This is a picture I took from the parking lot of the local grocery store in January 2021.
These are pictures from that same parking lot after the fire.
Fortunately the town was almost completely not burned. But the view will take a lifetime or more to recover.
That "after" view is stunning. Yet in terms of the mountains 80 years is nothing.
ReplyDeleteIt is not, Nylon12. But for the people that live there and the industry that was dependent on this, it will be a very long time indeed.
DeleteThe road down into the canyon is still blocked. At some point I will try to make my way down there.
Praise God.
ReplyDeleteYou all be safe and God bless.
Linda, this was literally on the edge of town. A lot of people did a lot of very hard and dangerous work to keep it from going farther.
DeleteLife always leaves a mark on the living. i'm glad your place was passed by.
ReplyDeleteNo truer words were spoken STxAR - it is just not so often in graphic form.
DeleteThe mountains will recover, and quicker than you think, TB. In a year or two, from a distance, it'll look as if nothing happened!
ReplyDeleteFrom a distance, maybe Pete? There is was a fire farther down the road and it has still not recovered 4-5 years later. Dryness is not helping the issue at all.
DeleteSave those pictures to compare with next year and the years after. You will be amazed at the differences.
ReplyDeleteWe took a drive yesterday through a couple of last years burn areas since the roads are now reopened to traffic. As with your views, much of it was quite ugly, with blackened matchstick trunks left standing dead. But the understory was a different matter. The grasses had completely re-seeded the hillsides, and while dried and brown at this time of year, it portrays natures' erosion control firmly in place. Seedling shrubbery is also evident throughout. There are scorched hillsides that are completely burned, but nearby, there are streaks of forest still green in the upper canopy, even with blackened trunks.
Yes, it will take decades for the viable trees to reseed their neighboring areas, but it just tells me that nature's timetable is much different than ours.
I grew up in the Douglas Fir rainforests of Western Oregon, and it took me many years to learn to see and appreciate the much different aesthetic of the arid high desert country of Eastern Oregon. But it is there, and there is a certain aesthetic to burn recovery too if we tune our minds to see it.
I do hope that you and your caretakers at The Ranch will be able to continue the practice of "defensible space" and forest management, even if you cannot on your own do controlled burning. Just keeping the understory from being a tinderbox of disaster is the key.
Greg - As I mentioned to Pete, we are already having some issues farther down the hill with an earlier burn that really not recovered much as all - largely due, I suspect, to a significant lack of rain. If we have a good long rain this Winter, we may be in fine shape. If it it another dry year, it will become much more dicey.
DeleteThe Ranch will probably get a second going over after this round of burns - after the first set of rains, of course.
Some years ago I read of a wildflower declared extinct. After a fire in the mountain area of the country (memory says not a forest fire) when they arrived in a meadow to camp it was awash in the extinct wildflower. They finally solved the mystery of where it went. It would become dormant until a fire allowed it to flower in the aftermath. Nature is a wondrous thing we don't appreciate enough in our lifetime.
ReplyDeleteGL, Once upon a time forest fires were a regular occurrence - not the raging out of control fires we see now, but lesser burns which kept things in balance and made sure that the flowers you mention were a regular occurrence. Nature is wonderful, until humans generally muck it up either by treating it poorly or by controlling it with care to the point it cannot function.
DeleteHad dinner with a woman who oversaw controlled burns in our surrounding areas. Had a long talk about why and how and it boils down to States, especial Ca., who only does a fraction of the controlled burns each year that needs to be done. If they spent the $ up front they could save the cost of the result.
DeleteGL - How interesting and thanks for sharing. I wonder if the reluctance is due to residual thinking that says "all burns bad", or perceived cost? Surely the cost of one forest fire is more than most controlled burns.
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