The History of the Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council up to 2023 © 2024 by Joe Christy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

The History of the Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council up to 2023

Joe Christy

Inception from wildfire 2008-2009

Before June 2008, we thought of our Bonny Doon environment as the ‘Asbestos Forest’, rainy in the winter and often foggy in the summer. Fire was the last thing on our minds, but then on June 11, 2008, after climate change had given us an unusually hot, dry summer, the Martin Fire broke out in the Ecological Reserve. The fire was believed to have been started at an illegal campsite in the Moon Rocks, courtesy of a cigarette butt tossed into a burn ring. The resulting fire consumed over 500 acres, basically the entire Eco Reserve. It was only fully contained 5 days later. The last prior wildfire in Bonny Doon was in 1948.

Soon after the Martin Fire had been contained, CAL FIRE personnel scheduled a meeting to give an after-action report. At that meeting, Angela Bernheisel, the CAL FIRE Public Information Officer, was asked what we could do to be better prepared for wildfire. She said that we should start a local Fire Safe Council. At the time, I was chair of the Rural Bonny Doon Association (RBDA), so the RBDA invited Dan Lang from the California Fire Safe Council to speak to us about how to start a local Fire Safe Council. Basically, we learned that we needed folks to take the helm who had experience with a) fire prevention and b) with fund-raising.

We didn’t have to wait long for another fire. The following summer, on the evening of August 12, the Lockheed fire broke out in the northern reaches of Bonny Doon.  Driven by high winds from the northeast, the flames moved rapidly south, consuming almost 7,900 acres. The fire was finally contained 11 days later, on August 23.   Again, in the after-action report to the Community, Ian Larkin of Cal Fire urged us to start a local Fire Safe Council.

That fall, Nadia Hamey and I began discussing in earnest forming a Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council. Nadia is a Registered Professional Forester, who had been the land manager of about 600 acres of forest that had originally been owned the Davenport Cement Company who had initially logged the hardwoods to fuel their cement kiln and was at the time owned by Cemex, an international cement conglomerate, until bankrupted in the financial crisis of 2008. Cemex at that point was working the redwood forest logging it in a selective, one tree at a time process over a planned century harvest cycle. After the CEMEX bankruptcy, the property was bought by a conservation partnership of five non-profits who christened it the San Vicente Redwoods and retained Nadia to help them achieve their conservation goals. Almost immediately the property was engulfed in the 2009 Lockheed Fire, giving her a baptism by fire.  I had come from 20-year career in mathematical research involving 12-year writing and managing over $3,000,000 in grants and lately been chair of the non-profit Rural Bonny Doon Association and led it in an environmental direction. Nadia and I had worked on the Santa Cruz North-Coastal section of what came to be the CAL FIRE and the Resource Conservation Districts’ 2010 Santa Cruz County - San Mateo County Community Wildfire Protection Plan. We joined with Alan Lindh, Will Powers, and Alec Webster to get a Fire Safe Council off the ground. Our immediate goal was to secure grant funding to build strategic shaded fuel breaks along both strategic ridgetops for containing wildfire and access and evacuation routes in Bonny Doon. This would require us to incorporate as a California Public Benefit Corporation and then apply to the IRS for 501(c)(3) non-profit status.

Birth in the rain 2010

To that end we called an organizational meeting at the Bonny Doon School for the evening of January 20.  Unfortunately, climate once again intruded.  The meeting could not take place because a driving winter storm had closed most of the roads in Bonny Doon. Luckily, on February 17, when we rescheduled, the weather cooperated. We elected a founding board composed of Nadia Hamey, Val Haley, Ilana King, Lonny Schwartz, CAL FIRE San Mateo Santa Cruz Unit (CZU) Deputy Chief Rob Sherman, Alec Webster, and me.  For the new mission statement of the new Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council (BDFSC), we adopted “To educate and mobilize the people of the Ben Lomond Mountain to protect their community, homes and environment from wildfire.”  We even collected the royal sum of $200 in donations.

Starting out 2010 - 2013

We wasted no time getting started. In March 2010 we canvassed those who had attended the February meeting about their concerns about making Bonny Doon fire safe & what BDFSC could do about them.

In May we began drafting the by-laws & articles of incorporation necessary for applying for non-profit status and began work on a strategic plan.

We also put on our first workshop, beginning at the Martin Road fire station with presentations by: Angela Bernheisel on principles of defensible space, including ladder fuels, mosaic fire-scaping, and the 30' & 100' zones; Joe Issel on the Resource Conservation District's chipping program; Rob Sherman and a member of the Bonny Doon Volunteer Fire Team on County Fire's LE100 inspections; and Val Haley on working in environmentally sensitive habitats. The workshop continued with a walking tour of the Ecological Reserve and discussion of the Martin Road shaded fuel break, environmentally sensitive defensible space at Val Haley's home on Quail Drive, and roadside Fire Safe activities of the Vineyard Road Association. After the success of that first workshop, we resolved to hold quarterly public events for the Bonny Doon community.

In early June, Nadia, Ilana, and I attended a California Fire Safe Council grant writing workshop and wrote projects for two grant proposals. The first project was to construct two shaded fuel breaks, one along the San Vicente Redwoods’ 3.5-mile Empire Grade ridgetop frontage with another ½ mile along a strategic ridgetop on private property below Pineridge. These fuel breaks, which for short we together called the Cotoni Shaded Fuel Break project, were submitted by the Soquel Fire Safe Council, in partnership with ourselves and the South Skyline Fire Safe Council through the California FSC’s Western Wildland Urban Interface (WWUI) grant program. The WWUI partnership grant was awarded early November 2010.

The second project, part of another partnership with the Soquel and South Skyline Fire Safe Councils, which was to be under the fiscal sponsorship of the RCD was for the purpose of building our building three more fuel breaks:  the Middle Empire, along the eastern side of Empire Grade from the Crest Ranch Christmas tree farm down to Sunlit Lane, including an ill-fated fuel break along the eastern edge of Braemoor;  and the Lower Empire, on both sides Empire Grade from ¼ mile above Pineridge down to ¼ mile below Quarry Road. Unfortunately, the submission was delayed when the coordinator for the RCD left to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. In late November 2010 the RCD found a new coordinator and the second grant was finally submitted, and the RCD partnership grant awarded in June 2011.

Although we will occasionally refer to the two grants as the WWUI partnership grant and the RCD partnership grant, respectively, we will mostly write about the Cotoni Shaded Fuel Break project in the first case and the Middle/Lower Empire Fuel Break project in the second case.

In 2011, we began the year with a well-attended backyard burn workshop, which was inauspiciously held during a February snowstorm.

In summer 2011 we completed our strategic plan at last, based on the March 2010 canvas. In a nutshell, we determined that we should operate on three scales: individual property level, neighborhood level, and landscape level.

During winter 2010/2011 through fall 2011 we set about getting agreements to work on many small private properties, while waiting for environment clearances from BLM for the WWUI Partnership grant and from CAL Fire and State Parks for the RCD Partnership grant.

We officially became a non-profit in late August 2011, when we finally received our 501(c) (3) status from the IRS, retroactively back to our California incorporation in June 2010.

2012 and 2013 were busy years for us, building fuel breaks using inmate crews, which we finished in late fall 2013. In the process, we learned that we had underestimated by orders of magnitude the cost and overestimated the feasibility of protecting the homes built right out to the brink of the eastern Braemoor precipice. We decided therefore to focus instead on the cheaper alternative of opening a second evacuation route from Braemoor through Crest Ranch. To proceed, we had to seek approval for a re-scoping of Middle/Lower Empire Fuel Break project in June 2013.

In the Fall of 2012, I was fortunate to be awarded a scholarship for the Assessing Wildfire Hazards in the Home Ignition Zone training by the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA).

In Spring, 2013, with our non-profit status finalized, we submitted the first grant proposal of our own to CAL FIRE’s 2013 State Responsibility Area Fire Prevention Fee grant program. We proposed to build shaded fuel breaks down the Warrenella Truck Trail through the San Vicente Redwoods, to the open grasslands of Coast Dairies north of Davenport, and down the Fall Creek Truck Trail through the eponymous unit of Henry Cowell State Park to eastern Felton. Together with our now completed portions of the Partnership and RCD grants, we would then be able to bisect the Bonny Doon Firescape both north/south along Empire Grade, and east/west along the two truck trails.

That Fall, we submitted a second grant proposal through the California Fire Safe Council, to begin in 2014, for a scaled-back shaded fuel break along the Warrenella Truck Trail.

In fall 2013 our two partners in the RCD partnership grant encountered greater obstacles than ours in Braemoor, so the entire RCD Partnership grant was allowed an entire year’s extension of the performance period. 

A highlight of our November 2013 annual meeting was a presentation by world- renowned UC Berkeley fire scientist Scott Stephens on the fire science perspective on the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Bonny Doon in particular.

In the winter of 2013, unburdened by the necessity of daily supervision of inmate crews, I began a pilot of our Home Ignition Zone Consultation (HIZ) program.  When board members and ex-firefighters Tom Scully and Steve Pizzo joined the program, the consultations became very popular, and the HIZ program continues to this day.

Coming into our own 2014-2017

The spring of 2014 brought the bad news that our 2013 CAL FIRE grant was not funded, though they pledged to keep our submission open for consideration for their 2014 grant cycle. Nonetheless, we still had plenty to do. That spring, we partnered with State Parks and CAL FIRE on Parks’ State Fire Assistance grant for the Fall Creek truck trail. Our role was to manage the project and provide sponsors for the CAL FIRE inmate crews. 

That summer, we received our first major grant for $169,000 from California Fire Safe Council, matched in kind by $221,000 worth of inmate crew time from CAL FIRE, to construct the shaded fuel break on the Warrenella truck trail.

In the fall, we were surprised to learn that CAL FIRE Northern Region had decided to fund the 2013 the Warrenella/Fall Creek truck trail projects, funding that we had to turn down since we couldn’t very well perform the work twice!

In the winter of 2014/2015, in preparation for constructing an 8-mile shaded fuel break, we laid out and flagged the Warrenella truck trail. This gave us an opportunity to appreciate the splendor of the second-growth forest and the beauty of its understory. We discovered habitat for Federally protected Marbled Murrelets, a seabird, which prefers no to nest on sea cliffs like all its relatives, but to perversely nest in the tops of wolfy old Douglas Firs. We flagged those trees for protection, as well as other environmentally sensitive plant habitat areas that we needed to avoid.

While flagging, we were surprised to discover two previously undiscovered archeological sites. Because an archeological site is defined in the California Environmental Act (CEQA) as a place where artifacts more than 45 years old are found, I and some of our other sponsors thought twice about sitting still for very long!

Since portions of the mid-section the of the truck trail had been clearcut with two-man crosscut saws and steam mules for the purpose of supplying lumber to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.  We were required by CEQA to avoid a section of the south side of the truck trail to avoid the location of the woodmen’s ‘Camp Three’, which had previously been recorded as an archeological site based on contemporaneous maps. As we worked down toward Camp Three in 2015, we were amazed by the railroad tracks used by the steam mules, by the more than 20’ diameter log skid trails, and by the axe & crosscut saws beyond the shaded fuel break footprint, not to mention the mountain lion marking spoor and scratches in the nearby woods! While we were dutifully avoiding the alleged area of Camp Three, one of the CAL FIRE Captains, an amateur archeologist, discovered a water box, cooking pit, eating china, and cobalt glass in the area we were setting out to work. This caused us to skip forward down the Warrenella while a CAL FIRE professional archeologist surveyed the site. We planned to come back later and build our fuel break over the misplaced Camp Three, while avoiding the actual Camp Three.

Despite the delays for archeological surveys, a serious accident befalling one of the inmates, and finally, the California Fire Safe Council’s difficulty in receiving their final payment on the master grant from the Forest Service, we were able to close out the Warrenella project only 6 months late, in early summer 2016.

Later that summer, we returned to the Cotoni fuel break. Working with hand crews and masticators, we aimed to maintain the fuel break by mechanical means.

Before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 1600’s the Ohlone people who originally lived here would come into the mountains in the fall along a broad network of trails to gather acorns & nuts and to hunt game. When the weather began to turn wet in late fall, they would burn 50–100-acre plots between trails. The next year they would burn different plots, returning in a 10-to-15-year cycle. The Ohlone stewardship increased the yields of acorns and the hazel nut groves that they cultivated while making the game easier to find.

When the Spanish arrived, they were struck by the beauty of the parklike forests and by the smoke draped over the landscape in the fall. By the early 1700’s the Missions exterminated most of the Ohlone in the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains; the rest they enslaved. By the time that Mexico became independent in 1821, the Mission system was in decline, so for the next 27 years, the remaining indigenous people in the missions were sold to the ranchos which were beginning to work the lands that the missions had ceded and move into new territories. In 1848, gold was discovered in California which led to a massive occupation by Americans seeking their manifest destiny in the gold fields. California was annexed into the U.S. as a state in 1850 and the new State forbade the indigenous people burning. A century and a half of fire suppression beginning in 1910 filled the once parklike forest with tangled undergrowth, ready to burn, which it did, catastrophically in 2008 and 2009.

In early 2017, with both the landscape (fuel breaks) and property (HIZ and chipping) levels of our three-level strategic plan in place, we finally began to implement the third, neighborhood, level by advising neighborhoods on how to organize workdays to secure escape routes and safe zones to shelter in if the escape routes became unsafe.

In late 2017, we applied for another, Evacuation, grant from the California Fire Safe Council to build modest 10’-wide ‘fuel breaks’ beside the primary escape routes along Pine Flat and Bonny Doon Roads.

We also began planning another grant funded project to return good fire to the landscape on 2 square miles of the restoration reserve of the San Vicente Redwoods. Our grand scheme was to return frequent small fires to the landscape to restore the resilient, fire adapted landscape of the pre-European era. This required extensive planning to prepare a detailed line-item budget with a quarter-by-quarter workplan, to obtain environmental clearances, and to lay out 169 acres of major ridgetop shaded fuel breaks. Only then could we begin the work on fuel breaks to isolate watersheds, while the landowners mechanically thinned the undergrowth in the watersheds between the ridges. We could then move on to build fuel breaks on intermediate ridges, dividing the landscape into 50–100-acre firesheds which, after 300 years, we could safely burn again as the original peoples did.

Doubling Down 2018 - 2020

In June 2018 we submitted the second grant, to CAL FIRE, aimed at returning fire to the San Vicente Redwood landscape beyond the Cotoni shaded fuel break. Before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 1600’s the Ohlone people who originally lived here would come into the mountains in the fall along a wide network of trails to gather acorns & nuts and to hunt game. When the weather began to turn wet in late fall, they would burn 50–100-acre plots between trails. The next year they would burn different plots, returning in a 10-to-15-year cycle. The Ohlone stewardship increased the yields of acorns and the hazel nut groves that they cultivated while making the game easier to find.

Our grand scheme was to return frequent small fires to the landscape to restore the resilient, fire adapted landscape of the pre-European era. This required extensive planning to prepare a detailed line-item budget with a quarter-by-quarter workplan, to obtain environmental clearances, and to lay out 169 acres of major ridgetop shaded fuel breaks. Only then could we begin the work on fuel breaks to isolate watersheds, while the landowners mechanically thinned the undergrowth in the watersheds between the ridges. We could then move on to build fuel breaks on intermediate ridges, dividing the landscape into 50–100-acre firesheds which we could safely burn again after 300 years.

Unfortunately, the twin processes of collecting 90 homeowners’ permissions to work on their property for the Evacuation grant and designing a credible prescription for such a narrow ‘fuel break’ while simultaneously meeting the homeowners’ requirements, occupied all of 2018 and much of 2019. Thus, Evacuation grant work had to be delayed until mid-2019.

In August 2018, we were also buoyed to learn that we had been awarded $390,000 from CAL FIRE for the Returning Fire to the Landscape grant.

Then, in the Fall of 2018, after 2 years of unsuitable weather for prescribed fire, the Amah Mutsun Land Trust fittingly initiated the maintenance of the Cotoni fuel break with good fire by conducting a cultural burn. That was featured in a National Geographic TV Special, Native America. 

In winter CAL FIRE continued the maintenance with prescribed burns by up through winter 2019-2020.

In spring of 2019, Meggin Harmon took over our annual Spring Chipping program breathing new life into it. At that time, we were able to fund it entirely through community donations; a tradition that continues to this day.

In August 2019, we gathered 12 hardy souls, from staff, parents, community members, and the entire BDFSC board to make Bonny Doon Elementary School fire safe, removing 23 cubic yards of brush and downed limbs entirely by hand! Ryan Beauregard kindly the necessary dump runs to dispose of that with his vineyard’s stake side truck.

Meanwhile, our preoccupation with the Evacuation grant and the arduous process of obtaining environmental clearances and permits that fall and winter delayed the initiation of groundwork on the Returning Fire to the Landscape grant until spring of 2020.

Carrying on After the Fire 2020 – 2024

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, affecting every aspect of life while we sorted out how we would live while locked down.

Finally, in the second week of June our contractor for the building of fuel breaks was able to start moving his equipment to the work site, where the CZU fire destroyed it the next week and made returning fire to the landscape irrelevant.

It took over a month to contain the fire in the San Vicente Redwoods and nearly a year before it was safe to re-enter the area to work. 

Of course, we had to extensively re-imagine the Returning Fire to the Landscape grant project, as we saw that the extreme- and severe-intensity fire along the ridgetops had removed much of the canopy that was to provide the shade. Of course, throughout the process of re-imaging CAL FIRE generously assisted in re-scoping the grant several times. Our goal thus shifted to first removing the burned, standing dead, hazard trees. It soon became clear that there were many, many hazard trees. We discovered that even the hardwoods that had been killed by the heat from moderate-intensity fire, had no commercial value, even as firewood, since they shattered on impact when felled. We next had to figure out a way to dispose of thousands of tons of biomass.  The ultimate project morphed into concentrating our felling and clearing only on the watershed defining ridgetops. We masticated the shattered trees where they lay. while hauling the 12–16-foot logs to a single central staging area accessible to heavy machinery. 

We next had to figure out a way to dispose of thousands of tons of biomass.  The ultimate project morphed into concentrating our felling and clearing only on the watershed defining ridgetops. We masticated the shattered trees where they lay while hauling the 12–16-foot logs to a single central staging area accessible to heavy machinery. From whence we imagined that they could be hauled to an offsite biomass processor.

By mid-winter of 2020-2021, we were only able to build 72 acres of fuel breaks while decking many more logs than we could afford to haul to the nearest biomass processor. Luckily, were able to obtain, from CAL FIRE and the Tree Mortality Task Force, one Air Curtain Burner [ACB]. An ACB is basically a boxcar sized, steel walled, cement lined blast furnace, open on top, complete with fans to create a cyclone within to trap the combustion inside. The ACB burns the biomass at high enough temperature that only minimal carbon dioxide and steam is released into the atmosphere, and the ash remaining is confined in the bottom of the ACB.

In late February 2021, we were able to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and were promised two more ACB’s. Simultaneously, the landowners advanced their timeline for opening the public access portions of SVR which meant constructing, in March, a parking lot where our staging area lay.

Even though we were granted an extension of the performance period of the initial grant from the end of March through the end of 2022, it soon became clear that we would deplete the remainder of entire budget of the original grant just establishing a new staging area at safe remove from the area of SVR long intended to be open for public access. The funding was spent by April 2021 and, even with 3 ACBs at work, there were still thousands of tons of biomass still to treat and 97 more acres of fuel break to be constructed. Again, we were saved by another re-scoping, approved in June 2021.

The HIZ consultation project had been a great success until the pandemic lockdown placed it on pause, so when the California lockdown was lifted in January 2021, at the instigation of board member Mike Phinn, we approached the National Fire Prevention Association [NFPA] about possibility of having an in-person Assessing Structure Ignition Potential Hazards in the Home Ignition Zone training, as the Assessing Wildfire Hazards in the Home Ignition Zone training had been re-named. Initially, the NFPA was timid about having an in-person training before the pandemic lockdown was lifted nation-wide. Luckily, Mike was an old friend of Pat Durland, from their pre-retirement fire service days. Pat had gone on, after his retirement, to initiate the NFPA HIZ program that I had attended years before. Ultimately, Mike’s persistence paid off, and we were able to have the very first post-pandemic training in the US right here at Bonny Doon Elementary School. With nearly two years of pent-up demand for in-person training NFPA allowed us to double the size of the training from 20 students to 40, for the price of 20. That allowed us to offer scholarships to 20 students from Bonny Doon while charging 14 additional students sponsored by the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, and 6 others from the rest of Northern California. Finally, Pat Durland allowed 2 other fire service retirees from the County and 2 more Dooners to audit the training and boost their credentials for the BDFSC HIZ program

In May of 2022, CAL FIRE generously granted us a $700,000 direct award to finish the Returning Fire to the Landscape grant as re-scoped, including the remaining 97 acres of fuel breaks remaining and integrating a study conducted by UC Berkeley and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Land Trust of ecosystem recovery in less severely burned areas under a variety of different amounts of canopy thinning.

This work progressed rapidly, as did the construction of public access trails, which opened in December 2022. Along those trails, many of which traversed the Cotoni Shaded Fuel Break along Empire Grade that BDFSC constructed in 2013, as part of 2011 WWUI partnership grant, there were still some hazard trees outside our original project area, while in the footprint of the winter 2019-2021 maintenance prescribed burn, extensive brush which had regrown by 2020, and the area consequently burned with low intensity during CZU fire. The area of the second maintenance prescribed burn to the north burned with low intensity.

Seeing this, in November of 2022, CAL FIRE amended the direct award to include a further $251,000 for removal of the hazard trees in the area with public access and then to prepare the entire Cotoni Shaded Fuel Break for another round of maintenance with prescribed fire.

Notably, we hired a contractor for this last amendment who brought an improved ACB, called a Carbonator, for biomass treatment. The Carbonator proved ro be both more efficient at treatment and capable of producing valuable biochar instead of ash. The resulting biochar was used in a successful pilot program at Elkhorn Slough to filter agricultural runoff, so it is clean enough to wash the produce grown in the Pajaro Valley.

The entire 2019 project was finally completed in June of 2023 and during a break in early winter 2023 between the atmospheric river storms the prescription was met for the third maintenance prescribed burn along Empire Grade. The cost of the project had ultimately grown to nearly 1.3 million dollars and extended to five years.

Fittingly, on my 70th birthday in December 2023, we had a hybrid Zoom/in person annual meeting and board election at the Beauregard tasting room, for which Ryan Beauregard very generously supplemented the pizzas that BDFSC brought up from Davenport with free wine for all present. Shortly after the meeting, the new board itself elected Lisa Scallop to become the new Board President; Paul Gabriel, Vice President; Meggin Harmon, Treasurer; and Susan Mason Secretary, refreshing the leadership of BDFSC.