Letter from the desert: Good news about the devastating Hackberry Fire
Posted by Chris Clarke on October 8, 2008
I took it upon myself to answer the implied question I posed here, about the existence — or lack thereof — of surviving piñon pines in the Mid-Hills.
I drove up into the burn zone Tuesday for my first thorough look at the place. I’d been up there before but my shock at the dramatic changes overwhelmed me; this time I was ready for the scope of the destruction — old news by now to the folks who live up there — and deliberately looking for evidence of Life Going On.
I have good news.
Life is Going On.
Oh, it’s bad up there. Burned, charred, devastated. Everything I’ve written these last three years about the damage is true. In places. It’s the nature of change in the natural world: change is rarely uniform.
It still looks bleak up there, with sagebrush gone and replaced by charred mineral soil. But the blue yucca is thriving. The shrubs are coming back, at least some of them. There are pockets of surviving conifers including, yes, a pleasing number of piñon pines. One of the surviving piñon pines is a mature one in the middle of my favorite site in the Mid-Hills campground, which campground was utterly deserted when I arrived.
Sort of.
There were deer. Three of the biggest muledeer I’ve seen in my life trotted past the Zheep in mid-campground, with utterly glossy coats and neither visible ribs nor wear, tear, parasites nor bald spots.
There is still charcoal soot on the rocks up there where trees burned down. I found crumbling, irregular charcoal stumps a foot across still firmly rooted in the ground. In the campground, only a few sites, maybe a third of them, still have shade. It used to be an oasis in the desert up there, 5,600’ and wooded. Now it looks more like what people think of as desert, except with charcoal.
But there are bands of living conifers making drifts across the landscape where the fire did not reach.
There’s food for pinyon jays up there.
I came back with a final version of the Joshua tree book’s fire chapter pretty much built in my head, and I’ve banged out a few thousand words of it already. That feels good too.
I’m sure there’s plenty of bad news up there I still haven’t seen. In particular, the trail from Mid-Hills to Hole In The Wall seems to have been at the heart of the blaze, and I need — now that I’ve taken that deep metaphorical breath — to check it out. Next week.
But still. There are still piñons up there.
This is good news.
