Sunday, April 3, 2016

Twelve years later...

In the summer of 2003, my family traveled from the Willamette Valley to central Oregon and back for a family vacation. We took hwy 20 over the pass, which was lush with trees between Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Washington. It was a trip we had taken many times, and I remember staring out the car window as trees whizzed by at 55 mph. I wasn’t paying any particular attention to a landscape I’d seen many times before.

The day after we got home from this trip was when the B&B complex fire began to burn through the area, ultimately burning 90,769 acres. We tuned into the news for over a month as firefighters fought the fire, which was a confluence of two fires started by lightning strikes in mid-August. Hot, dry weather, low relative humidity (>20%), and 10 to 20 mph winds along with high fuels because of the history of fire suppression caused this fire to burn very intensely in some areas.
http://www.traditionalmountaineering.org/images/maps_BandB_closures.jpg


Over the years, I’ve visited the area a lot and noticed some of the effects of this fire. Morels had some very good years in this area, as they tend to thrive in fire-disturbed areas. Varying fire intensity has created a mosaic of different effects. For example, the areas around Jack Creek and Canyon Creek Meadows didn’t seem to have very intense burning, and the fire created snags and burned off ground cover. The Meadows in particular recovered quickly, and you can hardly tell the fire came through. Other areas were subject to very high intensity burning and are still covered by snags and downed wood. I hiked the area near Three-Fingered Jack last summer, and got some pictures of the area. 


Sources: 
http://www.orww.org/B&B_Complex/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26B_Complex_Fires
http://www.traditionalmountaineering.org/images/maps_BandB_closures.jpg

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