November 5, 2021

Posted on by mr_rambler

You can see where the Caldor fire crested on Echo Summit and leapt clear over the valley, to catch on the other side, where it burned extensively around the corner out of sight above the city of South Lake. From afar, the fire just left a brown smudge on the landscape where it charred the foliage and left the trees standing, but it girdled the trunks and incinerated the soil and killed most all of them.

This was the first time in history a wildfire was able to burn clear up and over the craggy granitic crest of the Sierra (the Dixie fire crossed the hydrologic crest 130 miles north of here, in much less mountainous terrain a few weeks prior). Such a thing was considered impossible in the old firefighting paradigm of just a couple decades ago. Times have changed, some call it the Pyrocene. 

 

 

This lower bit of forest has been thinned, probably a few times, to more closely resemble the sort of open, low fuel load forest that existed here before commercial timber interests decided to try to eliminate fire entirely from this subtly balanced forest ecosystem here which relies upon it. What could go wrong?

The removal of excess saplings and smaller weakened trees while preserving the big old fire hardened ones is the necessary work the regular natural and native set fires did for the forests of old (not to be confused with commercial logging which basically does the opposite). Such prescribed thinning treatments around the South Lake neighborhoods, are what made it possible for the firefighters to save the town from destruction. That, and dumb luck (or divine providence if you will)

But unlike those forests adjoining the neighborhoods, this is far from developement, so it’s maybe more of an attempt at stewarding forest health. I would think you’d see a better mix of saplings in a healthy forest, but it is a mosaic out here. The surrounding forest here is overly thick with trees and dead and down. Plus, the Agency wants to do as much as it can while its here because it may not be back for a while.  We’ll see. It’s all a landscape scale experiment, with no real control.  But whatever the future here holds, it is assured that fire will play an increasingly decisive role. 

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