The splash of green on the ashen landscape was unexpected. Marc Hoshovsky, a naturalist retired from a career with California state agencies, was reviewing a satellite photo of areas burned in the LNU Complex fire last fall, hoping to tease out insights into its trajectory across the lands around Lake Berryessa. This landscape, on the southeast flank of the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, had burned repeatedly in fires over the past decade. Amid the fire damage revealed in the photo, that green flag, centered on the monument’s Cedar Roughs Wilderness area in eastern Napa County, stood out like a Fresno pepper dropped on a barbecue grill’s burnt charcoal.

Marc and I travelled the Lake Berryessa region in early January to explore how the LNU Complex fire had affected the area, including the parts of the Cedar Roughs Wilderness the fire seemed to pass over.

It is also a landscape shaped by wildfire. For the National Monument’s ecosystems, fire is a familiar visitor, not the disaster it can be for human settlers. Prior to the 20^th century, fire renewed the inner coast range’s grasslands, swept innocuously beneath thick-barked oaks, and cleared dense chaparral, creating conditions for regrowth from root crowns and seedbanks. As elsewhere, decades of fire suppression and an extended fire season are creating conditions for larger, more damaging blazes. Much of the National Monument has been affected by wildfire over the past decade, with some areas on its dry eastern margin burning five times out of the past 6 years, the most frequent fire recurrence in the state. Marc and I hoped our visit might reveal how these infernos were affecting the area’s diverse vegetation, further exposing its geologic features, and yet had spared the Cedar Roughs.

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