Six years after the CZU Lightning Complex Fire severed Big Basin's trail network, crews are rebuilding one of its most beloved backcountry loops with bridges made of fiberglass instead of wood — engineered to survive the next fire and never rot. The catch: the nonprofit paying for it is racing a matching-gift deadline that expires Sept. 18.

The Timms Creek Loop — a 4.5-mile route that ties the Sunset Trail, the Timms Creek Trail and a stretch of the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail together deep in Big Basin Redwoods State Park — has been closed since the 2020 fire tore out its bridges. Now California State Parks and California Conservation Corps crews are carrying in saws, planks and prefabricated fiberglass spans a mile and a half from the nearest trailhead to rebuild it, bankrolled by a $450,000 drive from Sempervirens Fund. It's a different chapter of Big Basin's recovery than the day-hike reopenings that have made headlines: this is the money-and-engineering story of how a fire-country park rebuilds the parts of itself the public can't yet reach — timed to the park's 125th anniversary in 2027.

Most of Big Basin's post-fire story has been told at the front country: the Sequoia Trail to Sempervirens Falls reopened in May (external source, opens in a new tab), and a weekend bus now drops hikers at the gate. The Timms Creek Loop is the opposite — a backcountry corridor still closed to the public, a mile and a half from the nearest trailhead, where the damage from the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire is still raw.

Reaching it means a daily commute on foot. State Parks staff and young Conservation Corps members hike in and out each day, according to on-scene reporting by NBC Bay Area (external source, opens in a new tab), packing saws, planks and prefabricated bridge sections down through blowdown and slide debris to re-cut the tread and replace what the fire took. State Parks' Eamon Reynolds told the station the job amounts to roughly five miles of fresh trail that will knit three separate routes back into a single loop.

The defining detail is what the new bridges are made of. According to Sempervirens Fund's campaign announcement (external source, opens in a new tab), this phase installs 22 fiberglass crossings built to shrug off a low-intensity fire. Reynolds told the broadcaster the material is prized because it resists flame and, unlike the original timber, won't rot in the damp canyon — which should also trim decades of maintenance cost.

One of them, Coltrane Mueller, told the station the payoff is getting to bring his future kids to the forest someday and point at a span: "I built that."

That's a deliberate rebuild-it-smarter bet, not a like-for-like replacement — and the scale of what's still missing is bigger than the current work suggests. The land trust says the fire consumed almost the entire 18,000-plus-acre park and knocked out 46 trail bridges along Timms Creek alone, twice the number going back in during this phase. (The broadcast report counted 22 pedestrian bridges lost; the figure from the nonprofit funding the job is 46 destroyed, 22 rebuilt now.)

Paying for it is where the story turns unusual. Sempervirens is trying to raise $450,000 by Sept. 18, with a matching donor pledged to double each gift made since the drive opened July 8. Rather than lean on a single grant, the fund is selling the rebuild retail: bridge-sponsorship tiers and its first peer-to-peer fundraising push let donors underwrite specific spans and trail segments, buying the loop back one crossing at a time.

Sara Barth, the fund's executive director, has cast the project as more than trail maintenance — a way to reconnect the public to the park at a fragile moment in its recovery, and to build the forest back tougher against a hotter, more fire-prone future. Sempervirens' founders helped make Big Basin California's first state park in 1902, and the group has stayed tied to it for more than a century.

For the corps members doing the sawing and hauling, it's also a first trade job. One of them, Coltrane Mueller, told the station the payoff is getting to bring his future kids to the forest someday and point at a span: "I built that."

The timeline is pointed. Sempervirens is aiming to finish by winter 2027, in time for the 125th anniversary of the park's founding, though the broadcast report cited a spring 2027 target. Until then the loop stays shut while crews fell hazard trees — the front country open for business, the deep forest still a construction site, one fiberglass span at a time.