Bear Gap Trail Junction (2329) to campsite at mile 2352
In the afternoon the lush green northwestern forest gives way to yet another desolate burn area. Any livable ecosystem has been scorched away, taking with it all animals and their corresponding calls. What is left is the creaking of dead trees, sharp snaps of falling branches ricochet through the air undisturbed by anything living. A single stream makes a valiant effort at life, florescent green leaves spring from along the bank. Their inherent liveliness standing in stark contrast to the black earth.
In the silence I think back to something another hiker told me at Trail Days. How they were frustrated by the number of burns they’d walked through in Oregon, calling them pointless, and wasteful. They believed like so many do, that fires are purely distructive and lack any benefit. This hiker, like myself, had likely been raised on Smokey Bear telling them that the only way to protect the forest was to eliminate any wild fires. But they, like myself and perhaps you too dear reader, have largely been misinformed, and are only now coming to recognize how foolish our understanding of fires have historically been.
For those of you who were raised in the west, this is likely a familiar story. If that’s you, then feel free to skip ahead a paragraph. Otherwise read on, you might just learn something. The current dictum of aggressive fire suppression which the National Forest Service so vehemently upholds is largely a reaction to The Big Burn, the largest fire in American history which in 1910 burned 3,000,000 achers of land in the Rockey Mountains in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho. The fire killed 86 people. In response the Forest Service adopted a policy which sought to extinguish wildfires as quickly as possible. Smokey Bear was introduced to the world as the friendly face of wildfire suppression, telling the American people that a healthy forest was one that never burned. Unfortunately, Smokey was wrong, the USFS was wrong, and only in recent years have people come to accept that forest fires are in integral part of forest health—that seeking to control every wild burn is perhaps the worst thing we could have done for the health of our forests.
This new understanding of the necessity of forest fires for the health of the forest ecosystem is representative of a larger shift in human awareness, albeit one that has been slow to catch on. The realization that nature does not exist for human domination. That the frustration one might feel while hiking through their twentieth burn of the trail is so minuscule when viewed in comparison to the health of the natural world around us as to be laughable. In the crudest sense, it’s simply not about you, about us. This world is not ours for the taking or making, but rather if we are to survive as a species we must learn to live in symbiosis with the world around us. As humans we are overly skilled at placing ourselves at the center of the universe, but it’s a tendency that we’ll have to overcome.
In the final miles of the day I hike through a sick forest. Blowdowns and deadfalls clutter the understory, competing for room with saplings and dense bushes, all shaded by the bigger trees looming overhead, blocking much of the sunlight from reaching the ground. My pathway is only clear due to the countless hours of volunteer trail crews. I wonder when the last time this area saw a fire, and how massive and destructive the next one might be, with every square inch of ground cluttered with drying kindling. Like an old body that can no longer fight off an illness, so too will the next ember to find this land be fatally consuming. But then again, all things die. And only when compared to our brief human lives is the lifespan of a forest a tragedy.
