A Lesson in Learning to Live With Fire, and Each Other
In California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, former timber war foes teamed up to show how environmental and industry interests could work together to ward off wildfire disasters.
Burned trees in Berry Creek, California, in September. While the wildfires in the West have burned a record number of acres this year, pockets of well-managed forest have managed to survive.
Photographer: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Within days of sparking on Sept. 4, California’s Creek Fire was powerful enough to produce its own pyrocumulonimbus — a thunderhead of wind, rain, smoke and fire. The mushroom-cloud-like plume was the largest ever seen in the U.S., a monumental illustration of a catastrophic fire season and of the scale of loss below: tens of thousands of acres burning in the Sierra National Forest, at the southern end of the mountains John Muir called the Range of Light.
Now the largest single-ignition fire in state history, the Creek Fire is still burning, consuming huge swaths of that mixed-conifer landscape every day, at one point traveling an unprecedented 15 miles in one day. But a few rare spots have been spared. One is a cut of land just east and south of Shaver Lake, a popular recreation spot: There, flames dropped from the canopy and moved along the surface, charring the bases of trees but leaving most intact and alive. It is a stark contrast with the nearly 400,000 acres of forest to the north and west that have burned so severely that much of the landscape, said Kent Duysen, the owner of a nearby sawmill, looks like a “nuclear site.”