The church survived and so did the train depot. But the rest of Paramount Ranch is a mangled yard of twisted metal and charred wood. The National Park Service fenced off the ruins of the replica 19th-century Western town, which throughout its 70-year history in the Malibu hills has served as a classic set for the likes of HBO’s Westworld, countless Hollywood westerns, and weddings. When I visited the rubble in April, a man in his 60s stood beside me, peering through the metal fence at the leveled buildings. “Our daughter got married out here,” he said, wearily.

Six months earlier, the Woolsey Fire ripped through the mock town’s saloons, mining shops, and Sheriff’s buildings. The blaze burned nearly 100,000 acres and scorched 88 percent(opens in a new tab) of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is home to Paramount Ranch. It was the largest fire in the park’s history, and it left a scar that is easily visible from space(opens in a new tab). The Woolsey Fire followed in the footsteps of 2017’s nearby Thomas Fire, which for eight months held the title as the biggest wildfire in California history — until, that is, it was eclipsed by yet another giant blaze(opens in a new tab), the Mendocino Complex fire.

And yet, the land now thrives. A procession of winter storms, born over the Pacific Ocean, has breathed life into this scorched world. It is earth renewed. Amid the telltale signs of a violent 1,000-degree inferno — blackened trees and singed shrubs — lush, even head-high plants have shot up from the ground. “It’s quite a comeback,” said Mark Mendelsohn, a National Park Service biologist who has spent the last month trudging through the phenomenal regrowth. “You’ve got black shrub skeletons and a verdant green carpet.”

The greenery extends all the way to the Pacific coast, following in the tracks of the Woolsey Fire. Here, a popular beachside state park in Malibu, Leo Carrillo, has been closed since the conflagration tore through, only fizzling out when flames met the callous sea about 10 miles away, as the crow flies, from Paramount Ranch. Ninety-nine percent of Leo Carrillo (which usually sees some 1 million visitors a year) ignited. “That’s a staggering number if you think about it — everything burned,” said the park’s superintendent Craig Sap.

But you wouldn’t know it today. It’s not just the green that’s flourishing. Like Paramount Ranch, the park is teeming with snakes, rabbits, crooning birds, and caterpillars.

Especially the caterpillars.

“There are just millions of caterpillars everywhere,” said Mendelsohn. “It’s often hard to walk.”

With 1.8 million acres burned(opens in a new tab), 2018 was California’s worst fire season on record(opens in a new tab). It’s mounting evidence that even in historic fire country, a more potent fire regime has emerged(opens in a new tab) out West. Overall, wildfires in the U.S. are burning twice as much land(opens in a new tab) as they were in the early 1980s and they’re burning for weeks(opens in a new tab), not days, longer.

Yet in California and beyond, the indifferent, natural world will largely renew, sometimes in a matter of months. In the far West, where fires are king, it’s our society — our campgrounds, historic sites, homes, and, most importantly, lives(opens in a new tab) — that will suffer. The wild world, on the other hand, will largely rise from ashes, sometimes gloriously.

“These systems have been programmed to respond [to wildfire] for millennia,” said John Bailey, a fire ecologist at Oregon State University.

“Fire is reality. It always has been.”

On November 8, 2018, the day the Woolsey Fire ignited, Marti Witter, a fire ecologist in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, drove home to nearby Topanga Canyon at 6 p.m. The Woolsey Fire was small and not yet considered a big threat, at least compared to other blazes in the area.

By the next morning, Witter couldn’t get on the usually bustling 101, or Hollywood Freeway. The Woolsey Fire — stoked by potent winds and parched plants — was about to leap over this major Los Angeles artery. “That was the day it just ripped to the coast,” said Witter.

On its race to the shore, Woolsey left Paramount Ranch and Leo Carillo charred and smoldering.

The story of how Woolsey erupted in flames is not a simple one, because no fire is simple. It’s a confluence of the right ingredients, at the right time. “It is the interaction of weather, climate, and fuels [dried-out grasses and plants.]. That’s just physics,” said Bailey. And importantly, Woolsey, like most wildfires today(opens in a new tab), likely had a human-provided spark(opens in a new tab). “We are getting more fires and they are getting bigger, but that’s being driven by them getting lit a lot more,” said Witter.

But in Southern California’s fire country, the feasting fires have also been handed a valuable gift: drought. When Woolsey ignited, along with other fires that day, the region was still mired in a years-long drought(opens in a new tab). That means parched vegetation. “In November we were exceptionally dry,” noted the Park Service’s Mendelsohn. “That was one of the main reasons why the fire spread so fast.”

“Just this winter brought us out of drought,” he added, referencing the recent winter deluges.

California, a land already infamous for either lots of rain or no rain at all, is expected to experience even more drastic weather(opens in a new tab). “The key climatological signal is extremes,” said Sean Anderson, an environmental scientist whose family evacuated from the Woolsey Fire. “Those highs are getting higher, and those lows are getting lower,” noted Anderson, a professor at Cal State University Channel Islands.

Anderson spotted evidence all over the charred land. Many California shrubs evolved to survive fire. But some five years of drought left hardy shrubs as bone-dry pieces of tinder rooted to the ground, just waiting to ignite. When Woolsey hit, they did just that, and vaporized. This left countless hills naked. “It literally looked like a moonscape,” said Anderson.

Climate scientists expect more of this climate whiplash(opens in a new tab) — dry spells mixed in with shorter bursts of pummeling rain.

This year, heavy winter deluges followed a long drought. And so life returned in awesome force, more dramatically than in many years past. North of Los Angeles, the spring hills transformed into vivid yellow mounds. A species of mustard has flourished everywhere. Mendelsohn spent the early spring slogging through the towering plants.

“We’re calling them the mustard jungle,” he said. “You just come back yellow.”

In the dead still of late morning, I peered through the Paramount Ranch fencing at deformed sheets of metal roofing, collapsed to the ground.

Clang!

I jumped back. A rabbit leaped out from beneath the debris and rattled the rusted slabs. I wouldn’t expect anything to live in a charred graveyard, but there it was. After, I headed north, about to cross by some newly sprouted grass, but was promptly stopped in my tracks.

“Be careful of the rattlesnakes out there,” shouted a man from 50 yards ahead. “They’re big. Scared the bejeezus out me.”

And again, there were caterpillars. Miles away from Paramount Ranch, on the Leo Carrillo coast, they swarmed over the boulders, soil, and riverbank. Just as Mendelsohn discovered farther inland, there were places you couldn’t walk, lest you crush dozens of the creeping bugs. Masses of the fuzzy, young insects even floundered into the Leo Carrillo creek and floated a mile down to the beach. Many drifted helplessly into the waves.

The campground, closed by both fire and pummeling mudslides (the naked, rootless hills near the beach had little to hold back their rain-bloated soil) was now ruled by the crows. Murders of them flocked overhead, circling the vacant lots. Their croaks echoed through the silent valley, dominant, dark, and mean. It was theirs, for now.

There are plans to rebuild in this wild country. Sap, the park’s superintendent, hopes to open up much of the campground by Memorial Day, some seven months after the blaze sliced through. Still, while dead trees have been removed, a number of buildings, ravaged by flames, won’t be rebuilt anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service intends to reconstruct Paramount Ranch by late 2020 — with the latest fire-resistant standards. It will stand once more as an iconic Western movie set, bustling with film crews, curious park-goers, and sometimes, weddings. “It’ll be back,” said Mendelsohn. “And then we’ll make some more memories.”

But like a true Western outpost, a threat will always loom in the sun-drenched fall air. It won’t be bandits, marauders, or railroad tycoons. It’ll be fire. Even during a normal year, when the shrubs haven’t been baked dry by years of drought, the land is primed to light up. “It’s like standing there waiting to start a bonfire,” said Witter, the park’s fire ecologist.

And this year, after the great rains brought phenomenal regrowth, there will be exceptional loads of vegetation to burn, especially the thickets of yellow mustard now coloring the hills. “It’s so widespread, dense and tall,” said Mendelsohn. And it will spend months drying out under the relentless California sun. “We’re going to drop right into the danger zone,” he said. “It’s going to be tinder.”

The tale emerging in the hills outside of Los Angeles is also being told over the greater West, a land of extremes that’s grappling with even greater extremes. Nearby, the expansive Colorado River Basin — upon which 40 million depend for water — is drying up as temperatures soar(opens in a new tab), sometimes even grounding airplanes(opens in a new tab). Though some life will inevitably perish under geologically unprecedented levels of change(opens in a new tab), the greater earth will move on and in many places renew or evolve, largely indifferent to the changing climes. It’s our human experience that will feel the heat(opens in a new tab), and watch fire lap at the hills above town(opens in a new tab). Sometimes, it will burn right through town(opens in a new tab).

It’s an environmental regime that favors fire, not humans. After all, as ecologist John Bailey stoically reminded me, “every year is a good fire season.”