More wildfires sure, but never like this.

Summer had not yet arrived, but already the hillside on the edge of Los Padres National Forest was the color of toast.

Even a brilliantly sunny day couldn’t dress up the dull palette of invasive grasses that had transformed the slope into a dried-up weed patch.

Only a sprinkling of young shrubs provided a hint of what the spot looked like before it had burned — again and again and again.

In the last 22 years, three wildfires have swept across the area, all but erasing the cover of gray-green sage scrub documented in 1930s aerial photographs.

Southern California’s native shrublands are famously tough. Conservationist John Muir celebrated them as Mother Nature at her “most ruggedly, thornily savage.”

They evolved along with long, hot summers, at least six rainless months a year and intense wildfires.

But not this much fire, this often.

The combination of too-frequent wildfires and drought amplified by climate change poses a growing threat to wildlands that deliver drinking water to millions, provide refuge from Southland sprawl and — 142 years after Muir penned his mash note — are still home to mountain lions, bears and big-eared woodrats.

Burn maps show the astonishing extent of the wildfires that have seared the southern portion of the Los Padres forest and adjacent lands.

The border of the 2007 Zaca fire bleeds into the even bigger 2017 Thomas fire, which in turn runs into the footprint of the 2006 Day fire. Together they incinerated an area roughly twice the combined size of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Dozens of other wildfires have raced across the forest’s crumpled terrain in recent decades, including the 1997 Hopper, 2003 Piru and 2007 Ranch fires that blackened the grassy hill near Lake Piru.

“There are not that many places where there’s really old habitat left, that hasn’t seen a fire in the 30 years I’ve been here,” said Los Padres forest biologist Kevin Cooper, who retired last month.

Wipe the steep mountainsides clean with flames and there is nothing to hold on to rainfall and let it seep into the ground, recharging aquifers.

There is nothing to prevent soil from washing away and silting up reservoirs and fish streams.

There is nothing to stop rivers of mud and rocks from crashing into foothill communities.

The Thomas fire was barely contained when monster debris flows roared down denuded slopes last January, killing at least 21 people and destroying more than 100 homes in the Montecito area.

Across Southern California, oft-scorched shrublands have given way to monotonous expanses of quick-to-dry invasive grasses that are of little ecological value, don’t anchor the soil as well as deep-rooted chaparral plants and ignite easily, fueling more and more fires.

Frequent fire is driving chaparral loss in the Santa Monica Mountains, which burned yet again in November. Roughly a quarter of the 97,000-acre Woolsey fire was a reburn of land charred in wildland blazes over the last two decades.

Once gone, the chaparral and sage scrub that drape the wildest parts of Southern California are proving ominously difficult to restore.

Frequent fire is driving chaparral loss in the Santa Monica Mountains, which burned yet again in November. Roughly a quarter of the 97,000-acre Woolsey fire was a reburn of land charred in wildland blazes over the last two decades.

Once gone, the chaparral and sage scrub that drape the wildest parts of Southern California are proving ominously difficult to restore.

“For so long, people thought of chaparral landscapes as being so resilient that papers came out in the ’70s on ‘How do you get rid of this stuff — it keeps growing back,’” said Nicole Molinari, the U.S. Forest Service ecologist for Southern California.

“And here we are finding ourselves at a time when we’re actually concerned about its ability to persist and trying to restore it and having challenges in doing so. That to me is a little frightening.”

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