Six years after the CZU Lightning Complex fire burned through 97% of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the park is open but incomplete — 17 of its 85 original trail miles accessible, no water systems restored, campgrounds still on paper, and coast redwood saplings now topping 20 feet through the char.

On May 22 of this year, California State Parks reopened the Sequoia Trail at Big Basin Redwoods State Park — 2.9 miles, including the Sempervirens Falls overlook, off limits since August 2020. It was the first time hikers could walk that corridor since the CZU Lightning Complex fire swept through the Santa Cruz Mountains and took nearly the entire park with it.

The fire ignited August 16, 2020, after a single overnight thunderstorm produced roughly 11,000 lightning strikes. The burn footprint across the mountains reached 86,509 acres total; inside Big Basin specifically, 17,792 of the park's 18,224 acres — 97% — fell within the fire perimeter. The severity breakdown inside the park: 77% high severity, meaning all live canopy was lost.

Six years on, the accounting is split. On the infrastructure side, it reads like a long list of absences: 17 of the park's original 85 trail miles are now open, phased back roughly every six months. No water systems have been restored — visitors carry their own or buy from a kiosk. The original visitor center is gone; an interim structure has replaced it. The main campgrounds at Opal Creek and Tent Camp are still in design. Full restoration, projected to cost approximately $370 million, is expected to take many more years; California has front-funded $186 million, with FEMA reimbursement sought for eligible costs.

On the ecological side, the picture is different. Coast redwoods — which had been the backbone of the park since its founding in 1902 as California's first state park — survived at a 97% rate, sprouting lime-green growth from dormant buds beneath charred bark within weeks of the fire. Five years out, those saplings were clearing 20 feet. The Douglas firs, which don't share redwoods' fire-adapted biology, largely did not survive; 97% were killed.

Mill Creek tells a parallel story. After a dam on the creek was removed in October 2021, researchers documented 15 juvenile coho salmon in the creek — an endangered southern-range population, and the first coho ever recorded in Mill Creek. Twelve juvenile steelhead were found upstream, the first in those waters in over a century.

What a visitor walking the Sequoia Trail or the Redwood Loop sees today is the gap between those two stories made visible: charred snags still standing among new growth that is already chest-high on a tall person, a temporary restroom at the trailhead where a full facility used to be, and the quiet of a park that once drew more than a million visitors a year and is still, measurably, on its way back.