A story of fire.
After igniting by lightning strike on July twenty-seven 2006, the Tripod Fire Complex finally burnt itself out with a muffled sigh sometime that October, when snowfall at last ended the wildfire season for the year. The complex, as fire agencies refer to multiple conflagrations that combine into a single, monstrous entity, had burned a total of one hundred and seventy-five thousand acres of the exquisite Pasayten wilderness. About the size of New York City. It was the largest wildfire in Washington state history. We’d walk right through the heart of where it burned, almost twenty years later.
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Backing up a bit, my friends Matt and Ben and I have done some incredible trips. The Southern Sierra High Route that took us a hundred and fifty-some miles through the range, from fifty miles south of Cottonwood Meadows to Baxter Pass. Another high route through the Wind River range, a hundred and twenty miles that crossed the Winds from southeast to northwest. We’ve missed a year in the last five due to wildfire, and last year Ben couldn’t join Matt and I as the two of us checked off a high route through the Sawtooth range in Idaho. This year, Matt couldn’t join because he and his wife are biking on gravel from Canada to the Mexico border. It’ll take them five or six weeks and he couldn’t swing the additional time. A couple thousand miles.
That left Ben and I.
Keeping it simple and without Matt’s luxurious travel option by way of his Cessna or Glasair, we opted for the mountains due north of both of us. The Pasayten. Ben sketched a route for us that would take us nearly sixty miles on a loop-plus-lollipop around the Monument and Lease Creek basins. We’d climb mountains and run ridges, almost entirely where fire has ravaged.
As a sign of what’s now normal, during our trip smoke drifted in and out from the Pioneer fire burning on the north side of Lake Chelan, due south of the Pasayten. We’d actually witness the beginning of the Calcite Creek Fire just across the border in British Columbia following low rumbles heard from a ridge we were climbing. But it wasn’t until the second day that the immensity of the Tripod fire, and of other fires that have scorched most of the Pasayten in the last twenty years, left me with one undeniable observation: the Pasayten is a story wrought of fire.
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For four days, Ben and I didn’t see a single person. An elk, some bear scat, a few squirrels. Not until our fifth and final day, on the hike out, did we run into the first people on the trail hugging the Middle Fork of the Pasayten. A wonderful couple, Bill and Susan. Instantly warm and welcoming, we quickly fell into conversation. Turned out, Bill ran the Methow Valley Forest Service office for three decades before recently retiring. Also, both Ben and I had mutual friends with them, he in Mazama and I in Leavenworth. The two were out to climb Mount Carru, the neighboring peak of Lago which Ben and I had slogged up and down two days prior. From his thirty years with the Forest Service, Bill knew about fire.
As chance would have it, I ran into the two of them again, Bill and Susan, a couple weeks later at a pub in Cashmere following an afternoon spent with our friends and kiddos at the city pool. With dinner winding down and us adults waiting for our checks, I was chasing H and S inside when I ran into them. They were having dinner with some scientists from the University of Washington, U-Dub for short, who had spent decades researching wildfires for the Forest Service. Those scientists knew about fire. Bill offered to send me some of their materials the following week.
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From the information Bill shared and in my own research of the Tripod Complex fire, along with the other fires that have burned throughout the Pasayten in the last twenty years, I came across this observation posted in 2012:
“Something that struck me about the burned forest in the Middle Fork area and up Tatoosh Buttes is that at that time, about 6 years or so after the (Tripod) fire, no new trees were growing up anywhere in the burned areas.”
As Bill had put it, the Tripod had burned hot and hard. The good news is when Ben and I hiked through, there were small spruce sprouting up amongst the figurative ashes, fireweed and lupine. Going back again to 2006, very hot days in May rapidly melted a big snowpack from the previous winter, and persistent high summer temperatures pulled moisture from beetle-diseased and already-dying wood. The Pasayten’s forests were primed for the lightning strike that followed six miles north of the town of Winthrop that July. Smoke jumpers were on it within minutes, but it didn’t matter. The explosive fire swelled from an acre to twenty, then hundreds to hundreds of thousands.
By the first week of September, the fire fighting team peaked at over two thousand, including crews from New Zealand and Mexico. They ultimately won the battle protecting the towns of Winthrop, Twisp and Conconully, but the quintessential Pasayten wilderness had been ravaged, likely lost for centuries, if not forever.
It’s true, and important, that fire is a natural occurrence across the landscape. The catch, as Bill put it to me, lies in the intensity of fires like the Tripod. For centuries, heck millennia as far as we now know, fires burned slow, thinning the forests and leaving in their wake natural fire lines subsequent fires would hold against with strict diligence. Looking at photos throughout the twentieth century, it’s uncanny to see the overlays of previous fires and the burn scars of recent ones, holding the line. The Tripod fire did no such thing. It was a monumental beast, angry and determined. How could it hold a fire break with dead and dry branches exploding, shooting sparks a mile into the air? For the Tripod, there were no lines. There was no defense other than nature itself. That heavy, muffled sigh of winter.
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The Tripod fires, as big as they were, are still only a slice of the story of fire throughout the Pasayten. On our trip we hiked three different ridgelines and climbed multiple peaks, all with views in every direction into many of the valleys. Some valleys were spared. The West and Middle Forks of the Pasayten, dense as they are with forest, and Eureka Creek. Others had burned. Lease Creek and Monument Creek, seemingly in their entirety.
In the wake of those fires was literal ash, vanished trails, and deadfall as far as we could see. Haunting. It was up on Tatoosh Buttes I felt a sadness that only grew as we hiked up into a landscape I could tell through momentary glimpses had been an incredibly special place before the Tripod roared through. If there was beauty it seemed like much of it was lost. I didn’t feel any respect for that fire. It had decimated the forest, wholly. Yes, it had burned hot and furious. The wildflowers I sensed doing their best to come back didn’t offer much consolation. The trees were gone. With them, the forest. The soul.
At one point up on Tatoosh Buttes, we crossed a line. High enough, or far enough in some direction, the Tripod had let go of its grasp. In one direction, green and good. In the other, black and gone. For a mile or two, we saw what the buttes had looked like, what I always envisioned the Pasayten to have looked like. Sweeping green hills dotted with spruce and larch and wildflowers, set amongst a backdrop of thorny North Cascades peaks. A landscape like no other. The current views of endless fallen matchstick trees and patchwork greenery as far as we could see though made for a somber experience.
Fire is loss.
True, in the long game it can and should be seen as both, a loss and a gain. Necessary. It was just really hard for me to envision the gain from that fire as we climbed Ptarmigan Peak, where spread out before us in all directions was evidence of essentially a mass destruction. There was beauty, for sure. From up high, across grand vistas, a sweeping sea of peaks. Of bright heather, purple and pink, tucked amongst the blackened destruction of fire. Of light and shadows cast across a landscape full of stories, if only it could speak.
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References:
National Forest Foundation: Holding the Line
