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A walk in the fire zone
This was actually around a week and a half ago - a week ago last Tuesday, Sept. 16 or so - but I've been deep in the word mines and I'm just now writing it up. (Click to embiggen photos.)
We enjoy doing walks in the fall when the weather is nice, and we decided to walk out and explore something interesting. I don't remember if I wrote about it at the time, but we had a little wildfire scare at the end of June, when a lightning-sparked wildfire started a few miles from our house. It got an all-hands-on-deck suppression approach (because it's so close to town and adjacent to several subdivisions), and was extinguished after burning about 15 acres or so. We watched the water tankers dropping loads on the blaze from our house.
This fall, we decided to try to walk out and find the location and have a look at it. We tried it once and failed, but after looking at satellite maps we decided that we were headed in the right direction, just turned back too soon. It involves walking down an old road cut - utility access road? who knows - that mostly looked like this:
But occasionally more like this.
And we found the fire zone! Once we were there, it was unmistakable. The rest of these pictures are under a cut because some might find them distressing, although I mostly found it eerie and fascinating; it was nothing like any place I've ever been before. (All burned trees, no vehicles or structures.)
The pictures don't really capture what an eerie, empty landscape it was. I could still smell a scent of char, like an extinguished campfire smell, not strongly but as a background ambiance.
One of the things I found really interesting was that the trees, while most of them still stood, were perfectly smooth, with all the roughness of the bark burned off.
Another thing that was really interesting was how you could see the underlying shapes of the trees with all the branches burned away, including a lot of burls (a kind of naturally occurring lump on spruce trunks that is coveted for making custom furniture).
Or this one on the center left of the below image with a weird bend in the trunk that I guess was the result of growing around another tree.
A lot of clearing had been done, with deadwood carefully cut and stacked. I assume this was done by the firefighters as a standard cleanup technique, to help mitigate the possibility of another wildfire burning through leftover deadwood.
Another interesting thing was that many of the trees had unburned blobs of branches and cones at the top.
We guessed this was by design - the spruces burn incompletely, the cones are left intact, drop their seeds, and a new generation of trees starts all over again.
This next part is just total guesswork on our part, but it might be partly symbiosis. The red squirrels that depend on these forests for their survival (and cut and cache massive numbers of cones in the fall) often leave trees with these Dr. Seussian blobs of cones at the top of a couple of feet of otherwise bare trunk, due to the squirrels having cut and stored all the more accessible cones underneath them - we have many examples of this in the forest behind our house - and these stretches of bare, squirrel-cleared trunk may be what enabled the remaining tip-top spruce cones to survive and seed the next generation of trees.
Okay, technically this is a willow, but life finds a way, doesn't it?
One thing I didn't (apparently) take a picture of was a lot of areas along the edge of the fire zone where the peat moss had been cut and torn back, to check for fire burning in the peat under the ground. (Which is one of the common ways these fires can smolder and spread.) The fire zone itself is also a peat forest, but you can't actually tell that you're walking on peat at all, because it's been charred into a solid surface underfoot.
That surface is mostly charred moss, believe it or not. Normally it covers the tree roots, which are now exposed.
Destructive but necessary: the bulldozed fireline along the edge of the fire zone. You could clearly see how they had used the road as a firebreak and extended the clear area to stop the fire. It, too, will grow back.
We were treated to some gorgeous evening views of the distant Alaska Range as we drove home.
We enjoy doing walks in the fall when the weather is nice, and we decided to walk out and explore something interesting. I don't remember if I wrote about it at the time, but we had a little wildfire scare at the end of June, when a lightning-sparked wildfire started a few miles from our house. It got an all-hands-on-deck suppression approach (because it's so close to town and adjacent to several subdivisions), and was extinguished after burning about 15 acres or so. We watched the water tankers dropping loads on the blaze from our house.
This fall, we decided to try to walk out and find the location and have a look at it. We tried it once and failed, but after looking at satellite maps we decided that we were headed in the right direction, just turned back too soon. It involves walking down an old road cut - utility access road? who knows - that mostly looked like this:
But occasionally more like this.
And we found the fire zone! Once we were there, it was unmistakable. The rest of these pictures are under a cut because some might find them distressing, although I mostly found it eerie and fascinating; it was nothing like any place I've ever been before. (All burned trees, no vehicles or structures.)
The pictures don't really capture what an eerie, empty landscape it was. I could still smell a scent of char, like an extinguished campfire smell, not strongly but as a background ambiance.
One of the things I found really interesting was that the trees, while most of them still stood, were perfectly smooth, with all the roughness of the bark burned off.
Another thing that was really interesting was how you could see the underlying shapes of the trees with all the branches burned away, including a lot of burls (a kind of naturally occurring lump on spruce trunks that is coveted for making custom furniture).
Or this one on the center left of the below image with a weird bend in the trunk that I guess was the result of growing around another tree.
A lot of clearing had been done, with deadwood carefully cut and stacked. I assume this was done by the firefighters as a standard cleanup technique, to help mitigate the possibility of another wildfire burning through leftover deadwood.
Another interesting thing was that many of the trees had unburned blobs of branches and cones at the top.
We guessed this was by design - the spruces burn incompletely, the cones are left intact, drop their seeds, and a new generation of trees starts all over again.
This next part is just total guesswork on our part, but it might be partly symbiosis. The red squirrels that depend on these forests for their survival (and cut and cache massive numbers of cones in the fall) often leave trees with these Dr. Seussian blobs of cones at the top of a couple of feet of otherwise bare trunk, due to the squirrels having cut and stored all the more accessible cones underneath them - we have many examples of this in the forest behind our house - and these stretches of bare, squirrel-cleared trunk may be what enabled the remaining tip-top spruce cones to survive and seed the next generation of trees.
Okay, technically this is a willow, but life finds a way, doesn't it?
One thing I didn't (apparently) take a picture of was a lot of areas along the edge of the fire zone where the peat moss had been cut and torn back, to check for fire burning in the peat under the ground. (Which is one of the common ways these fires can smolder and spread.) The fire zone itself is also a peat forest, but you can't actually tell that you're walking on peat at all, because it's been charred into a solid surface underfoot.
That surface is mostly charred moss, believe it or not. Normally it covers the tree roots, which are now exposed.
Destructive but necessary: the bulldozed fireline along the edge of the fire zone. You could clearly see how they had used the road as a firebreak and extended the clear area to stop the fire. It, too, will grow back.
We were treated to some gorgeous evening views of the distant Alaska Range as we drove home.
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Wow, that's so much green growing back on the forest floor in just a few months! And those spruces are very lumpy. (Some places in the East Troublesome burn scar look similar, though a lot of that was aspen forest, so you also get the differently-weird phenomenon of trees that go from pitch black to white, or pines where the trunk is black but the branches are stark white...) I'm surprised those barkless trees aren't black, actually, all the burned forest I've hiked through has always been totally charred—I guess probably just from having burned longer/hotter?
Thank you for the cool photos!!
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We also have old aspen burn scars, but what they typically look like is ghostly white branchless trunks along the road in an otherwise dead area; eerie in their own way, but not quite like this. I've mostly just seen burned areas from the road, or seen them up close now and then when things are growing back, but I've never walked around in such a fresh burn zone, and it was quite an experience! I also like reading about your experiences, and obviously no obligation or anything, but I'd certainly be interested in photos if you have any.
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I think you’ve seen my photos of the burn scar, actually—there’s a few of a pine forest segment here and lots of both pine and aspen burn scar here! Definitely nowhere near as soon after the fire (4 years after the fact) but you can see from the second one why I was surprised by the amount of ground cover that’s already there in your photos, that Willow Creek area is still so bare.
I also have a handful of photos from a different section in 2023 at the bottom of this post, but ironically there’s way more growth/ground cover in those earlier photographs because they’re from a section that was aggressively reseeded by the forest service (which is amazing, honestly, I’m super impressed by the extent of the recovery efforts).
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When I was in college, a tornado passed through my hometown. For several years afterwards, even after everything in the path had been rebuilt, you could see the path by the broken trees on the hill.
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Also thanks for posting the photos, they're interesting.
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Wonderful photos!
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A+ reflections.
One thing I didn't (apparently) take a picture of was a lot of areas along the edge of the fire zone where the peat moss had been cut and torn back, to check for fire burning in the peat under the ground. (Which is one of the common ways these fires can smolder and spread.) The fire zone itself is also a peat forest, but you can't actually tell that you're walking on peat at all, because it's been charred into a solid surface underfoot.
The Great Meadows near my parents' house are peatlands and some acres notably burned in 2009. I didn't know at the time: I have a note in then-LJ about the peat-blue smoke, which just turned out to be the fact of what I was seeing. I don't think it had ever occurred to me that they could produce the same danger as a coal-seam fire, but fuel-wise, it makes perfect sense.
These pictures are fantastic.
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