NORTH COUNTY -- Fire is as much a part of nature as the trees and shrubs it consumes -- and crucial for maintaining a healthy environment.

But officials and scientists say the October firestorm burned so hot and wide all over Southern California that it threatens to block the return of forest, wipe out islands of habitat essential for rare animals' survival and trigger the flow of mountains of toxic-metal-laced mud into rivers, reservoirs and the Pacific Ocean.

In San Diego County, state officials are especially anxious because the Cedar fire torched what is believed to be the world's only grove of Cuyamaca cypress trees.

"We always feared that a fire would get in there," said Jim Dice, senior ecologist for California state parks. "It's possible that some of the trees may have escaped, but I'm pretty doubtful."

The ring of fire that engulfed California from Ventura to the Mexican border cut a meandering swath of destruction the size of Rhode Island, killing 20 people and burning 3,500 homes. Gov. Gray Davis expects the property toll to top $2 billion, making it the most expensive fire disaster in state history.

San Diego County was hardest hit of all the fire-ravaged counties. And it has more plants and animals threatened with extinction than any other county in the nation.

In the region, four major fires destroyed more than 2,400 homes and charred 400,000 acres -- an area nearly as big as Orange County.

The most menacing of the four regional wildfires, the 280,000-acre Cedar is the largest on record in California. It killed 14 people, including a firefighter.

The toll of the nearby Paradise fire was 57,000 acres and two deaths. And the Roblar fire scorched 9,000 acres on Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

In Riverside County, the Mountain fire east of Temecula wiped out 23 homes and torched 10,000 acres.

Rare cypress threatened

The rare cypress trees, some 25 to 30 feet tall, were growing near King Creek at the 5,000-foot level on the southwest slope of one of San Diego County's tallest mountains, 6,512-foot Cuyamaca Peak. The stand of full, rounded, juniper-like evergreens covers less than one square mile. Part of it is in sprawling Cleveland National Forest, and part is in 25,000-acre Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, which burned from one end to the other.

The Cuyamaca cypress is cousin to the Arizona cypress.

"The cypress grows among the chaparral. It's not in the pine forest," Dice said. "It is specifically adapted to fire. The cones stay closed until they are heated, then they release their seeds."

Because of that, Dice is confident a fresh crop of seedlings will spring up.

But he's worried that, because there may be no mature trees left, the cypresses could be without seed-bearing cones for years and another fire could wipe them out permanently.

Dice said the Cedar was the third fire to hit the stand in a half century.

The Conejos fire reduced it to 12 trees in 1950, said Jeff Bisbee of Reno, Nev., who has extensively photographed the grove. Then a 1970 fire cut short the lives of many new cypresses that had sprung up.

"Before this last fire, there was only a few mature-sized trees left on Cuyamaca Peak," Bisbee said.

A partial comeback

Much of the forest that went up in smoke all around Southern California is expected to come back -- but not all of it.

In some places, wildfires burned so hot they destroyed not only the pines, cypresses, cedars and firs, but the seeds scattered along the ground as well, said Joan Wynn, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman in Rancho Bernardo. In those areas, she said, trees that once provided a crucial canopy for an enormous variety of wildlife may never grow again.

"In the long run, the fire will be beneficial," said Jim Bauer, a UC Davis wildlife biologist studying the habits of mountain lions and deer around Cuyamaca. "But it burned hotter than a normal forest fire. And if fire gets too hot it can kill microorganisms and seed in the soil."

In other areas, the forest will come back -- but not right away.

California state parks spokesman Brian Cahill said grasses, wildflowers and shrubs will spring up quickly, but it will take decades to regrow the giant ponderosa, Coulter, Jeffrey and sugar pines that towered over the back country.

"The botanists are excited because they are expecting to see some wildflowers up there that they haven't seen in a long time," Cahill said. "But for the immediate future -- in yours and my lifetime -- it is going to be a very different forest."

Animal habitat shrinks dramatically

While the black scars across the land could drive away tourists, it will drive animals far and wide in search of food and force them to compete for what's left in the surviving islands of green, biologists say.

"We could have a situation where we exceed our carrying capacity," Bauer said. "They are eventually going to eat up all the forage."

And that's not counting the animals who died in the fire itself. All across the blackened moonscape of San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, dead carcasses of deer, rabbits, birds, frogs and kangaroo rats litter highways and country roads.

The encouraging thing for Bauer, though, is that in the days since he has picked up radio signals of nine of 11 collared deer and all five collared mountain lions a team of UC Davis scientists are tracking. Cahill said biologists also spotted 13 species of birds, among them red-tailed hawks, meadowlarks, woodpeckers and bluebirds.

Even more endangered

Less optimistic are keepers of the region's endangered species.

Jane Hendron, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Carlsbad, said California coastal gnatcatcher birds lost large chunks of coastal sage scrub in San Diego and Ventura counties; the Quino checkerspot butterfly lost most of its Otay Mountain habitat; arroyo toads lost habitat all over Southern California; and the San Diego fairy shrimp and Riverside fairy shrimp lost vernal pool habitat on Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.

Over at Camp Pendleton, fire was kept from spreading into critical habitat.

Some species' habitat is so fragmented that a firestorm like this is devastating, Hendron said. The Quino butterfly, for example, lives only in southwestern Riverside County near Murrieta and in the Otay Mountain area of southern San Diego County.

All over the county, habitat preserves for endangered species were affected.

In Escondido, a quarter of the 3,000-acre Daley Ranch preserve burned, said Barbara Redlitz, coordinator of that city's endangered species program. Elsewhere, 9,000 acres were blackened from Ramona to the Mexican border across the county's 172,000-acre system of preserves, said county spokesman Mike Workman.

In Ventura County, fire roared through mountain homes of the California condor, the largest bird in North America. But just one of 29 birds is unaccounted for, said Marc Weitzel, project leader for the wildlife service's Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Complex.

Wild condors survive

"The condors seem to have weathered the firestorm and are back to business as usual," Weitzel said.

There are 220 condors left in the world, most of them in zoos such as the San Diego Wild Animal Park in Escondido.

Experts say chaparral will come back strong just about everywhere -- and quickly.

But the hardy shrubs that grow several feet tall and carpet slopes all over Southern California are not expected to come back quickly enough to halt the inevitable mud slides.

Bill Schultz, deputy chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said erosion occurs naturally whenever heavy rains fall, but 10 times the normal amount of mud and debris washes downstream after fires.

That mud is laced with high concentrations of hydrocarbons and toxic metals such as copper, lead and cadmium that kill fish in rivers and lakes, said Keith Stolzenbach, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who is studying run-off for the UCLA Institute of the Environment. Those materials also reach the ocean, he said, although the much larger body of water is better equipped to handle the contamination because of greater ability to dilute toxic chemicals.

The metal is mostly from trees and soil, Stolzenbach said, but some of it is from man-made items.

With the fires now out, Schultz said state, federal and local officials are turning their attention to bracing burn areas against potentially massive erosion in heavy winter rains. Officials are developing a plan to protect vulnerable watersheds such as North County's San Luis Rey and San Dieguito rivers.

He said protection strategies could include planting rye grass on some slopes, mulching others, removing debris from streams, and constructing catch basins and dikes around homes.

Homeowners also can help themselves.

The San Diego County Department of Public Works is making sand and sandbags available to the public at its stations in Valley Center, Ramona, Julian, Alpine and Lakeside.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-3529 or ddowney@nctimes.com.