On-air challenge: For years I’ve been playing a “License Plate Game” when I’ve been with someone in a car. To play, you need to be in a state where most of the license plates have three letters —which many do. One of you calls out a set of letters from a nearby car. The object is to think of the shortest common, uncapitalized word that contains those letters in left-to-right order — not necessarily consecutively. Let’s say the letters on a plate are NFT. Someone might call out BENEFIT, in seven letters.  But that can be beaten by INFANT, in six letters. That in turn can be beaten by NIFTY, in five. In today’s puzzle, I’ll give you some sets of three letters. For each one, add two letters anywhere to complete a common, uncapitalized five-letter word.

1. VCR
2. GTO
3. CNN
4. CIA
5. NSA
6. PGA
7. HMO
8. RBI

Last week’s challenge: Last week’s challenge came from listener Ethan Kane, of Albuquerque. Name a common tree of North America in two words (3,5). Rearrange its letters to name a well-known plant of Central America, also in two words (4,4). What tree and plant are these?

Challenge answer: Red Maple –> Reed Palm

Winner: Suzanne Hendrich of Missoula, Montana

This week’s challenge: This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, who’s a frequent contributor here — and it’s a little tricky. Change one letter of a place on earth to get a familiar phrase much heard around this time of year. What is it? The answer consists of three words (5,2,5).

Submit Your Answer

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, December 19th, 2024 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.

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.

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.

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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)

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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.

This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.

In the summer of 2024, Caroline Davis and her partner were doing a DIY home project that required 1,500 pounds of gravel. So Davis headed to a home improvement store, and started filling up her Toyota Corolla with 50-pound bags.

“I’m loading, loading. And this older man comes over,” she recalled. “And he says, ‘Do you know that your car has a weight limit?’”

Davis did not know that. It had never even occurred to her that she could damage her car with a heavy load.

“That feels to me like something your dad would tell you,” Davis said. Her dad had died of a heart attack in 2017, at the age of 57.

“So I’m doing DIY later in life,” she said. “I didn’t [learn] that from him.”

Caroline Davis (left) and her father in June 2012.

Caroline Davis/Caroline Davis

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Caroline Davis/Caroline Davis

Davis started to feel overwhelmed; how was she going to unload the gravel from her car and bring it back to the store? And then how would she transport all the gravel she needed back home for her project? That’s when the man made an offer of unusual generosity.

“He says, ‘I can load you up in my truck. Do you live nearby?’ And I say, ‘Yes,’” Davis said.

The man helped her unload all the gravel from her car, and then loaded it into his truck. They exchanged numbers, and she shared her address. When she pulled onto the highway, the kindness of what he had done began to hit her.

“I just start to cry in my car because I was so grateful for the goodness of strangers, of this person helping me,” Davis said.

“The whole interaction just reminded me of my dad, of knowing that that’s something that he would do.”

When they arrived at her house, the man helped her unload all 1,500 pounds of gravel onto her driveway. She thanked him, again and again, and he insisted that she not worry about it.

Davis didn’t want him to leave empty-handed. She tried to offer him money, then wine, but he wouldn’t accept them. Then she thought of something he might like.

“I have a garden. And it’s the end of the season. And I just say, ‘Do you like cucumbers?’” Davis recalled.

“He’s been pretty serious up until now,” she said. “And his face just lights up and he says, ‘I love cucumbers.’”

She offered him a tour of the garden; it turned out he, too, had been a gardener, before his work got in the way. Davis twisted a handful of big, prickly cucumbers off the vine, and gave them to the man. He seemed thrilled.

“He tucks them under his arm, and he just marches off back to his truck,” she said. “And I watched him drive off, leaving behind my 1,500 pounds of gravel.”

Today, inspired by her unsung hero, Davis tries to be on the lookout for others who might need a hand.

“I just am so grateful for people like that, who teach me the things I don’t know I don’t know.”

My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.