Wildfire and Other Things

What a month. Through August and the first two weeks in September it's been busy. I must have made two dozen trips evacuating other people's animals from the mountains. Wildfire. Every time there is a wildfire in California my mother phones me and asks "is everything OK?" Usually the fire is nowhere near us, well except this time, and she didn't call. Needless to say I get quite a few calls from my mother during wildfire season. The last drought caused a lot of tree kills due to the bark beetles, as I mentioned in a previous post, and often leads to an intense fire season.

It was quite the season this year and it was a near run thing at my place in the mountains. After the break is a photograph from the road up at about the 5000' elevation. The red dot is the approximate location of my place up there. The fire also threatened a small community at the base of the mountains.

This fire burned through about 50 square miles and fortunately it was an understory fire not a crown fire. The next photo shows what that means. You can see the trunks of the trees are scorched to about 10-15 feet high leaving the rest of the tree relatively unscathed. This sort of fire can actually promote a more healthy forest as it clears out the lower growth and allows for the trees to re-seed. The cones of most pines require a fire to open and drop their seeds. If the fire was too intense it sterilizes the forest floor and nothing grows for years. A crown fire destroys the whole forest and many of the past fires in the Sierras have been of this type.

It was all hands on deck for the firecrews who battled the blaze. I got lucky, the crews were able to keep the fire away from all but one of the structures in the vicinity. A few miles north of me is the southernmost groves of Giant Sequoias and I have heard it was bad. I'll wait until the snowmelt next year to get up there and get an eye on it. As for my place in the mountains here's a picture.

It was hard to believe when I finally got a look at the place last week. You would never know there was a fire there unless you went a quarter mile away and saw the wasteland much of the forest has become. The credit goes all to the firefighters, and I can't quite imagine how they managed to do that.