In December 2017, I spent two days filming in the Leo Carillo campground. The winds barreling down the dry creek were fierce and carried an ominous threat: a few short miles to the north the Thomas fire was raging. A change of wind direction would have forced us to shut down. We watched the sunset from the bluffs, filtered by clouds of brown smoke drifting miles out over the ocean, beautiful but daunting. A year later, almost to the day, the Woolsey fire burned through that very canyon, and the surrounding hills.

The devastation is still very visible today, but so is the rebirth of a resilient ecosystem you can’t help think has been through this cycle before, since long before there were trails, campgrounds, or even Chumash settlements. It’s an old story in these coastal mountains, for which Man seems to have little respect, intent as he seems to be on changing it forever. And so, with our help, it’s become a story of self-destruction. The zeal we’ve shown in attempting to dominate and control our environment will ultimately make it uninhabitable. Is that also just a phase of a grander cycle? The prickly pear that grows out of its charred carcass, the leaves beginning to fill in the canopies of singed stately oaks, the bright green dandelion that dots the charcoal dust, the vibrant red young laurel leaves, the ducks frolicking in the pond, I’d like to think have a greater story to tell.