CA, Aug. 11 (U.S.): The flames are fading. Firefighters extinguish the last embers. One last curl of smoke rolling in the wind.
A wildfire has ended in the California wilderness, and what remains is a blackened landscape of skeletal pines, leafless oaks, scorched lawns, and logs where seedlings once stood.
Then life slowly returns.
One year after a windswept wildfire swept across a rocky mountainside above Lone Pine, California, flashes of new growth appear in this still charred corner of the Inyo National Forest, a hiking, camping, and fishing playground about 350 miles (563 km) away. ) The Associated Press reported) southeast of San Francisco.
Small clusters of white and purple wildflowers stand out against bare pine trees, many of them stripped of bark in the fire. Green horsetail shoots as thin as strands of yarn separate from the ground beneath the barren tree branches. A handful of new leaves emerge like a fresh bouquet from inside a burnt stem.
It’s the start of a long recovery, and a cycle that repeats often across the West as climate change leads to drier, hotter seasons and more wildfires.
As it roars across the landscape, flames blaze with varying intensity. Some of the tall trees on the hillside died, others only sang and could recover. The first plants that reappear after burning are usually more resistant to fire over time.
“Some shrubs and other types of grass are more fire-adapted, and they can come back faster,” said Todd Ellsworth, director of the US Forest Service’s Post-Fire Recovery Program.
But it may be five years before the ground cover returns to what it was before the fire. One stand of the pine trees was badly damaged – the needles burned from the branches, the trunks burned black – and they will not return.
“Coniferous trees don’t come back very quickly,” Ellsworth said, referring to some pines and other trees that bear cones. Sometimes, it’s up to the forests to get in and replant them.
Fragile little flowers and patches of fresh growth against a stark mountainside and slabs of gray rock were a reminder that wildfires are part of California’s ecosystem, including the eastern Sierra Nevada where the fire broke out.
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