After the Fire, New Life

Hiking the Fern Lake trail, it’s still a shock to see the burned tree limbs, the empty spaces where trees went up in smoke, and the charred black ground a year and a half after the East Troublesome wildfire roared through this area of Rocky Mountain National Park. Whole groves of aspen are completely gone and the blackened skeletons of ponderosa lay on the ground. You can tell that the junipers burned the hottest, because the black circles surrounding them are lifeless.

Yet, as spring comes to the mountains, there is also new growth. The yellow grape holly spreads across the barren hillsides, and a few barrel cactus are flowering, either having survived the fire or regrowing from deep roots.  New grasses are pushing up among last year’s dead ones, and in the puddles from the melting snow I find moss growing on rocks.

On the steep slope where the 2013 flood cleared out trees and bushes, and then the fire cleaned out anything left, I saw small ponderosa pines growing, maybe four feet high. From what I can find, ponderosas grow at a rate of  12-18 inches a year. Is it possible these pines started growing after the fire?

Most of the willow bushes in this open valley were destroyed, but I see new shoots coming up, adding some color—yellow and red—to this dark landscape, which is almost unrecognizable in places. With so many trees gone, it’s more open, so from the trail I can see the river across a now open field. And without the trees and bushes, the boulders are no longer obscured but are revealed in all their grandeur—the myriad different shapes, textures and colors. I can see how the orange and green lichen blend with the blue and gray tints of these angular rocks.  

After the wildfire burned the outer bark of the aspen trees, what’s left is the yellow outlines of these elegant trees, a bright light in the darkness (below). Similarly, with their needles burnt, the architecture of the junipers is exposed: the intertwined golden and brown limbs and branches (above).  

I read that ponderosa pines’ thick bark protects them from fire. So even if the tree looks dead—the blackened trunk and the orange needles— underneath the outer bark, nutrients and water can still be transported from the ground to the branches. These ponderosas might yet survive to see another year.

Hiking in another part of the park this week, Wild Basin, I noticed that, without fires to clean out the underlying dead brush and downed trees, the forest looks messy and is prone to more severe wildfires. In contrast, on the Fern Lake trail, the fire has opened up the landscape, so sunlight is better able to penetrate and activate new growth—of grasses, flowers, aspens and  pines.  

Although the fire itself was unnatural—leaping over the treeless tundra—I have to appreciate that I’m watching a natural cycle, even a destructive one: the death of one ecosystem, a rearranging of the natural landscape, and then new growth. It's not just an ending but a new beginning.

Comments

[Sally Hanson]

It is wonderful that a lot of trees 🌲 do survive these events! And many things will rejuvenate! I have seen this over and over. The year after Mt St Helen’s bleak I drove there and many flowers were coming up and I imagine it didn’t kill the roots so then it can rejuvenate. But I see people all over just rush in and start logging and maybe too soon🤔 Good experience to see this happen.

[shoney]

Your photos are so beautiful, along with your writing, you tell an amazing the amazing story of rejuvenation.

[Kathy Kaiser]

Thanks, Shoney. I'm hoping for more rejuvenation. Only time will tell.

[Kathy Kaiser]

Sally, I'm glad to hear that life is returning to Mt. St. Helen's. But it's disturbing to hear that more logging is being done.