A month before, lightning strikes had sparked one of the worst fires in the East Mojave’s history. 71,000 acres burned in the course of a couple days.
My friend Matthew and I headed for the burn area to see it for ourselves.
The temperature was well into the triple digits, and we didn’t do much hiking. We looked around, explored about a quarter-square-mile of catastrophic burn. Incinerated Joshua trees still stood, black and tan spike mops.
One dead Joshua tree had bark peeling away in sheets. I pulled at a piece of bark and pink spores exploded out into the air from underneath.
The burn destroyed irreplaceable desert wilderness. I have been back a few times now, and while the land is still beautiful it is truncated. In one spot, what was once a sweet defile shaded by ancient junipers is now a sun-blasted bowl of standing charcoal and geology. On that day any return visits were well into the unforeseeable future, and we drove downslope a ways. I turned my back on the burn, not a little heartbroken, and regarded the broad sweep of Cima Dome to the north. Nothing had lain between the burned area and the world’s largest forest of Joshua trees but a two-lane road.
We would make camp that night atop the dome, watching electrical storms trail to the south and north. We would watch plumes of smoke from distant lightning fires. It was a milestone in my life, that afternoon, with the slow-dawning realization that my favorite place on earth would almost certainly burn some day. It has not yet done so, but it will. Invasive plants add unnatural fuel loads to once-barren desert, winter storms of increasing violence water the native desert vegetation and boost its growth, and the temperature each summer ratchets upward, drying plants out and boiling monsoon storms out of the ocean to spark their tinder.
This is the photo I took as the realization took root. We stood at the very fringes of the burn, a sharp line between intact and ruined vegetation right behind me, and looked up toward Teutonia Peak near the summit of the Dome. Lightning was flashing there, to what end we could not see.
Where exactly is the photo taken? Joshua Tree? Beautiful!
That would be approximately here, in the Mojave National Preserve.
I experience something similar every time I visit Cuyamaca State Park, which was hit hard by the Cedar Fire in 2003. I was pretty sanguine about its prospects for recovery at the time of the fire, but less so now, six years later, with little of the pine and fir forest regenerating on its own. Lots of fast-burning non-native grasses and chaparral coming back in its place. Any fire coming through in the next twenty years could wipe out what’s left of that montane forest habitat. Working on an essay on that for The Clade.
Boy that sure looked familiar. You can get the same effect along the Preserve’s Black Canyon Road, which I visited for the first time a few months ago. A picture of the two sides of the road is at
Hard to see a place you love change so drastically.