When the Spanish first arrived in the Valley of the Moon, they found extensive grasslands, valley oaks and extensive marshes fed by literally hundreds of springs and streams coursing down the flanks of the Mayacamas Mountains to the East and Sonoma Mountain to the West. The northwestern end of the Valley was particularly wet as the Sonoma Creek flowed down from Mt. Hood near Kenwood to eventually drain into the San Pablo Bay. Just a few hundred yards toward the sea from Sonoma Creek’s origin in what is now Sugarloaf State Park, the Santa Rosa Creek formed that eventually wound it’s way to the Pacific Ocean through the Laguna de Santa Rosa and the Russian River.
The First Peoples who lived here managed their woodland resources for centuries, setting controlled burns that improved the health of the grasslands, vegetation and arboreal populations with intermittent burns that kept the brush from becoming dangerously dense while cleansing the mighty Valley Oaks of debilitating insects and fungus, keeping them a productive food source.
The advent of European colonization wrought deep and permanent changes to the ecosystem that saw permanent settlements established, land drained, and trees harvested for building, furniture and wood heat. With the construction of more and more permanent, flammable structures, fire suppression became the norm with a resultant buildup of understory and tree density in non-settled areas, a condition that within a century resulted in ever increasing dangerous wildfires.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, the confluence of population density with an ever more volatile landscape and an increasingly warm climate manifested in conflagrations of enormous size and destruction throughout the Western United States, with California and Sonoma County not immune to the fiery depredations of the first quarter century.