what’s burning

Everywhere I go these days I try to see things as I would for the last time.

One year and four days ago we drove to the southern Gravellies for the day. We canoed across Cliff Lake, walked a few miles to Hidden Lake, had a picnic.

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This year we made plans to go back. We’d bring camping stuff this time, had a spot picked out. Camp in the shade of those nice big trees, jump in the water to escape the heat.

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I love taking pictures of mature forests. It has always been ironic to me that you can catch foresters referring to them as “decadent.” As though they should be stopped before reaching this point.

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Amazingly, there are only two wildfires listed in the Greater Yellowstone right now. All that means is that I write from a vanishing point in time and can’t say what will hit us next. Pretty much the entire ecosystem is in severe or extreme drought right now, some of it historic– like flows on the upper Snake River, some 22% lower than 1988, when a million acres of Yellowstone National Park burned.

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One of the two current fires is called the Goose Fire. 2,475 acres. It just jumped the southwest arm of Cliff Lake, pictured below. So much for fire lines.

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Last week Jen and I were walking two hours to the east, in the Absarokas, on a trail through steep, mature forest. I thought: I can’t believe we spent so much time bushwhacking through this range back in the day. It looks impossible. Noting then that nearly every spruce tree was dead, I remembered how, when we worked in the area, flurries of bark beetles could be seen in the air, catching the sun like snow crystals. The beetles girdled the bark on nearly all of those trees and the next year they turned red.

Ten years have passed and now the spruce forests are falling down. The forest a jackstraw mess. I find myself marveling and taking pictures of it: “forest primeval” stuff, puts an awe of nature in me. Then I try to understand what I’m really seeing. The way things look now, they may have never looked before, and they may never look again. Fires were suppressed, fuels accumulated, and far more importantly, the climate changed. It’s entirely possible that what’s growing (or dying) there now isn’t what will grow back. Either it simply won’t get a long enough chance, with a high-frequency burn cycle in place, and/or that floral regime won’t even be able to get started in the new climate, hot and dry.

How do I look at this world? I’m seeing it for the first time no less than I’m seeing it for the last time.

Everything above, pictured on July 8, 2020, is in flames. We ate dinner outside this evening as ashen fir needles from the Goose Fire dusted our table, and the sunlight poured in fluorescent orange bars across the ground.