Hiking the Burn on the Pacific Crest Trail

             The Applegate fires of last summer burned on some of my favorite trails. Remembering a hike through a burn in southern Oregon's Illinois Valley many years ago, I cringed at what I might find here. That hike had offered no solace for the soul, nor had the long hike through a scorching burn in Lassen Volcanic National Park a few years ago. But I also remembered the abundance of wildflowers on burned-over land in the Marbles and the rejuvenation of greenery on the Cook and Green Trail after a fire in the Applegate several years ago. I had learned, since that first hike in the Illinois Valley, that fire leaves a variously painted canvas. So, instead of shunning the trails that burned last August, I took an opportunity presented by this dreadfully warm and unsnowed winter to drive even as high as Cook and Green Pass, at the entrance to the Red Buttes Wilderness, to hike the Pacific Crest Trail where the fires had struck. Mike went with me.

            The first steps took us up a hill formerly covered with manzanita shrubs, now fire-scrubbed to bare ground, through which poked hundreds of manzanita antlers, ghostly white, like bones on a desert. The devegetated hillside exposed expansive views, onto the Red Buttes and Kangaroo Mountain to the west, out to the Marble Mountains, and down into the Klamath basin, where we could see the path of the fire as it leapt uphill. 

Whereas logging leaves checkerboard patterns – sharp delineations between patches of stumps and patches of live trees – fire burns in swirls: swaths of green, where the fire left trees untouched, reaching far into swirls of brown, where the fire had eaten voraciously

            From the manzanita-antlered hill we entered areas on the PCT where the fire had fed in that way, licking its way up sturdy trunks and snatching mouthfuls of the tree's life-giving greenery. Snags were bare-bone stark, but on some of the charred trunks, the bark had been torn off (I thought at first by bears, but more probably by gravity and the lack of tensile strength in the tree), exposing bright slashes of orange and red, like the imprint of flames on the trees. As though lit by shafts of light, these parts of the trees brought improbable color to the chiaroscuro landscape of blacks and browns. Rembrandt would have grabbed his paints.

            Elsewhere I could sense Picasso in his brown period (were he to have had a brown, in addition to a blue, period) – an abstraction of trees in skeletal form, arms hugging close to trunks, needles on the ground, everything in subtle variations of browns and blacks. As in a good painting, the color of the tree limbs echoed the color of the ground. The burned forest here was vertical-dominant and soft with subtle variations of color – the rich butterscotch of the ground textured with the rust-red of more recently fallen twigs, the ash grey of the trunks, and, overall, the burnt sienna color that occurred to me because fire was the painter – or sepia, maybe, like in old photographs. My bright clothes were like the color my mother painted into some black-and-white photographs I took many years ago, before color film was widely available.

            The needles on the ground were as thick as water,. Rocks and sticks among them interruptied the flow like islands in a stream. Altogether, the colors, the stillness, and the strangeness of the landscape had an eerily soothing effect.

            Reading the black scars on the trunks, we could see that in some places the fire was burning downhill. In other places we could see where firefighters had cut a fire break and how the fire had jumped it and slipped over the ridge. From time to time we stepped into and then shortly out of a green forest, intact, unchanged, as though the fire had been many miles away instead of just next door. I could see no reason for the fire not to have devoured these trees as well as the others, but there must have been reasons. If I were a pyrologist, I would spend hours on the PCT with my notebook.

            Mike and I hiked all day through land affected by fire. When we finally walked out of the burn, we had walked five and a quarter miles and it was time to return to the car. I didn't mind having spent the entire hike walking through the burn, though. It had been a day of color subtleties, fire education, and surprising solace for the soul.