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
No comments:
Post a Comment