Fire Season Arrives: Fire as Sculptor
One more look at the simultaneous beauty and destruction brought by fire, with some discussion of prescribed burning on public land
Hello folks! We’re back here at Unsettling with some new pieces after a bit of a break as I finished my hike along the Nüümü Poyo and transitioned into other travels. If I met you on trail: Hi! Thanks for following up and checking out the site. You can make sure to get future emails by signing up for the list.
As I mentioned to many of you, I’m working on a piece that gathers more info on the Indigenous origins of what many have come to call the John Muir Trail, and documents a bit of my experience in sharing and encouraging others to use what might be, for them, a less familiar name. So stay tuned for that!
In the meantime, here’s a post that should help segue us from the spring’s Prepping for Fire Season series into what appears to be a whole little run of pieces on the High Sierra in formation that I’ll be sharing in the coming weeks.
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“Look at all those trees!”
We had just crested Donahue Pass, marking our entrance into Yosemite National Park, and stood staring at the long valley beyond with its alpine meadow and serpentine river hugged by throngs of conifers stretching up to walls of jagged peaks. My hiking buddy for the day was an older Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker with whom I’d been leapfrogging the last day and a half; we’d finally decided to dive into conversation at the creek just where our real ascent began. He was the one exclaiming about the trees.
I was mostly still catching my breath from talking too much while climbing upwards, but found myself responding, in a much less delighted tone: “Yeah, look at them. There’s an area that needs to burn, and my guess is they’ll never let it.”
Well, there’s a way to kill a good mood. I didn’t bother to say more, though certainly such a remark might have been helped out by offering more context. But Donahue is one of the last big passes for those hiking north on that route through the High Sierra, and it’s a gorgeous one. The vibe was definitely one of enthusiastic looking, not of expounding on the benefits of prescribed burning.
Later that day, I wondered again: should I have said that? What did I really know about prescribed burns in Yosemite anyhow? I was making some assumptions, buoyed by the thick spread of trees before us, that prescribed burning was fairly limited in the park. It just seemed unlikely given the number of tourists on an average day, as well as its overall standing in the park system, and the sentimentality with which it tends to be regarded. People who dig Yosemite are often big on the whole “untouched nature” idea. Also, too, I knew that the head of the U.S. Forest Service had once again put a pause on prescribed burns this year, after one such burn led to the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, and most of Yosemite is obviously surrounded by national forest. We ourselves were standing on one such threshold between “park” and “forest.”
Well, I was wrong on a number of fronts. NPS, it turns out, has not followed the USFS in haulting prescribed burns this season.1 Which I later realized I already knew, as a backcountry ranger further south had previously told me that the smoke I smelled my first day while ascending the trail up Tumanguya was in fact a planned burn (run by Sequoia and Kings Canyon). Furthermore, it’s entirely possible to find footage of Yosemite park rangers gushing about the effectiveness of burning as a wildfire prevention. Just check out this video made after the 2013 Rim Fire:
But I would come to feel like I had put my foot in my mouth not just once but two more times before my long hike was over.
First, on my last full day of hiking, I found myself surprised to be in a long burned stretch which, admittedly, I should have known about in advance. It’s one of the few big burns directly on trail, and it’s right as you begin to hit some of the iconic hikes in the park, including Cloud’s Rest and Half Dome.
This is the 2014 Meadow Fire, which was not a prescribed burn, but a lightning fire that park staff let continue and which then expanded after some unexpected heavier wind rolled through. You can see some very intense shots of the fire as it was happening, as well as some thoughts on prescribed burning, on photographer Michael Frye’s website. There’s also this time lapse video from NPS:
This wasn’t the first burn I’d encountered on the Nüümü Poyo, but somehow it caught me off guard, and I felt the attitude of curiosity around fire and burns—precisely what I’ve been trying to cultivate in this year’s Prepping for Fire Season series—dissipate, replaced by a kind of weariness. This came, maybe, from how attentive I had been in the few days prior to the number of dead or dying trees along the trail (potentially more on that in another upcoming post, I think). But I’ll also admit: while I believe that we should allow fire to reclaim its place in our forests and mountains, I still go to these places, often, in search of rest and regeneration. Some days, you just want to hike through the trees, greeting them and thanking them for their shade, and not be forced to make your way in the baking heat around charred and leafless logs.
Intellectually, I could appreciate the Meadow Fire, but emotionally, I was having a tough time of it. Such internal conflict led to my feeling somewhat hypocritical—can I really espouse the importance of fire if I can’t handle the results?—which made me feel all the more down. At which point, of course, I recalled my words up on the pass and figured I was getting my required comeuppance in more way than one.
But also: I was sad, and sometimes you have to just sit with the sadness. Such emotion isn’t illegitimate—we have lost so many trees. Arguably, the forests should never have become as thick as they are; yet the fact of the matter is they did. Those trees came into being, and if one considers trees a kind of kin, to walk through a burn is to face the loss of many, many relatives.
At that moment, I opted to lean on two practices. The first was to acknowledge—out loud—the loss and destruction that the trees themselves experienced. This mirrors the practice I shared in March, of offering gratitude to the many beings that sustain one out in the world, especially in those situations where we modern humans tend to blindly describe ourselves as “alone.”
Such a practice looks like stopping, and acknowledging the different trees around oneself, and saying: “I mean no disrespect, in walking through this land where so many of you suffered.” Saying this, and truly meaning it, creates a major shift in focus. It’s no longer about my crabby self having a less than stellar hike on a hot afternoon, thinking about how hiking is more and more often less pleasant moments like this. It’s not even about my sadness at the loss of living beings I’ll never get to know. It becomes, instead, about their loss. At the burn site of the Meadow Fire, this shift gave me a different way to be. It opened up and prioritized the question of how to move respectfully through a traumatized land.
The second practice is to slow down and pay closer attention. As I wrote at the beginning of June:
“I’ve been opting to slow down in those areas touched by fire, to look more carefully, and to see if I can perceive not just what is absent, but what is present. …. To slow down and look are good first steps in staying in relationship to our world as it undergoes transformation.”
Slowing down is harder than it sounds, and one of the tricks I’ve learned is to use the taking of pictures to help me do that, which is how I’ve ended up with so many pictures of burns in my photo library. The act of photographing becomes an aid in attention, in careful looking. It’s a very different mode of taking photos from the touristy habit most of us hikers have adopted. The point is not to get the iconic social media shot or a record that I myself was present, but to find a different way of moving through a given place and of relating to what’s there.
In the heart of the Meadow Fire’s burn scar, while my sadness did not disappear as I sought out images, I felt it newly accompanied by a sense of esteem for the sculpting prowess of wildfire. “Fire is a sculptor” was the phrase that came to mind again and again as I poked in and about the burned or fallen trees. My grumpy mind retorted: “Well if that’s true, it keeps an awfully messy studio—” Fair enough, as burned lands can feel, to the human eye, a bit messy, everything tossed this way and that. Still, I couldn’t help thinking at the same time that there were some really beautiful works of art being made here, ones I would not want carted off and thrown out by any industrious humans.
Slowing down allowed space for me to see, at last, where the fire is helping take us, rather than only experiencing one part of its effect on me in the present. The Meadow Fire was a hot one; many of the rocks in the area are bleached white. Changes we might label ‘recovery’ will not be rapid. We’re less than a decade out from its occurrence, and plants are still deciding if they want to be residents in the area. But they’re moving in, and slowly knitting the soil and water back together in the space, and leaving hints of how past and future residents will co-exist:
Later that evening, I set up camp in the transition zone out of the burn. Below is a picture from a spot just adjacent to my campsite. If you look, you’ll see how all the rocks in the foreground were baked by the fire, but the trees just beyond them—while blackened at their base—pulled through. This seemed an appropriate place for me to rest that last evening: one foot still reminding me of fire’s power and the difficult change it had wrought, the other ready to step into the still lush world just beyond.
I finished my long hike on the Nüümü Poyo the morning after I passed through the Meadow Fire scar. I left Yosemite Valley mid-afternoon the same day, happily headed towards my first night of sleep on a real bed in several weeks. Unbeknownst to me, at approximately the same time, the first reports of the Washburn Fire were being made. I would learn about the fire when, on a shuttle up the 395 on July 8, the air darkening and smoke plumes drifting over a nearby ridge, I began searching online to find their source.
If you’ve been tracking that fire, you know it threatened the Mariposa Grove, a prominent stand of ancient giant sequoias, and that there was concern of how the fire might grow so hot that, even though sequoias are fire-hardy and in fact need fire to thrive, the grove would not survive.
My first emotion as I sat on the shuttle bus absorbing this news was some mixture of relief and elation at my good luck—bizarrely good timing, it seemed, to have finished and departed almost to the minute the fire first began. I did not finish my hike in dense smoke, and would be far away and breathing better air in the coming days.
My second emotion was more akin to mortification, an embodiment of the sentiment, “Good god, Meg, be careful what you wish for!”
But here’s where the flippant statement I made up on Donahue and its half-informed assumptions were really shaken down: as it turns out, they have been able to protect the Mariposa Grove, and in large part because of regularly conducted prescribed burns in the area. The fire, currently just over 50% contained, is in an area of the park where they’ve been conducting prescribed burns for nearly 50 years, as NPR reported this morning.
In fact, the area around Mariposa has been a site not just for prescribed burns, but for a more intentional practice of cultural burning. An article from last summer in American Indian documents how the Miwok, North Fork Mono and Chukchansi Tribes are engaging with multiple state and federal agencies to burn on their homelands, in a manner that connects to many of their cultural traditions (basket making, for instance, is often dependent on chute growth resulting from cultural burns).
It’s quite possible that the Washburn Fire, far from being a moment to scold the Park Service for their failure to conduct burns, will prove to be one of the better examples they can hold up to show how prescribed and cultural burning works.
If you’re reading this from a state like Oregon, where 78% of people support periodic prescribed burning, it all probably seems like less of a big deal: don’t we all know, at this point, that this is the solution? But accidents from intentional burns have created backlash in many locations, leading regularly to proposed legislation to undercut the ability of state agencies or residents to incorporate burning into their fire prevention practices.
Remember, also, that the Forest Service—which is responsible for twice as much land as the Park Service—is currently engaged in a 90-day pause on prescribed burning. What all the news stories on this for some reason fail to neglect is that USFS also initiated such a pause in the middle of 2021. Regularly instituting a moratorium on your prescribed burning program doesn’t sound much like dedication to the program, from my perspective.
It’s knowing all that, of course, that fueled my initial doubts up on the pass. We love our reactionary habits here in this country, and have routinely proven ourselves more committed to notions of protecting private property (including ill-advised developments in wildfire zones) than to participation in fuller ecologies that include fire. So I’m not yet taking for granted that the debate on prescribed burning has been settled.
I will take, however, a little more humility in how much I know about this topic just now, and in my own capacity for truly absorbing the difficult consequences of fire, no matter how well we carry out good burning or no. And I’ll try, as I can, to experience those transition zones that remind me both of fire’s destructive power and of the beauty and life it can create.
That seems a good place to leave this series and the theme of “prepping for fire season” just now. For the Washburn Fire also, in my mind, clearly marked the beginning of the summer’s big fires, and as I traveled back up to Oregon last week, the state’s Department of Forestry officially declared all its fire districts to be in wildfire season. We’re no longer preparing; we’re here.
Welcome to fire season. Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg
That the Forest Service maintains a different attitude toward fire is unfortunate, to say the least, as they tend to manage those lands closer to more dense populations of people. By failing to do prescribed burns in these areas, they are actually increasing the risk that some will lose their lives or homes, in a manner somewhat different from NPS, whose residents are often more temporary.