THE SLIDE FIRE GHOST TREES

The Slide Fire started just north of Slide Rock on May 20, 2014. Before it was contained sixteen days later it had consumed over 21,000 acres. A quarter of Oak Creek Canyon and parts of West Fork, East Pocket, Harding Point, Sterling Canyon and Howard Pocket had also burned.

For decades I had hiked and explored these places and I cried as I watched them being devoured by fire on the nightly news.  I understand that ground fire is important to keep a forest healthy,  but this fire had crowned and killed millions of trees.  It would not recover in my lifetime.

Two weeks after the Slide Fire I drove through the blackened forest. Most of the ground cover was gone, not a pine cone, blade of grass, fern or low branch remained. The forest floor had been swept clean. I found that the burn was worse than I had hoped but not as bad as I feared. At least in this area the fire had stayed on the ground and not crowned into the tops of the trees like many areas.

East Pocket

As I walked around the blacked tree trunks I found many large deep holes in the ground. They looked like giant footprints that some monstrously heavy dinosaur had left behind as it stomped through the forest. Some of there were nearly three feet deep. At first I thought they were animal burrows exposed when the forest detritus had burned away but there were too many, and they were too big. Then I thought maybe they had been dug by the fire-fighters but there weren't any piles of dirt or rocks scattered about. Then it dawned on me that they were burned out tree stumps.

Thousands of dead and dry stumps had been left behind after the old growth trees had been cut and dragged away by mule trains and railroad over a century ago.  Now with the brush and forest detritus burned away they became  even more noticeable by the voids they left.

I continued walking and came to the edge of a ravine and tributary to West Fork. There the fire had been much worse. Because of the steep slope the limbs had reached closer to the ground and the fire had climbed up the branches like a ladder and completely torched the trees.

I scaled down the ravine to the bottom. There the ash was ankle deep and rose in clouds as a shuffled along. Even after the fire had been out two weeks I could feel heat rising from the ground through the soles of my boots.

 Into the ravine.

  

I came to another stump hole but at this one I could see the ghostly image of the tree that had fallen next to it.  There wasn't any ash on the ground where the tree trunk had fallen and burned.  The white limestone soil was bare but had areas where it had turned pink from being baked by the intense heat. It was an eerie sight.  I think winds and updrafts created by the intensely hot fires is what removed the ashes from the stump holes and logs. 

The ghost tree.

Not even ash remained of the stump, trunk or limbs. 

I left the ravine and drove on to the end of the road where I found this sign, "E Pocket Lookout." It was half melted and the letters distorted like some 1960's psychedelic poster.  I was surprised, I didn't realize the sign was a plastic stencil.  I always thought those letters were painted on. 

I walked up to the road to the fire lookout tower to see if it had survived the blaze and it had. The attendant came down and admonished me for being in a closed area. He told me he remained there during the fire and how hard the fire-fighters had worked to save the tower.  It sounded like quite the scary ordeal.

East Pocket Lookout Tower

Four years after the fire I drove out to Harding Point.  It used to take about an hour to get there from highway 89A on Forest Service Road 535.  I took a chainsaw with me in case trees had fallen across the road.  Dozens had and it took me three hours to clear the road and drive there.  Thousands of dead black trees still stood and the ground had been taken over with tall, coarse grass and thorny brush.  It was ugly.   

SINKHOLES

A veneer of volcanoes and lava flows, known to geologists as the San Francisco Volcanic Field, cover an area fifty miles long and thirty miles wide around Flagstaff. Underneath all of it is a layer of limestone where sinkholes and caverns tend to form.

Orchid Paper

When I moved to Flagstaff in 1979 I found a job as a mechanic at Orchid Paper on Butler Avenue.  It is the same property where SCA Tissue is now.   At that time, next to the steam boiler in the manufacturing plant, was a drain pipe that dumped hot waste water down a natural opening in the ground twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  In the machine shop next door, there was an unnatural hole in the poured concrete floor where a six foot section of it had collapsed three feet into the earth.  There were orange cones around the hole to keep workers from walking into it.  In the four years I worked there it was never filled in, but I hope SCA would have repaired it and stopped dumping waste water into the ground when they took the business over.

Citadel Sinkhole

The Citadel Sinkhole is the largest sinkhole in the San Francisco Volcanic Field at 600 feet long, 350 feet wide and 170 feet deep.  Located inside the perimeter of Wupatki National Monument, hiking is not permitted into or around the sinkhole.  There is a trail to the Citadel Indian Pueblo which overlooks the massive pit.  



The sinkhole from the Citadel Pueblo looking south toward the San Francisco Peaks.

A cavern formed in the Kaibab Limestone at the very edge of an old lava flow.  The lava flow is the gray rock layer on top, the limestone is the white and red banded cliff below it.  For the floor of the sinkhole to be 170 feet deep, the limestone cavern had to have been at least that tall.  

Looking north toward the Citadel.

I wanted to walk to the Citadel overlook but a sign said no dogs allowed.  I wanted to walk my border collie so I drove a half mile further down the road and pulled to the shoulder and walked across cinders to this location.  When I returned to my vehicle park rangers were waiting for me.  They told me no cross country travel was allowed anywhere in the park.  They were very nice and only issued me a warning. 



Arrowhead Sinkhole

The Arrowhead Sinkhole is just outside the boundry line of Wupatki National Monument, so it is legal to drive to it and to hike there.  On the south side of the Antelope Hills Trading Post follow the dirt road next to the fence line heading east.  The is one short, rocky section you need a high clearance vehicle.  Follow the fence for three miles to the end of the road at the foot of a lava flow.  The sinkhole is on top of the hill.    

 Follow this road next to the Wupatki National Mounument boundry fence.

Hummm, which road to take?

After the rough section turn left on this road.

 The parking area at the bottom of the hill.

A short walk up the hill is Arrowhead Sink.

  

I found this sinkhole while exploring on Google Earth.

This sinkhole is 500 feet long by 150 feet wide and 130 feet deep.  Like Citadel Sinkhole this one also formed at the edge of a thick lava flow.  Neither lava flow had poured into the holes so the cavities in the limestone formed after the flows were in place and the roofs collapsed later.

The stratigraphy at the Arrowhead Sinkhole is typical of most of the San Francisco Volcanic Field.  This particular lava flow is about 80 feet thick but the lava gets thicker as you head west to the volcanic field around Williams. 

 For scale find the hiker standing at the bottom of the cliff.

South of Flagstaff the sinks are more numerous but smaller and some hold water in wet years.  There are also many stock tanks.  You can differentiate stock tanks from sinkholes by an earthen berm that encircles the tanks on the downhill side.   

Most of the sinks are found in areas were the limestone hasn't been covered by lava flows.  This suggests to me there are many more of them out there hidden from view underneath the patina of lava.  The lava is highly fractured by shrinkage cracks that formed as it cooled from a molten state, thus rain can easily find a way through it down to the limestone below.  Rain being acidic, particularly in our industrial society, dissolves the limestone.  To our advantage Arizona is an arid state and cavities from slowly.        

 Sinks

There are several shallow, dry sinks scattered throughout the forest southeast of Mountainaire.  They are mostly found in the grassy areas called 'parks' where trees don't seem to grow.  Maybe they are too soggy during the wet seasons.  There are also several sinks that hold water.



Saginaw Sink

Saginaw Sink is small and has clean water in it most of the time.  I have found it empty in the driest years.  It is located .4 miles southwest of the Flagstaff community of Mountainaire.

Quarry Sink

Quarry Sink has water in it during the winter and spring but dries up during the summer months.  It is located 300 feet east of Highway 89A, 1.9 miles south of the entrance to the Forest Highlands gated community.  It is hidden by pine trees and not easily seen from the highway.  You must crawl under a barbed wire fence to get to it.

 Crusher Sink.

Crusher Sink.

Crusher Sink is also near Highway 89A.  It is well hidden up the side of a hill overlooking an ugly, abandoned gravel mine.  It's 150 feet wide and always has water in it.  It's one of my favorite places to go to photograph dragonfly's and just relax.

Anderson Mesa Sinks

Anderson Mesa southeast of Flagstaff is a limestone horst bounded on the south side by the Anderson Mesa Fault and Lake Mary which lies in a graben.
  



There are many small lakes and ponds on top of the mesa that are being charged by water seeping through subterranean channels from Mt Elden and the San Francisco Peaks.  I believe most of these if not all are shallow sinks.  This would include Marshall Lake, Vail Lake, Deep Lake, Ashurst Lake and a dozen more smaller ones.

Anderson Mesa

IN MEMORY OF DAN DICKEY

Daniel Dickey in 1980

YouTube: Last Long Road (song for Dan)

The first time I met Dan was at  a swimming hole in Sedona called the Point in the summer of 1967. His family had moved from Fort Worth, Texas and bought a creek side property to open a tourist resort called Brookhaven.  It was just a hundred yards upstream from the Point.  We quickly became friends that summer swimming in Oak Creek and hiking the mountains around Sedona.  Dan taught me about hunting and I showed him how to do trick dives off the rope swing at the Point. When it was too cold to swim we spent hours at his house playing Spades and Cribbage.

Dan had a Texas drawl that I found interesting.  He loved football and the Dallas Cowboys.  He lifted weights in the basement of his house and stayed fit to play football for The Eagles at Flagstaff High School.  At school we didn't see much of each other, we didn't have any classes together and he stayed after school for football practice so we hung out with different crowds.

We both graduated from high school in the spring of 1970.  Dan found a job learning carpentry and I started working as a landscaper until 1971.  Then, to avoid the army draft we both went to Northern Arizona University as roommates.  We had little interest in school and partied too much and left after just one semester.  Dan stayed in the area and I wandered off to Detroit, Michigan where I worked in an automobile factory. Dan once showed up unexpectedly in Detroit to visit.  He drove all the way from Arizona in an old Ford pick-up truck with a wooden camper he had built on the back, complete with an asphalt shingled roof.

When I returned to Phoenix in 1975 Dan was still in the Sedona area.  The following year he and I lived in Jerome house-sitting for a friend that had gone traveling.  The house only had cold running water and an ancient wood cook stove.  If you needed to wash up there was a garden hose outside nailed to a wooden  post inside a bamboo stall.  We worked just enough to buy food and spent most of our days swimming in the Verde River and hiking around the Verde Valley.  In the fall I left to go backpacking in the Sierra's.

When I returned from California I moved to Phoenix.  At the time Dan was living in an old cabin on Oak Creek near the mouth of West Fork.  The front door was a hollowed out tree trunk cut in half length-wise and hug on hinges.  One interior wall was a giant basalt boulder.  It was a unique place and should have been saved as a historical structure, but it was torn down and replaced by a modern condo years later.

The log cabin on Oak Creek near the mouth of West Fork Canyon - 1977

Overlooking West Fork Canyon - 1977

By this time Dan was driving a red 1 ton flatbed truck with wooden side rails around the bed.  He told me a story how he had picked up an attractive woman hitchhiking on I-40 one time.  It turned out she was a dancer/stripper traveling from Las Vegas to Phoenix.  After some conversation in the cab she had climbed into the truck bed and danced her routine while Dan drove down the freeway back to Flagstaff.

In 1978 Dan moved to Mesa and worked as a carpenter setting concrete forms at the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant.  We would get together sporadically and go hiking and backpacking in Arizona and Colorado over the next several years.
   

The last time I saw him was the winter of 1984 when we cross-country skied into Locket Meadow at the San Francisco Mountians.  After that Dan moved to California and went to work for a contractor building apartments.  I spoke to him on the phone for the last time in 1990 then we lost track of each other.

In January of 2014 I was looking through some old slide photos and came across many of Dan taken during our adventures together.  I decided to look him up on the computer and I found an address for his parents living in Cottonwood.  I wrote a letter which was answered a month later by Dan's sister Cheryl.  She told me their parents Bruce and Juanita had both passed away years ago, and Dan had died on January 13th, 2012 in Cottonwood.

Dan was a kind and peaceful soul with an easy smile and a big laugh.  He was always willing to try what was difficult and he had no fear of heights.  He told me several times during his life that he was born a century to late.  He was serious about that and  I believed him.  He loved to read books about mountain men and cowboys and enjoyed movie westerns the most.

Rest in Peace 

Daniel Dickey

born 1951

died 1/13/2012

These photos are a record of some of the adventures we had, the miles we hiked and the mountains we climbed.  He was my friend and I have missed him.

The Inner Basin Ridge at the San Francisco Peaks - 1977


 On top of Humphreys Peak of the San Francisco Peaks - 1977

 
  Wing Mountain northwest of Flagstaff - 1977


 The Superstition Mountains - 1978 


 Reading a book in the Superstition Mountains - 1978


Emerald Lake, Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado - 1980


Free climbing - 1980





The San Juan Mountains -1980


 Camp at Rock Lake, altitude 11,900 feet - 1980


Box Canyon, Ouray, Colorado - 1980 


We cross-country skied into Locket Meadow, San Francisco Peaks - 1984
 There were many other hikes and adventures for which no photos exist.


I am a musician so in 2002 I wrote and recorded a song about Dan.

He loved the harmonica so I incorporated a harmonica into the song.   

It is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube music servers.

YouTube: Last Long Road

 

LAST LONG ROAD

© 2002

by Mark  Thomas

Sometimes you have a bad day

 when you don’t see no way

you can make it alone.

Days long, hard and rough.  

Just getting by is real tough

when there is no place that feels like home.

Can’t find a job and your spirits low.  

The woman you lost seems so long ago

far to restless to ever settle down.

Trucks broke down and your busted flat.  

Got no clue where the hell you’re at

on that highway out of town.

I can see from the lines in your face

 that everything and dream you chase is

always just a few more miles.

Stick out your thumb.  Get yourself a ride.  

Come and see me anytime.

Kick off your boots and stay a while.

I don’t have an answer which way to go.  

Won’t even pretend to know.

Might just ask for help from up above.

Hit your knees boy and start to pray.

   “Lord!  Help me through another day.”

Carry me down this last long road.

8-30-2016

Last week I had a dream about Dan:  My wife and I were standing in the front yard of our house.  An old primer gray pickup truck stopped on the street and Dan and a woman got out.  As they walked up to me Dan introduced the woman as his wife.  He and I said hello and we embraced then the dream ended.  I believe the dream was about my wish for him.

2-17-2018

Another dream of Dan:  He drove up to me in a blue super sports car and stopped.  He got out for a moment then got back in and tried to start the car but it wouldn't crank over.  I went over to look at it and found linkage attached to the door that if the door wasn't closed completely the car wouldn't start as a safety precaution.  I closed the door and Dan started the car and drove off.  A few minutes later he drove up again but this time he was driving some sort of yellow dune buggy.  He stopped but just sat there in the car looking very sad.  We didn't speak at all.