Three of us were hiking in the Warner Mountains, up in the northeast corner of California, far away from civilization and all its problems. We camped one night high up on a slope in a grove of trees. The campsite was good enough, but we felt kind of uneasy. Something wasn’t right. Clouds came up; the temperature dropped just after sunset. It felt like snow even though we were on the edge of summer.

We stood around the campfire. We were apprehensive. A snowstorm would change everything.

“I don’t like this place,” I said.

“That’s not it,” one of my companions said. “This place doesn’t like us.”

It seemed true. There was something in the air in that range of mountains. They were not welcoming, like the Sierra Nevada, which John Muir called “The range of light.” We felt like intruders here. It didn’t snow that gloomy night, but we never went back. We had gotten the message.

I remembered that night last week, when fire rode the north wind in our part of the world. In Southern California, the Santa Ana winds kicked up and bore down on the Simi Valley. Perhaps nature is trying to tell us something.

California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, the home of innovation and invention that has changed everyone’s lives. And here we were, sitting in the dark because the power went out. From the East Bay hills to the famous Wine Country, to little towns on the Mendocino coast, millions of people couldn’t cook dinner on electric stoves, couldn’t watch television or access the internet, couldn’t even open the garage door with a click as usual. It was like living in the 19th century for a couple of days.

Gloom and doom was in the air. It’s climate change, we are told. It’s the new normal. It will happen again. Autumn, which used to be the loveliest time of the year, is turning hellish.

The fires and the state’s housing shortage, wrote Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic magazine, are “raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest, most optimistic state is fast becoming unlivable.”

She may well be right. California has celebrated its growth, bragged about it. We now have more people than any other state in the union. Nearly 40 million Californians! Imagine that. The Bay Area alone has 7 million people. When my parents were young, only 1.7 million people lived in the Bay Area.

In Sonoma County, the population grew 46% between 1970 and 1980. Just under half a million people live in Sonoma County now, and a lot of them were ordered to evacuate their homes last week.

Population exploded even in the farther reaches, where crime was low, and living was easy. One such place in Butte County got its name when a lumberman called William Leonard rested under a cool tree on a warm day years ago. “Boys, this is paradise,” he said.

Paradise grew from 5,000 inhabitants to 15,000 in just 15 years. Just over 26,217 people lived in Paradise last year, when the town burned to the ground.

Perhaps our otherwise benign climate has fooled us all. I remember covering a flood in the Sacramento Valley not too many years ago, and going to houses that had been ruined by stinking floodwaters. It was February, and when the rain stopped, the fruit trees put out flowers right next to wrecked homes. It was surreal.

I remember two 100-year floods on the Russian River in a single year. And what a beautiful October afternoon it was in 1989, when an earthquake struck without warning.

We forget all that. The Bay Area hasn’t had a big quake in 30 years; people who were little kids then are now middle-aged. We think fires are new, but we forget the East Bay hills fire that killed 25 people. It was a firestorm that could not be stopped until the wind changed. But that was 28 years ago.

Fires are nothing new in California. Go to Muir Woods and look at the redwood trees, some of them hundreds of years old and some so scarred by fire you can stand inside the tree trunk.

The first Europeans to the Bay Area 250 years ago this week experienced an earthquake and noticed evidence of fires.

But they didn’t read the signs. The Spanish came back and set in motion California’s original sin: They shoved aside the native people and took the beautiful land for themselves. People kept coming, from the East Coast, from Latin America, from Asia, from everywhere.

Maybe we have too many people, too many houses in the woods, too much of everything. Perhaps nature is sending us a message, this time written in fire: It is time for California to stop growing.

Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf