Lifestyle
Charred by fire, these grand California redwoods rise again. How to hike among them
• Big Basin Redwoods State Park, near Santa Cruz, is recovering after fire scorched almost the entire park in 2020.
• Of 115 miles of trails and fire roads in the park, 31.5 are open. More are to reopen soon.
• Many post-fire redwood shoots are 10 to 20 feet tall. Walking among them is an lesson in earthly renewal.
It’s a life, death and disaster hike. Yet it’s also a stroll in the park.
The route in question is the Redwood Loop Trail, part of Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. One lap around the 0.63-mile loop and you’ll see, amid the fading ravages of fire, what a vast difference four years can make in the natural world.
The state park, California’s oldest, is also the largest stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco. It was 97% burned in 2020, when the CZU Lightning Complex fire erupted in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Tens of thousands of trees were incinerated, and most of the park remains closed, its infrastructure (including 150 campsites) destroyed.
Yet after four years of regrowth, which included drought conditions, followed by atmospheric river storms in 2023, visitors can walk amid countless rising stalks, many reaching 10 to 20 feet high.
“You’ll see shoots of green coming off these black trunks throughout the park,” said Will Fourt, senior park and recreation specialist for the state park system’s Santa Cruz district. Despite early fears, most of park’s redwoods survived, Fourt said, noting that they can resprout not only from their base and branches but also from their trunks — something most conifers can’t do.
Redwoods can resprout from their trunks.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
By one estimate, just 3% of the park’s Douglas fir trees remain.
Among the redwoods, “the new growth that’s coming up from the roots is just amazing. It was just all gray and black here for seven months after the fire,” senior visitor services aide Debbie Martwick said. “It’s so uplifting and inspiring, the resilience of nature.”
The park has been gradually reopening since July 2022, and weekends are busy enough that rangers urge visitors to make parking reservations at least a day ahead (details below). But on the weekday that I visited, I saw only a handful of other hikers.
Where to walk in the park
Like most, I entered the park’s main day-use area by way of State Routes 9 and 236 near Boulder Creek.
The Redwood Loop Trail is a flat route that includes some of the park’s biggest and oldest trees. You see tiny sprouts inching out of fallen trunks, head-high green shoots overshadowing charred remnants and towering old trees whose branches are greening again, despite jet-black charred bark below. If you stay alert, you’ll also spot a curly redwood standing along the edge of the trail. Unlike all the rest, this tree’s bark has a wavy texture that makes it stand out like a trippy delinquent among honor students — a moment of hallucination along a journey of inspiration.
This is a coast redwood in Big Basin Redwoods State Park with a rare anomaly that has left its bark looking wavy or curly. This is unrelated to the fire that burned 97% of the park in 2020. The park has done a lot of regreening in the four years since.
Hikers looking for a longer route, Fourt said, can take a four-mile scenic loop that includes portions of the Skyline-to-Sea Trail, Meteor Trail and Middle Ridge Road, returning by the Dool Trail. Remember sunscreen, Fourt added, because the park isn’t as shady as it used to be.
How Big Basin became the first state park
Big Basin Redwoods State Park was created in 1902, as dozens of lumber companies were racing to fell as many tall trees in the region as they could. Local activists bought up six square miles of redwood forest, then lobbied state officials for further measures to protect the area from logging. Today, that forest is still dominated by the same trees, some of them more than 300 feet tall and 1,000 years old.
But on Aug. 16, 2020, lightning strikes touched off the CZU Complex fire, blackening 86,500 acres in and around the park (which covers 18,000 acres). The flames killed one person. Thirty-seven days passed before firefighters could contain the fire.
Today, of the park’s 85 miles of hiking trails, Fourt said, about 6.5 miles are open, with several more miles expected to reopen this winter. Of Big Basin’s 30 miles of fire roads (open to hikers, cyclists and equestrians), about 25 miles are open. It may be years, however, before hikers can again walk the popular Berry Creek Falls Trail and Sequoia Trail.
At the park, the ravages of fire are still there, but fading.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
At the site of the old park headquarters building (built in log cabin style by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936), cement steps now lead to nothing at all. Its campgrounds aren’t expect to reopen for several years. A new facilities plan is due in 2025.
Before the fire, Martwick said, the park attracted 1 million yearly visitors, who often filled hundreds of parking spots, many of them along fire roads that are now closed. Now the park gets about a tenth as many visitors — 3,000 to 9,000 per month — and has only about 70 parking spaces at its main entrance.
There are chemical toilets, but no potable water, electricity, cell-phone coverage or WiFi. In October, park officials joined the Save the Redwoods League in releasing a new Forest Management Strategy plan that calls for thinning the park’s forests in future years by increasing the number of controlled burns (which park managers have been doing for decades).
Seeing the park today “can be dramatic for people who remember the park as it was,” acknowledged Fourt. “But there’s still a lot of beauty there.”
For now, a visit to Big Basin makes sense as part of a trip to the Santa Cruz area, but not as the centerpiece. Fortunately, there are plenty of other things to do nearby, including visiting the city and coastline of Santa Cruz as well as several state parks and the mountain communities of Scotts Valley, Felton, Ben Lomond, Brookdale and Boulder Creek.
Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which mostly burned in 2020, has done a lot of regreening in the four years since.
(Chris Reynolds)
Visitors can also check out Rancho del Oso, the coastal portion of the park that lies off Highway 1 in Davenport, about 17 miles north of Santa Cruz. Though Rancho del Oso currently features just three short sections of trail (less than a mile each), the area includes Waddell State Beach (one of the top wind-surfing spots in North America), a welcome center (rebuilt and reopened in 2023), a nature and history center and six campsites.
If you go
Big Basin Redwoods State Park is open 8:30 a.m. to sunset daily. Parking is $10 without a reservation, $8 with one. Weekend visitors are urged to reserve parking at least a day ahead. On summer weekends, there’s bus service from Scotts Valley’s Cavallaro Transit Center, about 45 minutes from the park, and officials plan summer overflow parking (with shuttle buses) at Saddle Mountain, about 10 minutes from the park’s main day-use entrance. Check the park website for details before visiting.
There are no fees or reservation requirements for visitors to Rancho del Oso.
Nearby state parks include Año Nuevo State Park, Butano State Park (where many areas are still closed), Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Natural Bridges State Beach and Wilder Ranch State Park.
Where to eat
In Ben Lomond, Aroma Restaurant has indoor and outdoor tables, with a pair of fireplaces in the rustic but stylish dining room.
In Scotts Valley, Laughing Monk brewpub has plenty of bar food, including bourbon burgers and sweet potato fries. Brunch on weekends.
Where to stay
In Santa Cruz, Sea & Sand Inn stands on a cliff above the ocean, next door to the pricier Dream Inn. Rates often start around $150 on weekdays, $280 on weekends.
In Santa Cruz, Mission Inn & Suites is an affordable option on Mission Avenue, about two miles from the UC Santa Cruz campus. Weekday rates often dip beneath $100.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
Detroit, MI7 minutes agoStorm chances return, which could impact Motor City Pride, graduations this weekend across Metro Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA15 minutes agoHilton campaigns in San Francisco as California primary votes still being counted
-
Dallas, TX22 minutes agoCrews cover up AT&T branding as stadium becomes
-
Miami, FL25 minutes agoMiami leaders gather for FIFA World Cup Host Committee Gala
-
Boston, MA30 minutes agoPackage fire outside Boston’s Museum of African American History under investigation
-
Denver, CO37 minutes agoRockies beat reporter Patrick Saunders to leave Denver Post
-
Seattle, WA39 minutes agoSeattle granted NFL Franchise on this day 52 years ago
-
San Diego, CA45 minutes agoMater Dei Catholic rallies, beats Point Loma in rematch of last week’s final
