A Fire Upon the Mountain

Managed wildfire creeping along the forest floor, July 2011

I pull off the darkened forest road and stop my truck in frustration, dust drifting ghostlike in front of my headlights. The rough directions given to me by the Forest Service, hastily copied from an e-mail earlier that afternoon, are clear yet make no sense at all from my dimly lit cab now that I'm actually in the field. Seemingly random turns through blackout tunnels of trees and moonless meadows have left me hopelessly turned around. Were it not for the decade-old forest map on the seat beside me -- too high a scale to be of much use even in the light of day --- I probably wouldn't even be sure I was still in the Coconino national forest.

This can't be right, I think, wishing I'd brought my gps.

Then I look up the hillside through the open side window and I see it: a dim orange glow reflected from rising smoke. Behind the black silhouettes of trees I can see a long line of flames flickering against the invisible mountainside. The acrid smell of burning assaults my nose, tightening my sinuses, and I know I have arrived. I kill the engine and sit for a moment behind the wheel.

Ostensibly I am here to take photos on a sort of lark, but in reality I'm seeking an endangered species, one rumored to exist in the wild yet seen by very few: Restorative natural wildfire burning in its native ponderosa habitat. For most of a century these creatures were mercilessly extirpated from the public lands, confused with their more destructive early-season human-caused brethren. Only relatively recently with the rise of more enlightened management policies have they begun to make a comeback, and even then only under tightly controlled circumstances. If you read the dry, carefully worded press releases filled with codewords like "managed wildfire" and "lightning sparked" and "hazardous fuels reduction" you can sometimes learn of their presence.

 

Burning Log, July 2011

I shoulder my pack and camera gear and set off up the hillside toward the flickering glow, picking my way carefully through the pitch black forest. As I draw closer to my quarry I turn off my headlamp and the washed-out two-dimensional LED projection the lamp confers is replaced by a gloriously three-dimensional firescape. My eyes adjust to the dimness and it becomes apparent that the fire is huge, stretching for many acres across the side of the mountain and extending far up the slope. Presumably the original lightning strike is somewhere up there high above, the source of the ten day old blaze.

Forgetting my camera I simply stand there in the darkness taking it all in. The wildfire is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and I am enthralled by the calm, almost demure manner that it goes about its age-old work of clearing the forest floor. Like ice melting or water slowly seeping into cloth the fire is drawn into the fallen logs, to the dead trees, into the doghair thickets and the mats of pine needles. It is a fluid thing, practically a living, breathing animal, and it responds to the air currents and terrain in wondrous and fascinating ways.

For long minutes I stare spellbound, watching the flames creeping their way slowly down the slope, inches at a time, listening to the sound of crackling combustion and popping knots. Somewhere a large log catches fire, burns furiously, shoots sparks crazily into the air, then mellows and settles down into a bed of red coals. The nearby large ponderosa pines indifferently shrug off the tantrum, their bark hardly scorched at all.

 

Ponderosa Pines and Wildfire, July 2011

As I stand there sweating I realize that I am witnessing an unfolding drama as old as the ponderosa forest itself, one phase of a cycle that has been occurring since the very beginning. It is the delicate interplay between the slow buildup of fuels, winter snow and spring rains, summer lightning, the terrain, and the personalities of fire-adapted trees and vegetation. This fire is as much a natural part of the forest as the trees themselves, the rocks, the very mountain beneath my feet.

Hours later my camera's memory card is full and I have spent half the night wandering back and forth along the side of the mountain as if in a dream. Reluctantly I pack away the camera and tripod and head back down to my truck waiting far below. Ahead is a long drive through a maze of forest roads and then hopefully a few hours sleep before work. But I am too excited and know that sleep, if it comes at all, will be as elusive as these natural, restorative wildland fires have been for so long.

Comments

[Mike Dechter]

Great post. It's great to see someone who supports this type of restoration work instead of only hearing complaints about the smoke.

[del]

Hi, Mike. Thanks for the comment.

Yeah, complaining about smoke while living in the middle of a fire-adapted ecosystem that is built to burn periodically -- requires it to be healthy -- doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Restoring natural fire regimen back into these forests before Nature does it for us in the form of more Wallow/Rodeo-Chediski type mega-fires is of paramount importance. I would hope that most people, when given the stark choice between landscape-altering fires or a few months a year of smoke and stuffy noses would understand. But, alas, they probably don't...