Almost 2 years after the High Park Fire

The 2012 High Park Fire, and the 2013 flood (it doesn't get a fancy name, it's just The Flood), underlie every thing that happens here in Rist Canyon. Neighbors who decided to rebuild post-fire are slowly returning, families are still fighting with insurance companies, and parts of Buckhorn Canyon are still impassable after the roads washed away. A plague of locusts is wryly predicted this year. We and many others have received dire-sounding letters from our insurance companies about fire mitigation steps that must be taken OR ELSE.

Even though our house survived both fire and flood, the wet ground saturated the bases of our many dead, burned trees and weakened them into mush. Ever since last September, we've been hearing the crash of falling trees in the woods, sometimes really close by and sometimes resulting in inconveniently blocked trails. The trees would have fallen eventually, but the flood has hastened it.

Today I took a walk with Foley into the lower part of the woods, by the mill site where the logs for the house were milled back in the late 1970s. The site was still intact when we visited in April 2012. Now it's an array of charred things - axles, cinder blocks, fencing, mysterious hunks of iron. The fire burned hotly there. There were so many trees down that the usual walking path was impassable.

Oil drums, cinder blocks, an old solar water heater panel, and a lot of trees that fell since last fall


Even trees that survived the fire often became bent from the heat


Dead, burned, flood-weakened trees break off at their bases


Blackened circles of ground, usually where a treeful of needles burned hotly, are starting to be filled in with moss, an early successional plant that will help to reestablish organic matter in the soil


I saw lots of baby Douglas-firs. Doug-firs are not shade-tolerant, but the fire opened up areas of the Ponderosa-pine-dominated canopy and has provided opportunity for the Doug-firs to spring up. These seedlings are a reminder that the fire is part of the normal ecology here, and someday the forest will return.

Cleaning up the aspen grove

Our aspen grove lies between the meadow and the ravine south of the house. The larger trees are about 30 feet tall, and there are dozens of saplings. The High Park Fire burned through much of the grove in June, killing smaller trees and damaging or killing many of the large ones. Since the grove is so visible from the house, and it is our preferred source of firewood (aspen is less resinous than pine), we're diligently trying to clear out the dead trees this fall. For a small grove, it is turning out to be a daunting task, and it sets an ominous tone for the acres of burned pines awaiting our attention.

This was the aspen grove just after the fire, on June 29.

It was easy to see at that time what burned and what did not.

On September 11, we started clearing dead trees. This was taken from the deck just before we started.

Yesterday, this was the grove:
It's impossible to see a difference but trust me, there are far fewer trees now! Even with dozens of dead trees cleared out, there are a LOT of saplings and many larger trees still alive. Once we're done for the season, I will take a picture from the deck for a better comparison.

Some larger trees lost their lower limbs while the tops remain intact.

As I lopped off small dead trees (1 to 1 1/2 inches) in order to increase sunlight to the forest floor, I observed new growth at the base of nearly every tree. Aspens have thin bark, useless against fire, but their underground stems survive and even seem to be stimulated by the heat.

Here is a section that we haven't cleared yet; most or all of these trees are dead:

while this adjacent section didn't burn at all.

There are two piles of logs waiting to be bucked (=sectioned into fireplace-sized pieces).

TMCH built this nifty foldable bucking stand and is sectioning logs as fast as he can. I then put them in the trailer and drive them up to the woodpile. Like all of our neighbors, we are going to have more wood than we will ever be able to use!

High Park Fire symposium

On Monday at CSU I attended an all-day symposium about the High Park Fire and its aftermath. I was hoping for two outcomes: learn something useful about our burned land, and get a lead on a job. Partial success on one front, and I did at least find someone to send a CV to "just in case something opens up." Baby steps!

Overall I thought it was an excellent program. The Warner College received an NSF RAPID grant to do some post-fire study and work is already well underway. (Hindered, unfortunately, by the lack of pre-fire data points.) I was as always greatly amused by the scientists' reluctance to commit to a definite answer on anything. I know that science deals in confidence intervals and nothing can ever really be proven to be right, but at a conference like this where homeowners want to know, "What is the best thing to plant for erosion control?", "it depends" or "we're still looking into that" is unsatisfying.

I learned a great deal about hydrology and sedimentation in steep forested areas, a topic I know little about. Evidence from the Hayman fire of ten years ago, and from other fire studies, suggests that most ground cover rebounds within two years except in the most severely burned areas. Seeding may or may not be helpful and is greatly at the mercy of the precipitation that follows seeding. (And today after nearly 24 hours of drizzle, I wish I could go back in time and plant some seed!) Native plants with fibrous root systems are preferable for erosion control, and shrubs are the best. Be cautious of planting for the short-term; perennial grasses may establish so well that they outcompete the shrubs and trees that are supposed to succeed them. Contour log erosion barriers were actually frowned upon by the hydrology guy, who said unless they are perfectly positioned, they can cause even worse eroding rills than the sheeting water they were meant to interrupt.

Only about 47% of the total burn area was moderately to severely burned (per the BAER report). Restoration and erosion control should be concentrated on the most severe areas; the rest will largely rebound on its own. (I believe we have bits of all four severity categories on our land.) A researcher from the Rocky Mountain Research Station mentioned that it is not known how patch size affects regeneration. What an interesting topic that would be to investigate!

Ground cover regeneration seems like it is not something to fret about. Trees, however, are a different story. Aspens regenerate from below-ground stems and in fact are fire-stimulated, so they'll take care of themselves (our own aspen grove is filled with tiny trees). The conifers however tend to produce huge seed crops (mast) only every 4-6 years, and those result in large numbers of seedlings only if they coincide with a good precipitation season. This alignment is infrequent. The Hayman study showed abundant Ponderosa pine regeneration and poor Douglas-fir regeneration after ten years in less-severe burn areas. In the severely burned areas, tree regeneration was poor all around. This is a discouraging result, although the Hayman was just one site and other burns have shown better regeneration. A later speaker mentioned that places where natural reseeding is unlikely are good candidates for tree planting.

Next step for me: investigate our land and see how the rains are affecting those "severely burned" areas, and let that guide our restoration actions. Also, send a couple of "I enjoyed your talk" emails and meet people in my field! I signed up to volunteer with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program as well. As the Alma College career center loved to tell us, It's all about networking. Ugh.

Fire aftermath

The High Park Fire is done but its aftereffects will linger for years. We were fortunate; we lost a large number of trees on our property but the structures were not damaged. Sadly, 259 homes were lost, mostly in Rist Canyon and in Glacier View to the north. The people we've met who lost their homes, including the woman who was the selling realtor on this house, have amazing, positive attitudes towards the destruction, treating it as an opportunity to rebuild even better homes. Of course, we're seeing a biased sample. The people who lost so much that they never want to see this place again--well, they've already left and we'll never meet them. My heart goes out to them.

This week has been filled with aerial reseeding and mulching of slopes in the canyon. With the vegetation gone in so many places, erosion and flash flooding are a huge problem. Access to steep, densely forested areas is difficult so the work is done by helicopter. The same was true for the firefighting effort itself, only now they're spreading seed and straw rather than water. The helicopter landing zone (the "LZ," as my volunteer firefighter-in-training husband tells me it's called) is right across the road from us so we're getting a lot of chopper noise. They leave with a full bag of materials, fly west, and return with the bag dangling empty.

One particular bit of damage I was sad about was the huge mountain mahogany shrub (Cercocarpus montanus) next to the propane tank. The fire reached the tank and scorched it (eek!!) and destroyed the shrub. I saw this morning, however, that it is still alive. Mountain mahogany seems to have an amazing ability to regenerate from its roots; what a good little fire-adapted shrub!