This weekend, I made my first foray into the El Dorado National Forest since last summer’s devastating 222,000-acre Caldor Fire.
I couldn’t reach the core mountain quail spots I wrote about last month, but I was able tour some lower elevations.
It was bad. Of course.
But oddly, it was not traumatic.
As I rounded the first bend where I could begin to see the devastation, my head went to that divinely calm place I found in my 40s, a place where something really bad has happened, but you know being a drama queen won’t make it any better.
This is what it is now. Deal with it.
I honed this skill as faculty adviser to The State Hornet, the student-run newspaper of Sacramento State. Periodically, bad things happened. Once, there was a traumatic and senseless murder in the dorms - a reality you can’t hide from if you have to cover it. Another time, some otherwise bright students printed something really awful, and had to grapple with fallout for weeks and months.
You can’t take back murder. You can’t un-print something bad. And you can’t unburn a forest. All you can do is deal with it.
I’d like to tell you what recovery will look like for this forest, but I need to do some research to get a solid understanding of that. So for now I’m just going to share a few photos and brief observations, as well as the little things that gave me hope.
OK, this one makes me gulp hard.
This photo was taken near where Hank and I recorded the following video in 2020. It was the Pandemic Spring, and mushroom hunting in this forest was the first thing that had felt normal since the Before Times. Skip to the 1:40 mark to see more background, less mushroom:
Here’s another spot that looks like it was taken over by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Orcs. It looks naked and wounded. Clearly, that facing hillside had been logged and/or burned in recent history, and its recovery was not yet far along when Caldor happened.
This photo would almost be beautiful if you could convince yourself it was a deciduous forest in autumn in the background - but hey, there’s some green in there!
Here’s a silver lining for ya:
At least these trees will be used, hopefully for housing. (I hate the fact that the human population is still growing so fast, but we have a severe housing shortage in this state, and not building houses won’t keep people from needing them.)
Granted, it’s like an organ donation. No one wants a friend to die, but if something good comes from that death, well, there’s that.
And here, dear readers, are the seeds of hope: Green things are growing:
The plant in the foreground is lupine, an iconic flower in California’s wild places.
There are 70 varieties, and I have no idea which one this is. But my mom always loved California wildflowers, and I have a thousand memories of her exclaiming, “Lupine!” when she’d spot their signature towers of purple petals. Mom has advanced dementia now and could scarcely categorize this as a plant, much less as lupine, so those memories - and this plant - mean a lot to me.
Also, like so many plants in the Sierra Nevada, lupine can survive and thrive in total crap soil like you see here. It is a symbol of hardiness, and in this case, of beauty amidst destruction.
I also saw birds on this trip - a crow swooping over a blackened forest, a pair of robins. I saw ants doing their thing in an area where dead trees had been cut.
If there are animals, there is food.
If there is food, this place is not 100% dead.
It’s just different.
And now its new chapter begins.
Just a note: Hank has been traveling, but he’ll be back on To The Bone next week!
Good stuff, Holly, again. I'm gonna need to find a new way to start my comments.
I did like the Tolkein reference... a well placed LoTR or Hobbit (or even Silmarillion) reference never fails to spark my interest.
Beyond that, yep... "you can't unburn a forest."
I've always known, intellectually, that forest fire can look bad, but is frequently a blessing to a woodland. Entire ecosystems are built on it. (And yes, I know that when that system is put out of balance, a fire can be devastating rather than beneficial.) But I don't think I really grokked that until I saw what happened in the little Northern California spot I called Kokopelli Valley. You hunted there with me several years after that fire, and I think you recognized how healthy the place was looking even then.
I was able to return to Kokopelli Valley while there were still hot spots down deep in the manzanita roots. I wanted to cry when I saw it. The quail were all gone. The jackrabbits had disappeared. The little spring-fed stream was barely a trickle, and the wide spots where the frogs used to live were barren and crusted over with soot. I didn't even see hawks or jays. Everything was exposed. Etc. It really did look like the blasted landscape of Mordor, complete with smoking holes and blackened spires.
I'll shorten this just to say, by the following August deer season, the successional growth was already well on the way to rebuilding the place. Life was returning. The place was different, but it was easy to see that it would be fine, in the long run... and over the consequent seasons that turned out to be the case.
"After the darkest night comes the brightest day." It would be much cooler if I could write it in Tolkein's elvish, but there ya go...
I'm from Scotland, an ecological disaster area whose longtime lack of trees has, over the centuries, become recognized as part of its beauty. Yeah, I know that's weird. Maybe more helpful just to hope with you that this precious bit of California will rapidly renew, and bring loads of lovely mushrooms with it.