November 5, 2021

Posted on by mr_rambler

Walked in the first couple miles in sneakers with my ski gear on my back, past a trail crew headed up with mcleod rakes on theirs.  You think there’s snow up there? he said.  I know there’s snow up there, I told him. I could see it shining in the sun, just hoping its not all glare ice.  

When I finally got up there it didnt look so scary, the ice was barely visible up close, just a shiny thin glaze, kinda punchy, solid underneath but yielding, not intimidating till the very top, where it was windblasted, and I resorted to my harscheisen ski crampons.  Guess I won’t be coming down this way.   

 

A nascent glide crack forming behind the little cornice already, where it had been sagging in the sun. I could’ve used a bit more of that warming today. 

Cool little window at top of middle step of lahar crag. Watching a few little birds chasing off a hawk. 

Sharp pain in the bones above my right navicular make me stop and take my foot out of my boot and caress the surface.  It worked.

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

But only a change in the winds (of history) can really save these forests. I think, particularly those areas that burned in the more easterly, rain shadowed, extents of the Caldor fire, predominantly the Jeffery Pine/White and Red ‘Fir forests of the  Carson Range, may well not grow back, being replaced by a more arid, brushy, less forested, high desert ecosystem typical of other Great Basin Ranges further to the east. 

The large standing-dead salvage operations that are taking place there in the lower angle, lower elevation terrain that burned, are removing much of what meager organic material for soil production had accumulated since the last ice age (which indeed may prove to be the last ice age, for a long long time, till the climactic feedback loops we have set in motion run their geologic-scale course). 

Which may render our individual actions effectively moot, but it’s not just about that. It’s about the quality of the personal relationship we as individuals nurture with this place and the flow of occurrence in it. Our capacity to enjoy and engage with the Nature and our lives here, is commensurate with the respect we show, and the sacrifices we make, like with any relationship. 

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