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.