California’s Park Fire Continues Scorching Historic Wilderness

Brad Cooke has been spending a lot of time on Google Earth this month. A couple of weeks ago, the Chico, Calif.-based environmental educator was checking it every day for updates on the progress of the Park Fire — California's largest current blaze at 429,388 acres as of Monday. He was particularly concerned about a little-known outdoor destination that he had been visiting with students for 30 years: the Ishi Wilderness.

Although the 41,000-acre swath of Lassen National Forest evolved with fire, the Ishi Wilderness hadn't seen a significant blaze since 1990. And from what Cooke could tell from looking at Google Earth images, the fire had "just ripped through," he said. "And it's still blazing galore over there."

Nobody's sure how hot the fire burned there or how extensive the damage is. But those who are aware of the natural splendors and poignant history in this little-known pocket of California are eager for news about their beloved wilderness destination.

What is the Ishi Wilderness?

Tucked into the rugged foothills of the Cascade Range, the Ishi Wilderness is defined by basaltic cliffs, yawning canyons, unusual lava formations and spring-fed streams that flow west to the Sacramento River. It is named after a former resident, Ishi, who became famous for being the last surviving member of the Yahi people.

The Yahi inhabited the 2,000 square miles around Mount Lassen for thousands of years, hunting deer, catching salmon and gathering edible plants. White settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, and by the early 1870s, they had massacred nearly all members of the tribe. Ishi, who was still a child, and several others managed to escape into deep wilderness canyons. They lived in a small band for many years, but by 1908, all had died except for Ishi.

After three long years of loneliness, hunger and exhaustion, Ishi summoned the courage to hike out of the wilderness. To his surprise, he was received with awe and appreciation, and then he was brought to San Francisco, where he spent the remainder of his life teaching anthropologists about the lives of his people. Ishi's story was documented in the book "Ishi in Two Worlds," by Theodora Kroeber, and the book was adapted into made-for-TV films in 1978 and 1992.

For Cooke, who has taught outdoor education classes at Chico State University and Butte College, the Ishi Wilderness is more than just a piece of California history. He has been taking students on multiday backpacking trips there for about 30 years, sometimes bringing historians and archaeologists to help the students learn about the place.

"I was always in love with the Mill Creek and Ishi Wilderness zone," Cooke says.

What It's Like to Visit the Ishi Wilderness

Getting there is definitely part of the adventure. Visitors must approach on more than 20 miles of dirt roads to the north of Chico, and upon arrival, they feel as if they're 1,000 miles from civilization, Cooke says — like they've somehow arrived in Alaska. The landscape is just that peaceful, remote and rugged.

Because Cooke has been to the Ishi Wilderness during every season, he's seen it snow-covered in winter (which is unusual) and teeming with wildlife — mountain lions, bears and wild horses included — and bursting with native plants in spring. The hot, dry and dusty summers aren't ideal for a visit, he says, but he's seen that, too.

Then there's the cultural history, which is endlessly fascinating to Cooke. He makes a point of visiting pine granaries, where Native Americans once gathered acorns and pine nuts, and points out sacred sites, such as a volcanic plug called Black Rock that protrudes 250 feet above Mill Creek. He's found old gold-mining equipment and traps left by early 1900s trappers, and one time while hiking with students, they stumbled on one of the oldest slides in California.

"The tribe made it on this big piece of basalt, and they chipped little hand holds so the kids could get up there," Cooke says. "It's all smoothed out and rutted." After finding the slide, Cooke did some research and found it mentioned in history and archaeology books. It is one of the oldest play slides in California, he says, and demonstrates that Indigenous children had playground equipment that was built and perfected over thousands of years.

If you're wondering whether Cooke slid down it, the answer is yes.

"That was the first thing I did," Cooke says.

What We Know About the Park Fire's Impact

No one from CalFire has eyeballed or set foot in the Ishi Wilderness since the Park Fire swept through it, according to agency spokesperson Chris Peterson. But he could say that nearly all 41,000 acres were within the fire perimeter.

"If I had to give it a percentage, I'd say like 95 percent of it has definitely been in the burn area," he says.

He couldn't say anything about how hot the fire might have burned in that specific area, but he did point out that some areas of the Park Fire have burned "super hot," while others have not.

"Most of the native trees in California have adapted to live with fire," he says, "so as long as it's a low-intensity fire, most of the trees are pretty resilient."

To learn more about fire history in the area, SFGATE contacted pyro-geographer Zeke Lunder, who runs a wildfire media outlet called The Lookout and has been working in the Lassen foothills for 25 years. Lunder pointed out that the edges of the Ishi Wilderness have seen small wildfires in 2013, 2014 and 2022, but the last large-scale burn was the Campbell Fire in 1990.

For a fire-prone area like the Ishi Wilderness to go 34 years without a major conflagration allows for flammable materials such as leaf litter and dead shrubs to accumulate. And for that reason, the U.S. Forest Service had recently started a planning process for controlled burns out there, he said, and held public meetings to discuss it. But no controlled burns had been conducted yet.

For the most part, Lunder sees this fire as a good thing for the Ishi Wilderness, as "it doesn't seem like there's much out there that can be harmed by fire," he says. One exception to that is the Beaver Creek Pinery, a flat ridgetop covered in a ponderosa pine savanna. There's been a lot of research done out there, Lunder says, because people suspect that much of the landscape looked similar before widespread fire suppression.

"So that's my only real worry, if that place burned," he says, "because it had been a long time since it last burned, and there were a lot of dead trees." From what he's seeing in satellite images, though, at least some canopy remains in the pinery.

The Ishi Wilderness is a resilient place, he says, and will begin to recover almost immediately. Come fall, when it rains, the grass will spread out over the ground and the oak trees will either still have leaves or sprout them right back, he says. It will actually be a great time to visit, he says, with all the brush cleared out.

"After fires like this, it's a great time to go explore these landscapes," he says, "because you can just walk through what used to be 10-foot-tall manzanita." Of course, "freshly burned landscape is kind of an acquired aesthetic taste," he admits.

For Cooke, getting back out to the Ishi Wilderness is a top priority, and he'll be making the trip as soon as the road becomes passable. He's hopeful that Lunder is right and that the wildfire was low-intensity and beneficial for the forest, the way burns done by Indigenous tribes once were.

At the very least, he knows the ancient playground slide isn't going anywhere. And he can't wait to slide down it again.



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