Monday, October 25th, 2021
Sunday, February 14th, 2021: Bear, Hikes, Pinalenos, Southeast Arizona.
The forecast called for up to 4 inches of snow, beginning in early morning, so I was looking forward to today’s hike. But 4 inches in town, at 6,000′, could translate to a foot in the mountains. So I’d decided to try one of my favorite hikes, over in Arizona, which starts over a thousand feet lower and climbs to a little below 9,000′. I didn’t know if I’d make it to the top, but I’d try.
However, I wasn’t thinking about the long drive over there. When I got up in the morning there was an inch of snow in town. By the time I was ready to go, it was snowing again. The Sidekick has the best all-terrain tires you can get, and I shifted it into 4 wheel drive. As I drove south out of town, rising toward the Continental Divide, more and more snow was coating the highway.
I’d never tried the Sidekick on a snowy road before. My 2wd truck would’ve just slid off into a ditch immediately, so I was quite apprehensive. There was nobody else on the road.
The Sidekick did fine, and I figured the snow would end where the highway drops out of the mountains into the basin, below 5,500′. But it didn’t – it turned into a blizzard there. Snow was piling up in Lordsburg, below 4,500′. Crazy!
If Lordsburg had inches of snow, I wasn’t even sure I could get to the trailhead over in the Pinalenos. Maybe I should skip that climb, head south to the Chiricahuas instead, and do a low-elevation loop. I wouldn’t get much of a workout, but it’d be better than nothing.
But I finally emerged from the snow, crossing the playa on I-10, and saw blue sky ahead. I decided to keep going. And it turned out that the storm hadn’t dumped as much in Arizona as it was dumping in New Mexico.
The forecast had called for more snow throughout the day, so I dressed warm before heading up the trail. It’s really hard to change socks or pull on long johns when you’re already standing in snow.
It was windy, and clouds kept breaking up the sunlight, so I kept going from warm to cold while climbing. I couldn’t see much snow on the slope ahead, but I could see frost on the pines and firs up on the ridge. It can get really cold up there.
I hit snow on the trail at about the halfway point.
Fortunately the morning wind didn’t follow me onto the ridge top. The snow depth varied from 3 inches to a foot in steep, shady spots. It was beautiful fresh powder, and there was a little more coming down, despite the blue skies overhead. I was moving pretty well, but I didn’t have much time left by the time I got up there. I had to stop and turn back a half mile from the end, in order to get home at a reasonable hour. I was okay with that because the snow was getting deeper!
Snow on the upper trail made the descent much easier – I just sort of skipped down until I ran out of snow.
I really had to fight a crosswind to stay on the Interstate. It was dark by the time I reached Lordsburg. All the snow had melted, but there was a gale-force wind with brutal wind chill when I got out to pump gas.
The highway home was also snow-free until it rose into the low Burro mountains. There, I immediately hit ice and the vehicle started to fishtail. I was able to pull over and switch into 4wd, but still had only marginal grip. I switched on the emergency flasher and proceeded at about 35 mph. Within a few minutes a car came up behind me and tailgated me dangerously close for another 5 minutes until finally passing. It was a cheap little Japanese car, and it immediately speeded out of sight in the icy snow.
I expected to find it in a ditch ahead, but somehow the driver made it. And I found that I could actually drive faster now I was in 4wd. Still, it took me about twice as long as usual to get through the mountains. A long, exciting day!
Fire, Part 5: Wildfire Revelations
Saturday, February 20th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Wildfire.
All images by Max unless otherwise credited.
Previous: Recovering in Burn Scars
Wildfire and Habitat
Throughout these Dispatches on wildfire, I’ve been using the word habitat as if we’re all familiar with it and understand it in the same way. But is that true?
In ecology – the study of relationships between living organisms and their environment – habitat means, to quote Wikipedia: “the array of resources, physical and biotic factors, present in an area that allow the survival and reproduction of a particular species.” Your habitat is the area around your home where everything you need comes from: air, water, food, shelter, healthcare, etc.
But because many organisms range widely for the resources they need, habitat can be hard to pin down. We’re most familiar with birds – they can seemingly go anywhere. For some migrating birds, their habitat would seem to be an entire hemisphere of the earth. Whales, of course, also migrate thousands of miles. But even a colony of ants can live in a forest and harvest food from a nearby meadow – and vice versa.
As Wittgenstein observed, language is a game. The meanings of words are not prescribed in advance by dictionaries; words acquire meaning during use, and dictionaries are compiled after the fact to report on the usage of words in society.
Experiencing firsthand the changes wrought by wildfire in the Southwestern landscape, I’ve groped for words to describe and share my experience. When biologists, conservationists, and land managers get together in the field, I’ve always heard them refer to a forest, a grassy meadow, a desert, a stream corridor, or a seashore as a type of habitat – for example, “You’ve got that forest habitat next to a sagebrush steppe.” In that usage, habitat doesn’t refer to a single species and its needs, it refers to a physical area hosting and providing the needs of a distinct community of countless different species – from bacteria and fungi to trees and large mammals – whose interactions with each other and the nonliving components of that area constitute an ecosystem. That area, that type of habitat, has boundaries, beyond which it ends and other, adjacent types of habitat begin, and it’s defined in terms of the recognizable features that distinguish it from other, adjacent habitats. For example, a forest bordering on a meadow, or an ocean bordering on a coast.
Biologists are not really supposed to use the term “habitat” in that vernacular sense, as a place defined by a geographical feature, or an alliance of dominant vegetation, hosting a distinct community of species. But we need a word for such a place, and we grope for something more accurate.
Wildfire makes this need even more urgent. Within hours, a wildfire can turn a forest full of trees and the animals that depend on them into a smoking, ash-blanketed moonscape. The forest provided habitat for countless species, but what do you call the empty moonscape? And when, after monsoon rains, the ashy wasteland is gradually replaced by clumps of annual wildflowers here, stands of ferns there, isolated thickets of aspen here, scattered oak seedlings there, with birds and other animals moving back and forth between them – what do you call the new landscape? The theory of succession says that the new regime is transitory. Over time, species will grow and spread, competing for light, space, water, and nutrients. The perennials all start small, but some will end up dominating others.
That takes time – decades and human generations, in the case of this former forest – and in the meantime, what used to be distinct, homogenous habitat is an unstable, transitional mosaic of patches. Countless plants and animals begin using it immediately after the fire and increase in numbers and complexity from then on. The “new normal” is evolving, but it still provides habitat for these species.
Thus wildfire forces us to talk about habitat that’s divided into a mosaic of patches that are ever-changing and shared between countless species that overlap in some sort of dynamic network. Just as we defined the previous, larger, homogenous and stable area by its most recognizable features, we define each evolving patch by the features that are temporarily dominant. The more we strive for precision and follow the mandate of reductive science to focus on individual species, the more wildfire forces us to take a holistic view.
Desert Fires, Forest Fires
Across my four decades in the Mojave Desert, I can think of only three memorable wildfires. The small one I woke up to in 1989, described in Part 2, is the only one I know firsthand. The other two, the Hackberry Fire of 2005 and the slightly smaller Dome Fire that decimated our most famous Joshua Tree forest in 2020, consumed less than 200,000 acres. During that same period, the forested mountains of Arizona and New Mexico have experienced dozens of mega-wildfires consuming millions of acres. Whereas the prehistory of wildfire in the desert is poorly known and controversial, the forests of the Southwest are widely acknowledged to be adapted to and dependent on wildfire.
During my lifetime, the frequency and intensity of wildfire have increased in both habitats. Most “environmentally-conscious” people now assume that climate change is at fault, simply because media authorities have oversimplified climate change into the scapegoat behind all our environmental problems. But fire suppression, not climate change, is the main reason why more forests burn now than in my youth. Wildfires would’ve been common decades ago if our government hadn’t prevented and aggressively fought them.
Anyone can recognize that a warmer, drier climate will dry out both living and dead vegetation, increasing the risk of fire. But the desert and the forest pose very different risks.
Yes, reductive science tells us that the loss of forest reduces absorption of carbon by the “biosphere,” accelerating climate change on a planetary scale. But Southwestern forests are meant to burn, and the resulting habitat mosaic can be more diverse and productive than the artificial uniformity we created through fire suppression. The forest needs wildfire to restore its balance.
Not so in the desert. As I described in Part 3, unlike the Southwestern forests, desert habitats are being degraded and lost at an ever-accelerating rate due to invasive plants – and of course, due to urban and industrial development – particularly the misnamed “green” energy. Wildfire in the already extremely arid desert will explode in future decades as our rapidly increasing demand for electricity – misbelieved to be a “clean” source of energy – sparks more infrastructure fires, and as more and more invasive plants spread by our “green” electric vehicles provide more and more fuel for high-intensity wildfire, clearing more and more native habitat and replacing it with degraded, biologically impoverished land dominated by aliens.
We Europeans were wrong to call it a desert when we first saw it, because back then, it was a diverse, productive wonderland. Now, we’re making the place fit the name – a wasteland created by our expansion and innovation, a victim of civilization and progress.
Forest Reborn in Fire
Science doesn’t really answer all our questions or provide a definitive explanation for what happens in nature – science provides simplified abstractions that can mislead us into thinking nature is orderly and can be controlled by us.
In the ideal, theoretical, stable habitat, with a stable climate, stable landforms, and a stable ecosystem or community of organisms, scientists tell us that wildfire occurs in a pattern they call the fire regime. Within that theoretical regime, wildfire occurs in fire cycles, meaning that fires repeat at more or less regular time intervals. Each fire is followed by a more or less predictable sequence: flooding, erosion, deposition, plant invasions and colonizations, a period of decomposition, competition, and instability, eventually leading to a stable state in which the habitat and community are just waiting for the next fire.
In this theoretical model, climate – the yearly cycle of weather, from wind and cloud cover to precipitation, temperature averages and extremes – enables specific communities of organisms to settle into specific niches where, working together, they establish distinct habitats and ecosystems, adapting to wildfire and further shaping its regime – its pattern – and its cycle. This is ecology in the broadest sense – living and nonliving, earth and sky, ephemeral phenomena and stable pattern – working together to achieve what in my field of science – the science of motion and change – was called a dynamic equilibrium.
A particular fire regime, and its corresponding cycle, are of course determined by habitat, which is in turn determined by landscape, its geological foundations, climate, and evolutionary history. Regardless of climate, mountains create elevational zones of habitat, from the desert basins to the arid grasslands, the mid-elevation, fairly open forest of trees with spreading crowns, and the high-elevation mixed-conifer forest of tall, slender trees creating a more or less solid canopy. Mountains create corridors and niches of habitat via their rock substrate, their peaks, ridges, rock outcrops and cliffs, and canyon bottoms. Patches of fast-burning fuel – accumulations of dry or dead vegetation, especially from invasive plants – provide a ready-made path for wildfire, diverting it away from slower-burning patches. Both habitat and landforms create the potential for fire and shape its spread.
Within a distinct habitat and ecosystem, the fire adaptations of species, and the conditions of individuals – their relative age and health – determine how they react to fire, and how fire may cull weak or unhealthy individuals while protecting the population. The thick bark on the trunks of mature pines and firs acts as insulation, protecting the sapwood inside. Mature trees shade and kill their lower limbs, which fall off, denying surface fires a “ladder” of fuel to climb to the crown. This is particularly effective for ponderosa pines, which have thick branches that could offer substantial fuel.
Succulents like agave, yucca, and cactus, which we think of as natives of the open desert, thrive in the fire regime of forests because their stored water and underground mass cools and protects them from total destruction in a wildfire, so that even if their thick leaves are completely killed, the plant’s hidden heart can still bear fruit.
In southwestern New Mexico, we may reference the four seasons of our European cultural legacy for convenience, but those are not the seasons we get. Our windy season, in March and April, dries out the land, increasing fuel for wildfire. May and June, the buildup to the Southwest monsoon, bring heat and dry lightning in the mountains. Most of our wildfires start in May and June.
If we get a good monsoon, starting in July, rains will start to suppress the fires. Climate is the pattern, weather is the expression, preparing the land for burning, lighting the fires, then putting them out.
We all know how wildfire can be started by lightning strikes. But did you know that rocks falling against each other can spark wildfire?
Humans start wildfires through carelessness – like the campers in Arizona’s White Mountains who left their campfire smoldering and started the largest wildfire in the history of the Southwest. Or by malicious intent, like the arsonist(s) who destroyed the forest on the little peak I hiked near town.
Our advanced technologies are simply too complex for us to control and keep safe. A driver pulls onto the weedy shoulder of the road to take a call, her hot exhaust pipe catches the weeds on fire, then she drives away, oblivious. Small engines are used millions of times every day at the urban-wildland interface – chain saws, weed-whackers, lawnmowers – generating sparks that can cause wildfires.
Recently, some of the most destructive fires at the urban-wildland interface have been started by arcs or failures in electric power distribution systems. As we try to slow climate change by transitioning from fossil fuels to electric cars, the increased demand on electrical infrastructure will spark more wildfires.
Indigenous people have always started wildfires to increase the productivity of habitat, and Europeans have belatedly appropriated indigenous practices in North America. Fires with a non-human cause burn according to non-human constraints of landscape, habitat, and weather. Humans may schedule, locate, and direct their fires – a prescribed or controlled burn – for defined purposes like “fuel reduction.”
Once a fire has started, it develops a life and history of its own. It’s intuitive for us to think of fire as a thing – even a living thing – but in the reductive domain of European science, fire isn’t a distinct thing, it’s an ephemeral state or property of the “matter” which is burning at the moment. The flames consuming a tree, and the flames consuming its neighbor, are not considered a continuous entity or phenomenon. From the perspective of physics and chemistry, it’s all just atoms, molecules, and energy.
But in the real world, fire is most definitely a living thing. A wildfire is born, it grows, it travels. It may merge with a neighboring fire, like two cells fusing. Like living organisms, it’s always dying even as it grows and thrives – embers blackening and cooling in one place while flames blossom in another. Fires that spread from a center die from the inside out, an expanding ring of flames surrounding a blackened core.
But the movements of fire are directed by landscape, weather, and habitat. In mountains, in still air, a fire will burn uphill. But air is seldom still in mountains, and fires generate their own winds. Strong winds may carry sparks for miles to give birth to spot fires, children isolated from the parent. While moving, a fire may encounter fast-burning fuel that draws it forward. Or it may hit an obstacle – a patch of wet or slow-burning vegetation, a cliff or rock outcrop, the sharp crest of a ridge, a river, pond, or lake. The obstacle may stop the fire, force it to detour, slow it down, or simply reduce its intensity. Obstacles or patches of low intensity provide refuges for plants and fleeing animals.
Depending on cause and habitat, a fire may spread through soil – a ground fire – through surface vegetation – a surface fire – or from treetop to treetop – a crown fire. But these are just convenient abstractions – the reality is much more subtle and complex.
A fire is said to make a run – burning a path uphill, downhill, or across country – directed by landforms, temperature gradients, wind currents, and the availability of fuel. In a complex landscape, it moves like an amoeba, an amorphous being, drawn to patches of available fuel.
Burning vegetation generates smoke, clouds of particulates and gases that warn animals, trigger reactions in plants, release nutrients, and rise into the atmosphere, affecting weather.
Fire doesn’t just consume trees and other plants. Fire interacts with other living things, like any other partner in the ecosystem. Plants come prepared with their adaptations, like the thick bark and limbless trunks of the mature pines, and the water-filled leaves of the succulents. Heat rising from a surface fire in a fuel-rich forest may kill all or most of the leaves and needles above without burning the tree. A tree whose vegetation is killed may die from the top down, its roots rotting until the skeleton is eventually toppled by wind.
A hot crown fire burns downward. If the burning ends at the lowest branches, a standing char – a blackened trunk – is left and may stand for decades. If the trunk keeps burning to the ground, the fire will follow the roots underground, until all the wood is consumed, leaving tunnels in the soil.
Like plants in the forest, animals are said to be adapted to wildfire, meaning they respond to warnings – smoke, the sounds of burning, the sight of flames – by fleeing or taking cover, taking advantage of natural refuges created by variations in landforms, water features, and vegetation. Birds fly away, reptiles hide underground. Some individuals may perish, but the population generally survives.
In the immediate aftermath of wildfire, we see loss, destruction, blackened skeletons, ground covered with ash. What we don’t see is potential new habitat prepared by the fire’s release of massive amounts of raw nutrients. An unhealthy excess of fuel buildup, purged. Unhealthy individuals and populations, cleansed. Fire-adapted roots and seeds, stimulated by fire and waiting, below the ash, for the next rain to sprout.
Many plants of our Southwestern forests are so well-adapted to wildfire that when their aboveground parts are completely consumed, they immediately and aggressively expand underground and re-sprout. Quaking aspen, gambel oak, and New Mexico locust respond this way, filling in burn scars with impenetrable thickets.
Burned agaves, including our narrow-leafed beargrass, immediately re-sprout from unburned root stock, along with ferns and mosses.
Nutrients released into the soil directly by wildfire, and later by the decomposition of fire-killed vegetation, encourage the growth of sprouts from the underground seed bank which is always present, waiting to take advantage of disturbances like fire.
When a stand of trees and other vegetation is killed and largely consumed by high-intensity wildfire, the ground that was held in place by roots is now vulnerable to erosion. When it rains after a fire, floods full of ash and sediment rush downstream. Like terrestrial plants and animals, fish and other aquatic organisms are fire-adapted and sense coming changes. Some are killed, but others take refuge or are washed downstream, to return later when conditions are right.
We think of erosion as merely loss of ground, but in nature, erosion opens new habitat, and floods and landslides move old rocks, soil, and dead vegetation downhill, where they’re eventually deposited to form more new habitat. Erosion can expose buried seeds. In general, erosion and deposition are a form of natural tilling – agitating, turning, and mixing the soil, releasing buried seeds and nutrients. Major erosional and depositional events, like I found in the Pinalenos, create new landforms, which themselves shape new habitats and microclimates of the living earth.
Wildfire releases new chemical nutrients directly, through the burning of soil, vegetation, and dead organic matter, but the process continues for decades after as organisms killed by the fire are consumed by decomposers like fungi, insects, and gut bacteria. The snags and char of fire-killed trees hold precious resources, the product of decades of hard work by the plant. Decomposers process these resources and make them available to the broader ecosystem.
The old notion of ecological succession says that, if environmental conditions – the fire regime – persist, the post-fire undergrowth and thickets will eventually be succeeded by some form of mixed-conifer forest, completing the fire cycle. Pine and fir seedlings will sprout from an existing seed bank, or from seeds carried by birds and buried by squirrels, and eventually grow to shade the shorter trees, which will die out, and you’ll end up with a replacement forest.
But now, with global climate change and massive, high-intensity wildfires, many forests are in danger of stand replacement and forest conversion. We’re told this is a bad thing, because forests help absorb the carbon emitted by our machines, protecting the earth from further climate change. But fire’s removal of the forest canopy opens light and space and liberates nutrients for lush forage – grasses and annuals, the foliage of deciduous shrubs and trees – attracting both herbivores and the predators that depend on them.
Patchy Burns, Biodiversity, and Mosaics
A decade ago when our big local wildfires started, and I anxiously followed the news, I was shocked and saddened by the scale of destruction that expanded daily, reaching hundreds of thousands of acres. Then, after a fire finally died down and damage surveys were reported, I was encouraged when authorities claimed only “patchy” damage.
It was only recently, during my weekly hikes in burn scars, that I began to understand. As described above, living fires tend to grow and move like amoebas, shaped by landforms, weather, and habitat. Even the most intense wildfire leaves patches of lower intensity and unburned habitat, so that the reported acreage of a large wildfire, measured by the outer boundary, is typically meaningless.
The giant Wallow Fire in Arizona’s White Mountains started at the southern edge of the range in the Bear Wallow Wilderness, where the high plateau is deeply dissected into ridges and canyons. So at its origin, the fire was diverted by terrain and missed large patches of forest. But when it reached Escudilla Mountain at the opposite, northeast end of the plateau – an ancient volcano with broad, rounded slopes of volcanic sediment that were not dissected by deep ravines – the fire found no barriers and engulfed the entire massif. Escudilla is older than the rest of the range. The modern fire’s growth and movement were determined by processes that formed the earth’s surface 20 to 40 million years ago.
There, and in similar terrain of New Mexico’s Mogollon Mountains and Black Range, wildfire completely eliminated mixed-conifer forest from entire slopes. Those mega-patches may recover slowly via natural succession, or they may be replaced by very different habitat.
What’s important – the potential for recovery – may be largely invisible, hidden underground. A moonscape may be replaced in only a few seasons by a stand of ferns and Gambel oaks. A formerly continuous stand of mixed-conifer forest will be replaced by a mosaic of forest, shrubland, and grassland.
The scientific study of patch dynamics theorizes that the smaller the patch, the less diverse. This would suggest that a continuous forest stand covering many square miles is much more diverse than the small patches of forest remaining after a patchy burn. But how can that be?
The original uniform mixed-conifer forest has been replaced by a mosaic of dramatically different patches: new grasslands, new shrublands, new eciduous forest, and remaining conifer forest. Each new patch can support a community that’s dramatically different from the original. And the proximity of different patches provides more opportunities for organisms that cross boundaries, like birds, herbivorous mammals, and their predators. Patch dynamics only studies plants, but plants are only one of the five kingdoms of life.
Southwestern forests may sometimes appear pristine because they lack the invasive plants which have taken over other Western habitat like deserts and overgrazed grasslands. But the forests we’ve known in our lifetimes are not natural. Before Europeans came and began suppressing wildfire, it’s likely that Southwestern forests were much more complex.
Adaptation and Resilience
Like habitat, adaptation is another word we understand poorly and use ambiguously, if at all. Biologists say plants and animals are adapted to particular environmental conditions, as a result of evolution. But that implies a passive, static, stable end state. In the traditional model of evolution, random genetic mutations make some individuals more successful than others, and those individuals thrive and produce successful offspring, while the less well-adapted die out.
European anthropocentrism has motivated an ongoing cultural effort to prove that humans are exceptional and qualitatively different from other animals. In the beginning, God gave us dominion over nature, but now, in a more secular society, we look for scientific evidence of our superiority to justify staying in charge. Some scientists say that our big brains represent a quantum leap in animal intelligence. While other animals are slaves to instinct, we alone possess consciousness and self-awareness, we alone are aware of our own mortality, we alone laugh, we alone think and reason, accumulate knowledge and wisdom, and pass it on to our offspring. We alone use tools, developed language and art, and so forth.
But in parallel, other scientists continue to debunk these Eurocentric misconceptions. Among humans, as among other animals, the vast majority of behavior is involuntary, driven by habit, not by reasoning or even by conscious intent. Our addiction to the groupthink of social media, in which peer groups reinforce unexamined beliefs, is a troubling reminder of this. We are typically no more aware of, or in control of, our behavior than a cow heading out to pasture.
But like us, other animals are capable of breaking their habits. Animals can observe, think, make decisions on the fly, learn, remember, and teach their offspring. Both animals and plants are often capable of migrating to new habitat when they lose theirs. This is not static adaptation, this is actively adapting in real time to disturbances, to changes in environmental conditions. And in line with conventional evolutionary theory, natural populations are provided with ongoing mutations that promote continuing, involuntary, unconscious adaptation of the species. Species in nature are not just adapted, they’re adaptable – or to use another newly fashionable term, they’re resilient.
A few years ago, after decades of fearing a takeover of desert riparian habitat by tamarisk, I stumbled upon a remote canyon where tamarisk had become established in some kind of surprising equilibrium with native plants. Very old tamarisk plants with trunks a foot in diameter stood isolated throughout the canyon, at respectful distances from traditional natives like seep willow and honey mesquite. All seemed stable and thriving, and I could see no new seedlings or spreading thickets of tamarisk. Maybe it was a freak of climate – maybe momentary conditions in the distant past had allowed the old invaders to get established, but subsequent conditions hadn’t enabled new seedlings. Or maybe it was a glimpse of the future.
We all seek stability. But in nature, catastrophic disturbances occur in cycles, and stability and sustainability always go hand in hand with change and adaptability. Plants and animals don’t expect to maintain the same conditions for their offspring in the future. They expect their offspring to be able to adapt to changing conditions.
Rising Temperatures and Drought
From year to year and season to season, higher temperatures and reduced precipitation cause whatever moisture is stored in living vegetation, dead organic matter, and soil to evaporate, resulting in drier and better fuel for wildfires. Prolonged heat and drought stress living plants, lowering their defenses against wildfire or killing them and adding to the fuel. We can all tell that climate changes during our lifetimes, from cool and wet years to hot and dry, back and forth, seemingly erratically. How do we sense when the effect of climate on our habitat puts it, and us, at risk?
People in traditional societies stayed in one place from generation to generation, accumulating and passing on long-term knowledge and wisdom about the local habitat they depended on for their livelihood, including long-term climate trends. But our hyper-mobile society pressures us to relocate over and over again, so we’ve lost that local, community-based perspective on climate. We’ve become dependent on news media and distant experts.
Weather forecasts can prepare us for local conditions during the next week, but to compete in the consumer economy, news media distract us with sensational events on a national or global scale, like a “polar vortex” producing mega-storms thousands of miles away, resulting in catastrophic urban damage and human suffering. Excepting those temporary system failures, our universal industrial infrastructure ensures that we’re largely independent of climate. No matter how hot and dry it gets, we can live in Phoenix or Las Vegas, keep ourselves cool with air conditioning, and turn on the tap to get water delivered from an invisible reservoir hundreds of miles away.
When I moved to California’s Bay Area in 1976, to attend grad school, I was told the region was in a drought. That was my first experience with drought, but since I didn’t know the region without drought, it didn’t really mean anything to me. The foothills behind the school greened up a little in winter, but spent the rest of the year covered with dead, tan-colored vegetation. Water still came out of the tap, and since I lived in an apartment, I didn’t have to worry about watering the lawn.
Eventually I learned that the California climate came in cycles. There were multi-year droughts, and then eventually there would be a wet winter or two. But civilization’s industrial infrastructure protected us and ensured that droughts caused little hardship – they were actually kind of fun. We could compete against each other to use less water and feel more righteous.
After falling in love with the Mojave Desert, I met scientists who told me that the desert, depending on the same winter storms as the coast, had its own cycle of multi-year droughts broken by wet winters. As I immersed myself in the desert’s regional climate, habitats, and ecosystems, I developed a sense of when the land was “hurting” from drought.
I also learned that, unlike back home on the coast, weather in the desert was highly localized. Precipitation totals from both winter and summer storms tended to be so low – only a few inches per year on average – that deviations of a quarter of an inch made a big difference.
The topographic relief of a mountain range compresses wind-driven air, “squeezing” rain or snow out of clouds, so that storms often form directly over mountains, and mountains tend to get much more precipitation from passing storms than valleys. But in the desert, each isolated mountain range, separated from its neighbors by miles of low basins, can receive widely differing amounts of precipitation, both from individual storms and throughout the year. One mountain range can be suffering while its neighbor is doing okay. When I call friends in the desert to ask about weather, they give me different reports on different mountains.
We approach our desert mountain wilderness on highways through broad basins at middle elevations, where the landscape is thinly carpeted with the delicate foliage of our iconic shrub, the creosote bush. The tiny, waxy leaves glow a vibrant green when it has enough water, but shrivel and take on a more muted brownish tint in drought, and we desert lovers can tell that from a distance, at a glance.
Our first destination is usually a natural water source – a more or less perennial spring or seep. We know the amount of water present on the surface is directly dependent on annual precipitation. Living through both summer cloudbursts and winter storms from the Pacific, I learned that it’s the long soaking rains of winter that restore life. Water from summer cloudbursts quickly flushes downhill, evaporating along the way. A long, steady winter rain is absorbed by soils, plants, and fracture zones in the rock, where the water may be released slowly at natural springs and seeps for use by wildlife during coming seasons.
During the four decades I’ve been exploring the desert, more and more water sources I assumed to be perennial have dried up. Drought is deepening, and wildfires will be more destructive.
Scientists collect data with their instruments – thermometers, hygrometers, rain gauges, etc. – store the data in databases over time, and analyze it to measure climate change in specific regions. But weather stations are rare in the desert. There’s none in the entire mountain range where my land is located, so there’s no data – either current or historical – on temperature or precipitation there.
Field biologists try to detect the local impacts of climate change via surveys of plant and animal populations, sampling and analyzing, for example, seed germination rates, nutrient value of forage at peak times, survival rates of offspring, and mortality rates per population. Climate stress may also be inferred from secondary impacts like disease, parasitism, and of course wildfire.
My new home in southwest New Mexico has a distinct regional climate regime, depending equally on winter storms and summer monsoons, whose moisture comes from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. Old-timers spoke of the monsoon starting like clockwork after the 4th of July, but in my first year, it didn’t start until the end of the month, and it’s never been dependable since. Sometimes it barely comes at all. We don’t talk about drought as much as about a “good” or a “poor” monsoon, and a wet or dry winter. After 15 years, I seem to remember only two or three good monsoons, but those remain my definition of our climate.
A neighbor who grew up here told me they used to regularly get 16″ of snow in a winter storm, but since I moved here fifteen years ago, we’ve never had more than 8″ in town. I haven’t measured or kept records on temperature, rainfall, or snow accumulation, but the past few winters have seemed unusually warm and dry, and monsoons have been poor.
Whereas the monsoon is our iconic season, it’s the winter snows that restore our mountain forests. In the cooler climate of our region’s past, snow accumulated at high elevation throughout the winter, then melted slowly in March and April. This allowed soil, dead organic matter, and living plants to soak up the moisture. Now, in a warming climate, when snow falls, it quickly melts and moisture runs off before the system can absorb and store it. In the dry and windy season that follows, wildfire is provided with more and better fuel.
Our mobility has robbed us of the local experience and wisdom that could help us judge what’s happening, while media distract us with images of distant disasters and experts warn of global processes too complex and abstract to be locally useful. We’re left with generalized anxiety about climate, and a desperate hope that the authorities will protect us.
We civilized humans may accept that climate is changing, but unlike animals, we’re not adaptable – we’re not resilient. Despite abundant evidence that our societies are conflicted and dysfunctional, we cling to the irrational hope that our leaders will fine-tune our vast industrial infrastructure, so we and our children can continue to enjoy the same standard of living, jumping on a freeway to visit family or shop at a distant store, running air conditioners in Phoenix, turning a faucet to get water from a distant reservoir. Meanwhile, out of sight and out of mind to most of us, that infrastructure destroys more natural habitat and sparks more wildfires.
Beauty of Wildfire
Everyone in the American West has overdosed on TV footage of wildfire, usually shot from the air at night, and from that, we may imagine we know and understand wildfire. But the fire cycle has a complex and often subtle beauty that’s not limited to the momentary apocalyptic vision of flames burning at night.
Next: Government and Wildfire
Monday, February 22nd, 2021: Chiricahuas, Hikes, South Fork, Southeast Arizona.
Last time I returned from the Chiricahuas, near sunset, I was driving up through the low pass through the Peloncillos when I glanced left at a small hollow in the granite cliffs and saw a stone man. The light was just right to highlight this small pinnacle with a spherical top. So this morning, on my way back, I stopped to photograph it. Unfortunately the light was wrong, but now I saw it had a companion on the left.
Our mountains had received a lot of snow last week, and I’d already fought my way through 14″ of powder to 7,400′ on my shorter midweek hike. So for today’s long day hike, I was looking for a trail that stayed well below 8,000′ and avoided north slopes. During earlier researches I’d seen that I could chain together three trails in the Chiricahuas to get plenty of distance at lower elevation, but I hadn’t tried that yet because it didn’t offer enough elevation gain to suit me. Today might be the right time.
It starts in the most famous part of the range: South Fork Canyon, which is ground zero for birders. This canyon suffered major erosion and debris flows after the 2011 Horseshoe 2 fire, so the bottom was full of logs, piles of pale rock, and erratic boulders carried down from above.
But much of the riparian forest is intact. I was strolling rapidly through the shade along a winding trail lined with leaf litter when I heard a rustling in the vegetation above the trail at my right. I stopped and turned and saw a sight so amazing that I was pretty much paralyzed.
A smallish hawk with a high-contrast banded tail – probably a Cooper’s – launched laboriously off the slope, only about 6′ above ground, carrying a full-grown reddish squirrel – probably the Mexican fox squirrel endemic to this range – dangling by its shoulders from the hawk’s claws, so that the hawk and its prey were both facing the same direction. The squirrel wasn’t struggling so it was probably either dead already or in shock.
The hawk continued slowly, carrying its prize past me at a distance of only about 8′, and steadily off into the distance between the trunks of the riparian forest. The weight of that hawk is virtually the same as the weight of a squirrel. That would be like me carrying someone my own weight, while flapping my wings.
I stared off into the distance for a minute or two, then continued following the newly re-routed trail upstream for two miles. Then I turned left onto a branch trail that climbed the steep eastern ridge out of the canyon. At a saddle where the trail crosses the crest is an outcrop of amazing bright red rock, probably volcanic tuff or conglomerate like most of the rock in this region.
Past the red rock saddle the trail enters a new landscape, hidden from below, surrounding a sort of hanging canyon. The 2011 fire made short, narrow runs into this canyon from the east, so the current vegetation is a mosaic. The whole area feels close, intimate, and shady.
After crossing the canyon, the trail switchbacks up to a higher saddle which represents a divide between the interior and exterior of the range. I’d seen footprints ahead of me on the trail going into this canyon, but I left them behind as I climbed, and as usual I was the first to complete this trail this season.
When I reached the high saddle at the divide, my cell phone made the incoming message sound. “Welcome!” said the text from Verizon. “You are now in Mexico. The following rates apply…”
I was a few miles southeast of where I’d previously hiked in this range, and from that saddle, my view was south, and what I saw really was the mountains of Mexico. My phone was now connected to a tower somewhere over the border.
The guy who monopolizes trail information for this range had reported this trail in “good” condition. But the next trail I planned to take, southwest from this saddle, was reported to be in “bad” condition. I’d already had to climb around a couple of badly eroded sections on the climb out of the canyon, so I was curious about what I would find ahead on the next trail.
The first challenge was finding the trail. Searching through the scrub in the saddle, I eventually came upon two old wooden signposts, with a dry-rotted, illegible trail sign at their feet. Ahead was a narrow gap between two shrubs that might be the trail.
In the event, this trail turned out to be really easy to follow. It lacked the big washouts of the earlier trail. Its only drawback was that it now seemed to be used only by game; most of it was narrow and banked, rather than flat, crossing loose gravel on steep slopes, which was made it hard on my vulnerable foot.
Traversing around the outside of a ridge, it eventually climbed to a still higher saddle which gave me a broad view of Horseshoe Canyon, a major canyon on the south side of the range, and Sentinal Peak, the southernmost peak in the range. And I saw more of Mexico.
I kept traversing past the saddle until I felt my time was up and I had to turn back. I figured I’d gone at least 7 miles already.
It was a long slog back. On the way up, I’d felt like this trail was in better shape than most, but with my sensitive foot, they all feel worse going down. According to the years-old GPS data of the trail guy, I hiked less than 14 miles round trip. But I was walking fast during the entire hike, and even discounting short breaks, it took me an hour longer than a 16-mile hike with similar elevation that I did last summer. So go figure.
Monday, March 1st, 2021: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Last night, I’d tried to come up with a plan for today’s hike and failed. The snow on all our regional mountains was melting fast, but I knew from my midweek hike that it was still deep on north slopes. There were few trails within a 2-hour drive that had southern exposure, and I’d done two of them, with the corresponding 4-hour round-trip drives, in the past two weeks. I didn’t want to make another long drive.
I got up this morning with little hope or motivation, and considered taking a break from my Sunday hikes. It’d been over three months since I’d taken a break and it wouldn’t hurt my conditioning
Then during breakfast, scanning the list of hikes I’ve compiled, I suddenly realized that the Little Dry Creek trail climbs south-facing slopes. I hadn’t thought of it at first because it’s not one of my favorites hikes, and anyway, I’d already done it three weeks ago. I don’t like to duplicate hikes that frequently…but what the hell. It would get me out into nature.
After an hour’s drive, I arrived at the extremely remote trailhead, parked, shouldered my pack, and started laboriously picking my way up the difficult early stretch lined with big loose rocks. After a half mile or so it climbs above the canyon bottom and you get a view of the peaks ahead. And I suddenly had a brainstorm.
Last fall, after finally getting close to the 10,000′ crest, I’d tracked down a recent online trip log for this trail. My destination here has always been the 10,663′ summit of Sacaton, one of the iconic peaks of this range. But the trail is just too long and blocked with too much deadfall from the 2012 wildfire.
The online trip log was from a young Arizona woman, a “peakbagger”, who left the trail after the first mile and bushwhacked up the right-hand ridge. That ridge eventually connects to the Sacaton massif, so she took it all the way, traversing all the intermediate peaks. I couldn’t recall her exact route, but I knew it connected with an old mine road not far from this canyon bottom. She took the mine road a short distance then bushwhacked up to the main ridge. What the hell, I thought. I’ll try to replicate her route, and see how far I can get.
The whole peakbagger thing is a turn-off for me – mountains are sacred, and the idea of “bagging” them to add to your life list is another sad byproduct of our hypercompetitive European culture. But before reading the young woman’s account and scanning her photos, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to bushwhack in these mountains with their loose, crumbly volcanic rock, especially through burn scars blocked by mazes of deadfall and choked with thickets that I believed to be virtually impassable. I admired her toughness, but I figured if she could do it, I probably could too.
Heading deeper into the canyon, with progressive vantage points out, I saw the right-hand ridge started low, only a few hundred feet above the creek, and there seemed to be a gap, a side drainage, before it connected to the high ridge. A mile up the trail, I found where the side drainage joined the creek. It was dry and narrow, but I turned off and started climbing. This must be where she left the trail…and if I followed this side canyon to its head, maybe I’d connect with the old mine road.
As I’d expected, bushwhacking was incredibly hard. The right-hand slope was in shade and covered with snow, so I climbed the sunny, snow-bare left slope. But it was steep and alternated between loose rock and dense shrubs: oak, manzanita, mountain mahogany, and occasionally thorny catclaw. I had to cut my own switchbacks, slipping and sliding the whole way, scratching my hands and clothes.
Eventually I climbed high enough to see the head of the canyon. Its sides were completely choked with chaparral, as was the continuation of the ridge above. But now that I could see the destination, I had to keep going.
High above the head of the canyon, rounding a rocky corner, I suddenly came upon a cleared patch and an apparently bottomless hole – a mine pit. I remembered there was an old mine farther up the main canyon. I must be near the road. I thought I could see another cleared spot a few hundred yards ahead.
Heading that way, I ended up on an old trail, which took me to the mine road. I kept following it around the foot of the high ridge, and eventually came to a junction. The main road from below continued higher, through pine forest, and I could see it climbing around a small peak ahead. It was trending away from the main ridge, but I figured it would circle back and probably get me higher and farther along.
Traversing below the little peak I came upon a big gash in the mountainside, with a pile of rock obscuring a mine entrance. I set my pack down and climbed over the rock pile. There was a heavy steel door, partly open. I squeezed past it and walked into the mine, but it quickly became too dark, so I went back out and put on my headlamp.
I love being underground! And the colors of rock in this mine, while subtle, were really pretty. It had several junctions and branches, and whoever worked it had left some valuable equipment back there. Some of the lumber looked very recent.
The first branch led to a chamber, partly blocked by an air compressor, where there was a steel platform over a vertical shaft with cables leading down out of sight. It was so deep my headlamp wouldn’t penetrate it. Beyond this chamber, a rockfall blocked the tunnel, but I could see it led farther into the mountain.
Back in the light of day, I continued up the road, around the little conical peak. Eventually I came to a broad saddle where I could see east into another big canyon system directly below Sacaton. And forming a gate across this canyon were the two most spectacular rock formations I’d ever seen in this area. They both had arches like the sandstone canyons of southeast Utah. Could there really be sandstone in these volcanic mountains, or was it an anomalous volcanic formation?
The ridge leading to Sacaton was my destination, and the rock formations didn’t lead there, but I figured I’d head in that direction and see how close I could get before climbing higher. First I had to traverse another steep slope of loose rock and dense chaparral. After a few hundred yards fighting my way through that, I came to a deep canyon, forested on this side, with patches of deep snow. To get a better view of the rock formations I’d have to cross this canyon. I could see a large clearing, like a saddle, on the opposite side. I descended a few hundred feet in snow to a stream running across bare rock, then fought my up through the shrubs on the opposite slope, finally reaching the clearing. Now I could see that a much deeper and wider side canyon separated me from the rock formations. But from the clearing I was in, a ridge led upward toward the main ridge and the foot of the 10,000′ peak that began the Sacaton massif. From below, I couldn’t tell if this was a good route, but I’d give it a shot.
Here the real work began. Climbing this ridge was some of the hardest bushwhacking I’ve ever done. I began to doubt that the young woman had really completed this hike in one day. Yeah, there were a few small patches of bare ground, and a few sporadic stretches of bunchgrass between thickets, but most of the way I had to stop and scout gaps in the vegetation, zigzagging constantly back and forth, finding dead ends, turning back and trying other routes. It was incredibly slow, but I kept trying.
This outlying ridge climbed in steps of a few hundred feet at a time. Each time I crested a step I stopped and tried to scout ahead. Eventually I reached a forested stretch below the top. Here it was much easier, and I found a game trail. I continued for a quarter mile or so, and reached a little peak before the saddle just below the high peak.
I stood there in about 10″ of snow and checked my watch. It’d taken me four hours to get this far, and I figured I was only about a third of the way. The peak above required another 1,500′ climb that would take me at least another hour, and past that were three or four miles and probably another 2,000′ of up and down climbing, most of it on loose rock through dense scrub. How could that girl have done this all in a day? It seemed a near-mythical feat.
But on the way down, I discovered something. I got so tired of rerouting around masses of shrubs that I decided to just force my way straight through them. It was murder on my expensive REI and Patagonia outerwear, but it turned out to be doable, and a little faster than zigzagging through the maze. The shrubs had interlacing branches, and I still had to zigzag between the cores of individual shrubs, but the outer branches in the gaps between them gave way to brute force.
Unfortunately, because the descent of the ridge went a little faster than the ascent, I overshot the clearing where I’d climbed out of the side canyon. By over a hundred yards, but I didn’t know that yet.
When bushwhacking like this, I always stop every few hundred yards, look back, and memorize landmarks so I can retrace my route. I’d memorized the shape of the snow slope I’d descended across this side canyon, but now that I’d overshot, it didn’t have that shape. I couldn’t tell if it was the same one – I didn’t know if I’d gone too far, or not far enough. And I was in the midst of a seemingly endless thicket.
I fought my way down into the side canyon. I figured I’d climb the stream bed to the nearest snow patch, and if I couldn’t find my footprints, I’d turn and go downstream until I found the right place.
The upstream patch was the right one. My footprints were right there. I followed them up out of the canyon, onto the slope that traversed back to the mine road. I took the road to the trail that led to the bottomless pit, and then began bushwhacking back down the side of the shallow canyon that led to Little Dry Creek. Downclimbing here was much harder than ascending. I stumbled, slipped, and slid constantly in the loose dirt and rocks, thrown off balance as invisible branches and roots grabbed my ankles, in between fighting through thorny thickets. It got steeper and harder toward the bottom, to the point where it was downright scary. But, obviously, I made it.
It’d taken me 3-1/2 hours to reach the high ridge, and 3-1/4 hours to get back down. When I got home and checked the Arizona peakbagger’s data online, I discovered she’d taken an almost completely different route. Instead of the logical path up the side canyon, she’d cut off the main trail earlier and climbed straight up the right slope to the peak of that low ridge. There, she’d hit the mine road, and used it much farther than I had, which enabled her to go much faster during that stretch.
Then, just past the mine entrance, she’d again climbed straight up the little conical peak, and from there, continued following the ridgeline all the way to Sacaton. She said the bushwhacking wasn’t bad, but I could see it was. Apparently peakbaggers are just habituated to forcing their way through thickets. Their goal is to bag as many peaks as possible in their lifetime, and most peaks don’t have trails.
I could also see that the end point of my hike was actually the halfway point for her hike. By reaching Sacaton, she’d logged over 16 miles round-trip. So my total distance was about 8 miles, and after subtracting the time I’d spent exploring the mine, it took me almost 7 hours – more than twice as long as it would take me on clear ground. She’d also saved time on the way back by leaving the high ridge and dropping from the head of Little Dry Creek back into the main canyon, where she reconnected with the trail so she wouldn’t have to bushwhack back.
I was proud of how hard I’d worked, but it’s not the kind of hike I’d choose to do again. I’m in great shape, but hiking in steep loose rock is the hardest thing possible on my vulnerable foot. I could go faster on a healthy foot, but would I even want to?
Monday, March 22nd, 2021: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Snowshed, Southeast Arizona.
I’d taken last Sunday off, to break the pattern and give my troubled foot a rest. On my last Sunday hike I’d encountered a two-foot-deep snowfield at 9,500′ in our local mountains, but since then we’d had two weeks of warm weather. I figured that farther south, in the lower-elevation Chiricahuas, I could return to my favorite trail and climb to one of the peaks of the range. That trail goes through the “cold canyon” where snow accumulates deeper than anywhere else, and lingers longer. It’d been three months since I’d done that hike – in the winter, snow prevents me from doing the longer hikes with higher elevation, and I worry about losing conditioning.
But as soon as I crossed the pass south of town and got a view of the distant range, I could see there was still a lot of snow on the north slopes above 8,000′. I decided to change plans and hike to the “bleak saddle” instead. It’d be a long, hard hike, but with southeast exposure it should be snow-free, and if my energy lasted to the saddle, I might be able to continue up the nearby peak I hadn’t been able to reach last fall.
The forecast called for overcast skies and mild temperatures. From a distance, it looked like low clouds over the range were trying to drop some rain. But by the time I got to the trailhead, the sky had cleared, with only wisps of cloud.
I climbed the steep trail steadily, shedding outerwear, until midway along the 3-mile traverse, it was so warm I had to unbutton my shirt. It was probably in the 60s, and intermittantly gusty. Small black flying insects kept flushing out of my way, but the wind whipped them away so I couldn’t tell what they were.
Approaching the saddle I was feeling pretty sore and exhausted, and nearing the compression zone of strong wind that streams through saddles. I had to stop and squeeze into my sweater, and decided to put on my shell as well. The sky was now almost completely overcast, and the wind was so fierce and cold I had to pull up the hood immediately.
Despite being worn out, when I reached the trail junction on the bleak saddle, I decided to try the trail to the peak. It looked like the peak was close, a quarter mile and a few hundred feet above. I might not make it, but it would be more interesting than this bare, windy saddle.
There was actually no trail on the bare lower slope, only sporadic cairns and fallen logs placed as directional markers. The wind was so strong I was almost blown down at times. But after a few hundred yards, I found a distinct trail that had recently been cleared.
Then suddenly the cleared part ended. I could see the trail continuing ahead, but a thicket of aspen had been growing on it for at least five years, to a height of 8 or 10 feet.
Later, back home, I discovered the Chiricahua Trails website lists this trail as in “terrible” condition – the worst condition possible. But now that I’ve had plenty of experience bushwhacking and climbing over blowdown, I just kept going, pushing through the thickets, re-finding the trail on the other side.
As so often happens, the peak I’d seen from below turned out not to be the actual peak. Dozens of switchbacks, blocked by thickets or deadfall, led to a ridge that continued east for another half mile. Whereas the surrounding slopes had burned in the 2012 wildfire, a pocket of beautiful alpine forest had survived on this ridge. Otherwise I might’ve given up and turned back, especially when I reached an extensive blowdown blocking the trail 3/4 of the way along the ridge.
Past that, I finally saw the actual peak, a little hump at the far end of the ridge, where I flushed a white-tail buck that briefly stood, silhouetted, before dropping out of sight down the slope.
I expected the forest would block views from the peak, but it turned out I had good views due east and south. Making it all the way here, despite the way I’d felt at the saddle, seemed to recharge my energy. I started paying more attention to the beautiful forest.
This range crests a thousand feet lower than our mountains at home. It has only six peaks above 9,500′, five of them named – I’ve now climbed three of them. But it’s a Sky Island, and those peaks host tiny pockets, like this, of alpine spruce-fir forest like you find much farther north. With a warming climate, how much longer will they last?
According to the GPS data on Chiricahua Trails, this would be a 12-mile round-trip hike, with barely 4,000′ of accumulated elevation gain. But it took me nearly 8 hours – longer than any 14 to 16 mile hike I’ve done. That’s partly explained by the difficulties I had on the peak trail. But I still wonder about the accuracy of these GPS distances, especially older data like this.
On the way down I finally got a better look at the flying insects – they were small black butterflies with banded wings. Millions of them had recently metamorphosed in this range, despite the cool weather of early spring. They were having a hard time in the wind.
I was 1-1/4 hours late returning to the vehicle, but the time change gives me an extra hour of daylight. From the near-freezing wind chill of the high traverse, it got steadily warmer as I circled back and dropped into the dense oak forest of the trailhead canyon, where it felt like the mid-70s. Happily, despite the long day and the two-hour drive home, I got back just before dark.
