Click photo to enlarge
Palo Alto fireman John Rosinski puts out a hot spot in a portion of Henry Coe... ( Patrick Tehan )

California's dove-hunting season opened Sept. 1, so retired Campbell concrete truck driver Craig Locurto headed to his cabin near Henry W. Coe State Park last Saturday to see what he could bag.

But with the temperature in the 90s, the doves seemed to stay hidden in the shade, and Locurto and friends decided to cut their Labor Day weekend short without a bird, returning home Sunday.

Twenty-four hours later, their weekend getaway was gone. The massive Lick fire, which appears to have started on a neighbor's property, swept along the middle fork of Coyote Creek and destroyed Locurto's cabin and a friend's Jeep they had left behind. By Friday night, the blaze was 45 percent contained and had consumed 37,660 acres of brush and timber in and around Northern California's largest state park.

"Most people don't even know what's up here," said San Jose resident Steven Matranga, 59, who returned Friday to the land his family has owned for generations, "but every fiber of my body is tied into this place."

Cal Fire officials say the person responsible for starting the blaze, when flames escaped a barrel being used to burn debris, has stepped forward. Officials declined to name the person pending the end of the investigation, and no decision has been reached on whether to pursue criminal charges.

But a visit to the burned area on Friday showed the fire appeared to sweep southeast down a narrow divide in which


Advertisement

Coyote Creek runs between two ridges.

"Everything is like a moonscape back there," said Locurto, who had leased the property for over 20 years. "The cabin just melted."

A land of ranches

The lands around the edges of 87,000-acre Coe Park have changed little in the nearly 150 years since the Homestead Act allowed settlers to make claims on the properties. Parcels have been bought and sold and conservation agencies grab what they can to add to the park. Those in private hands, at 2,000 to 3,000 feet above sea level and with little road access, continue to function as grazing lands for cattle or hunting retreats for valley residents.

The biggest private owner is the San Felipe Ranch, owned by the heirs of William Hewlett and David Packard. But many smaller properties are owned by the descendants of Italian immigrants whose grandparents farmed in the Santa Clara Valley and acquired mountain parcels in the 1920s or earlier.

"We've all known each other for 40 years or more," said John Leonti, 44, whose grandparents built their first cabin on another section of land above Coyote Creek. "It's an oasis for all of us, and it's only an hour and a half from where we live."

And the fires have come and gone, most recently in this area near the northwest section of the park in 1961. Before Labor Day, that is.

The next property after Locurto's in the fire's path was the Laurel Springs Gun Club. Bill Silveira, a construction executive whose company is building a condominium high-rise in downtown San Jose, was just leaving from his weekend on the property Monday afternoon when he spotted the smoke plume.

Silveira met firefighters at the park headquarters and led them along the backcountry trails he's known all his life. His grandfather was one of the 11 original partners who bought the land from Henry Coe in 1929 after Coe, in a spat with a neighbor, decided selling to a noisy gun club would present a suitable nuisance for his neighbor's cattle.

The firefighters protected three homes that club members have built around their man-made Booze Lake. But an original cabin built by Silveira's grandfather was lost to the flames.

"The fire just overtook us and swept through the lake so fast," Silveira said. "It was throwing spot fires ahead of the fire wall itself, just hundreds of them. It was just the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

"I realized then that you can't outrun a fire," Silveira added, as he stood on the back porch of the three-bedroom home that he built, mostly by himself, over five years in the early 1990s. He watched Friday as a state helicopter circled repeatedly back to the lake, dipping to fill a giant

bucket of water and then hauling it off to dump on the fire.

Burnt landscape

Farther down the divide was mute proof of Silveira's realization. Three dead wild pigs lay scorched on a barren hillside.

Silveira's partners in the gun club include Rich and Barry Cristina and Jesse Weigel, owners of GreenWaste Recovery, a major South Bay garbage and recycling company.

"It's not much of a gun club anymore," said Barry Cristina, who has spent weekends there since he was a kid in the 1950s. "Now the lake is kind of the focus. We fish more than hunt, lay around and swim." The lake, at 16 surface acres, is more of a pond, the result of a dam the families built on Coyote Creek in an area called Cold Flat in the 1960s. Cristina said the lake originally was called "Cold Flat Lake" but a neighbor put up a sign that read "Booze Lake" and somehow the name stuck.

"A couple of beers were had during that period," he said.

Despite the fire's wide arc and rapid spread, there are so few buildings in and around Coe Park that only a few cabins appear to have been lost.

The modest property losses aside, many of the property owners say the flames will actually bring long-term benefits to the area.

"I wasn't around when the fire burned in '61," said Leonti.

"But I just know for several years when I was young there was an abundance of wildlife. Lately it's been scarce. The brush was so thick, an animal can't live with that."

To be sure, there still are deer, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, wild pigs and mountain lions roaming the properties in the Mount Hamilton range, with the deer and pigs the legal targets of hunters. Mountain lions, now protected under state law, are showing up with greater frequency.

Locurto said he looks forward to the winter.

"After the rain, it will all be green grass again."