Steve Liebenberg, 58, stands among the Redwoods in the Cathedral Grove part of Bear Mountain in Felton, Calif.
KAREN T. BORCHERS: SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
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June 21, 2008, 11:51PM
Old forest's last line of defense
Lumberjack fights fire, fear of heights at 200 feet


By BRUCE NEWMAN
San Jose Mercury News


SAN JOSE, CALIF. — For days, fire had scorched the giant redwood tree, so that its blackened bark looked like a charcoal candle. But it wasn't the flames or the falling embers that worried Steve Liebenberg as he dug into the flesh of the 240-foot tree and hurtled up its side.

Liebenberg was dragging a fire hose and a chain saw up toward a knothole that probably first blinked open before Columbus sailed to America.

Still rugged at 58, Liebenberg is the most veteran woodsman working in California's most venerable forest during an already devastating fire season, and his privately owned tree service is the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's last line of defense.

"When there's something nobody else can do, a tree on fire that nobody else can put out," says Liebenberg, "they call me."

Billowing black smoke from deep within the tree's spidery network of rot revealed that the tallest redwood in the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz was being consumed from the inside out.


High-flying acrobat
As he pumped 500 gallons of water into the knothole, he could hear the tree's innards heave a hissing, reptilian sigh as water met the rising fire.

"If you have a lot of water and a lot of heat in a confined area, it will blow the tree to pieces," he says. "Steam is incredibly powerful. And I'm on the tree. So if it blows, I'm gone."

On the ground, where fire crews gathered to watch Liebenberg work, water poured from the tree's base — blood red from tannic acid, and heated to more than 100 degrees. As Liebenberg held the tree in a wary embrace, what worried him was the possibility that at any moment during the delicate operation, his world could blow up in his face.

For 41 years, this third-generation lumberjack has survived while servicing precious, old-growth forests. Liebenberg is revered within Cal Fire for his ability to extinguish trees that often can burn for weeks.

But equally important is his ability to spot, and safely bring down, dangerous limbs that might fall out of another millennium and land on your head in this one.

"He's like an acrobat," says Ron Prince, former chief of the Santa Cruz city fire department. "I've seen him jump from tree to tree hundreds of feet in the air, clearing out all the dead and dry material. He's not only an incredible technician, but fearless, obviously."

Obviously. But not exactly.


'Ultimate tree-hugger'
Before he ever climbed his first tree, Liebenberg discovered something that would prove to be important: He is terrified of heights.

"When I was a kid, I went with my dad to some building in San Francisco where we were way up high," he recalls, paling slightly. "And when I went near the window and I almost had a heart attack."

That fear is always there, he says, but at times it overtakes him. In 1996, while working high on a 202-foot fir tree in Bonny Doon, Liebenberg began to feel clammy and lightheaded when he suddenly realized exactly where he was. "It's fine when you're working," he says, "but as soon as you stop, you become mortal. I sat there for about two minutes and began to freeze up. It's a horrible feeling."

So he hangs on for dear life. "I am the ultimate tree-hugger," Liebenberg says. "I do it to save my life, and to save theirs."

He learned his specialized skills from his father, Les Liebenberg, who was still climbing and cutting big trees until he was 81, a year before he died.

"My dad taught me the way to get past fear is to accept death," Steve says. "You make a commitment, and you live in this little world that's right in front of you, like a bubble, because one mistake and you're dead. There's no falling a hundred feet and recovering.


A long climb out
There was a time when he lingered in the treetops. It was five years ago when his daughter, Veronica, was seriously ill. Liebenberg's fourth wife, Joanne, had just died of brain cancer, slipping away while he was out on a job.

"She was a magical thing in my life," he says. Almost immediately after her death, his daughter was diagnosed with lymphoma.

"This was before picture phones," he says. "So I used to call my daughter in the hospital and tell her I was in a tree, then I'd carve her initials and take a picture of the view."

On weekends, he would take the pictures to her in the hospital, so she could see the mark she had made on the forest. Veronica died six months after his wife. "It was a long climb out from that," Liebenberg says slowly.

Liebenberg is training his 15-year-old son to follow in his footsteps, to walk among the crowned heads of the oldest living things on Earth.

The boy's name is Forrest, but sometimes you can't see him for the trees.




http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5849236.html