Chumash Fire Department Capt. Quntan Garcia placed a stalky beige plant into my hand and slowly trickled water from his Kirkland water bottle over it.
My hands were slightly coated with dust after spending a dry October day outside on Sierra Madre in Los Padres National Forest.
“This is soap plant,” he explained as he continued pouring water and told me to start rubbing my hands together.
“Is it working?”
I started to hear the familiar whoosh and feel the soft sticky texture that comes with pumping soap onto my hands. Dirty water escaped from my palms and between my fingers, which felt moisturized and clean once I shook them dry.
For hundreds of years, the Chumash have harvested and used the wavyleaf soap plant. Garcia identifies native plants like this one as well as cultural sites through the Chumash Fire Department’s Resource Unit’s efforts to help preserve the tribe’s history on public lands like Los Padres.
In October 2024, he went out with a crew to the Sierra Madre ridgeline, off Highway 166 outside Cuyama and New Cuyama. That ridgeline was the last line of defense prepared against the Lake Fire, which ignited on July 5, 2024, and burned more than 38,000 acres in three weeks.
During the fire’s early days, Los Padres used bulldozers to push back vegetation and built 170 miles of 12-foot contingency lines—creating “a line of unburnable soil to keep the fire from crossing,” Los Padres Forest Service Fire Public Information Officer Flemming Bertelsen said.
“Dozers put lines in quicker, but it’s more invasive. There’s a lot of soil displaced,” Bertelsen said as he navigated a Jeep over steep hillsides and bumpy private dirt roads. “If we don’t rehab the vegetation that’s used to slow down the runoff, it’ll end up in our trails, campgrounds.”
Starting in mid-October, Los Padres and the Chumash Fire Department went into restoration mode in areas damaged by fire suppression efforts and repaired remote roads to preserve them for the upcoming rainy season. Crews removed any trees that could fall on hikers and campers, built berms to redirect water flow, pulled out invasive plants, and restored the forest to its natural state as much as possible.
As of Dec. 13, suppression repair from Figueroa Mountain to Sierra Madre was about 90 percent complete, with rangers and firefighters pausing for the holidays and scheduled to resume efforts on Jan. 12, 2025, Los Padres Santa Lucia Ranger District Battalion Chief Vincent Montes told the Sun. About 50 employees supported these efforts, which will cost millions of dollars to complete.
“As soon as we hit 100 percent, it’s the satisfaction that we got a big project done with efforts helping us out, and it’s one less worry when wintertime comes and roads aren’t fixed,” Montes said. “The rains can damage more, and then we’re stuck with a bigger project.”
Prior the the 2017 Thomas Fire and resulting debris flow in 2018, the way the Forest Service conducted suppression repair was different, Public Information Officer Bertelsen said.
“In the past, fires would come, the Washington office would want to put the fire out and repair quickly,” he said.
Now, the Forest Service can take more time on repair efforts because the D.C. office wants a more “thorough recovery”—including protection of culturally significant and sensitive sites scattered throughout Los Padres.
“You’re obligated to be caretakers of the land. That’s our Fire Department motto,” Chumash Fire Capt. Garcia said.
The current fire chief helped start the Chumash Fire Department in 2006 after he saw several Indigenous people come forward to prevent a cultural site from being bulldozed during suppression efforts for a Northern California fire, Assistant Fire Chief Gilbert Romero told the Sun.
In 2007, the department responded to repair damaged cultural sites after the Zaca Fire.
“And then it was like, well how do we get ahead of that and stop them, and that was where we started making progress to being able to get ahead of things and going out to protect them,” Romero said.
The team now has about 22 firefighters and four fire trucks that respond to emergencies on the reservation and provide local and national fire suppression responses through agreements with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Forest Service. They’ve responded to the Thomas, Woolsey, and Alisal fires, and traveled throughout California as well as to Arizona and New Mexico to help protect culturally sensitive areas in other regions.
Cultural specialists use a mapping system that logs all of the sites throughout Los Padres, Fire Capt. Garcia added. The units travel in utility task vehicles to flag the sites—which can hold arrowheads, beads, stone pots, or woven baskets—before any repair efforts begin.
“It’s a race to get out here and flag it, and then explain to whoever’s in charge, and they’ll explain to the operator: When they see this flag don’t touch it,” Garcia said. “Families pass that knowledge down, and we pass it to the Forest Service.”
The exact site locations are confidential because people used to dig up or take artifacts for themselves. Part of Garcia’s work at the Fire Department is to educate the public about the importance of cultural and native plant preservation. The tribe’s elders have protected the land for the last 100 years, but the tribes can’t protect the sites by themselves anymore, Garcia said.
“It’s an ongoing cycle for us; we have to stay a part of it because we know things change. … We have to pass the token to speak up and educate,” Garcia said. “Every inch represents 150 years, and you can’t get it back once it’s gone.”
Reach Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 19-29, 2024.