fire.
It will take vision, patience and an enormous effort to restore the scarred Angeles, even with nature doing most of the work. At points in its past, this country had the kind of will it took to accomplish such feats on a grand scale, as evidenced by the creation of the national forest and national park systems, and the major projects undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Now, the damage wrought in these lands by climate change and more frequent fires calls on us to be up to the task again.
