Fire Stupidity

      These early autumn days have been lovely in the Applegate – little or no smoke, Delft-blue skies, gentle breezes that carry a hint of autumn. One Sunday, Mike and I set off for a hike to Azalea Lake, in the Red Buttes Wilderness Area. The Fir Glade trailhead is only about thirty minutes from my house and the lake about five and a half miles from the trailhead.

      The trail begins in a deep evergreen forest, dark and cool, then rises to a ridge, overlooking several Siskiyou peaks in the near distance and Phantom Meadow far below, before it tips over the ridge-top and down the other side. That whole side of the mountain had burned in last year's Miller Complex Fire. The trees, which grew sparsely anyway, were now but blackened poles. 

Underneath burned snags, the shrubs and bushes were already greening the ground, but all the way into the valley, down to the lake itself, we could see burned forest, near and far. The lake was rimmed with burned trees except for a small finger of forest the fire had neglected. That, of course, was where we headed.

      Even as we were descending the hill, we heard voices at the lake. As we got closer we could see four men, in camouflage outfits, just packing up to leave.

      Ah, right. I had forgotten that part of the Red Buttes is in California and that California's hunting season starts before Oregon's. These men had shot two bucks the day before and had packed out half the meat. Now they were leaving with the rest of the meat and their camping gear, all packed in what looked like very heavy packs. The men were staggering with the weight. Two of them had tied the heads of the deer, with the antlers, onto the backs of their packs so that to walk behind them would have been to stare into the eyes of the dead deer. To approach them from the front, as Mike and I did, was to fleetingly mistake the man's head, with the antlers sticking up over it, for a deer's head. I thought it was a pretty dangerous way to walk.

      But these men seemed carelessly oblivious of danger. They had built a fire and left it burning. "Oh," they said casually when we pointed it out to them, "we thought it would be all right." 

      I was incensed. How could they leave a fire burning when they had camped among fire-dead trees and hiked for two miles in view of hundreds of acres of the same? How could they walk away from a burning fire when they had been living with smoke in the Rogue Valley for two months? Hadn't they seen the billboards with the picture of a campfire and the words, "Wanted: Dead out"? Didn't they know that the fire in Crater Lake National Park a few years ago, for instance, was started by a campfire? Hadn't they noticed that there was a wind even now? Hadn't they thought about what happens when a wind sneaks into hot ashes and live embers in a fire pit? With only a handful of trees still green at Azalea Lake, how could they not care about the chance they were taking of destroying even those? How could they be so ignorant and so careless and so stupid?
        And illegal. I looked up fire restriction rules when I got hone, and, as I had suspected, campfires are not allowed in Northern California at this time.

      Mike and I had lunch; then I took a swim while Mike made numerous trips filling his water bottle in the lake and pouring the water over the fire until he had put it out. He stacked rocks in the fire pit so no embers that might have escaped the drowning would be whisked out by the wind. We could be sure that this fire was going to do no damage. The hunters who left it burning could have had no such assurance.