I love Big Basin. It is one of my favorite places in the world. The meteor trail is the prettiest trail I've found of the hundreds or thousands I've hiked in th

I love Big Basin. It is one of my favorite places in the world. The meteor trail is the prettiest trail I've found of the hundreds or thousands I've hiked in the Bay outside of the South Bay / Peninsula. The Berry Falls loops is magnificent - I love the sudden, dramatic change of ecosystem even more than the awesome falls. People have been reaching out to me about the fires. I understand why we mourn, but why do we think this is a bad thing? Fires are part of the forest. Humans have done harm here, both from preventing past fires (which make the smaller number of fires worse) and potentially from climate change (I don't know enough to know how strong the connection of global climate change to this sort of event is), but the basics of it seem clear: forests catch fire sometimes. Such natural phenomena are what gave us the forests we have today.