High Sierra Topix

For the first time since the Dixie Fire I went for a short hike in the Caribou Wilderness. I wanted to see how much burn damage. The entire Wilderness is in the fire footprint.

Starting at the Caribou Trailhead on the east side, wife and I made our way to Emerald Lake. Although there are a few pockets of low damage and a few small islands of unburned, most of it is close to 100% mortality. Blackened dead trees with no understory. A few purple penstemons were still flowering, and some grasses here and there. Otherwise, totally denuded.
The trail has been cleared and downed trees bucked, Emerald Lake is still a pretty shade of green, but 2/3 of the shoreline is high severity burn. I originally wanted to make it to Gem Lake, but got discouraged and stopped at Emerald.

I know it will eventually come back, but not before I am too old to enjoy hiking there again. A couple of wet winters would help with the recovery. The climate models do not show a wet winter this year.

I may still try to fish some of the lakes, but it won't be the same.

Thanks Dave. I have been wondering about that area. We enjoyed a few trips there before the fire. Very sad to read your report.

So not only do we have more large burn areas in our backpacking regions, but that will then increase the pressure on those areas that are not burned.

Sad days indeed.

Areas that are recently burned look "hurt", something that we feel as much as see. The trick to our recovery after favorite locations are burned is to realize nature has cycles; that it behooves us to grow an appreciation for these stages in the cycle. In two or three years the former forested areas will revert to the shrub/meadow terrain cover. It may not be your beloved forest, but cultivating a taste for for these ecological transitions is similar to appreciating the desert regions.

Ed

The Caribou Wilderness will recover. The adjacent LVNP suffered less damage in the fire. Over the past few decades they conducted a series of low intensity control burns, manual thinnings, and had some large managed ignitions ('let burns'). As a result the forest mortality was less. The Caribou Wilderness has had a fire management plan since the early 1990s, but did not get any natural ignitions under the right conditions to have any effect.

Much of the Dixie Fire will transition to shrub. With climate change natural reforestation is not occurring. Previous fires in this area saw forest replaced by thick brushfields, mostly ceanothus. In contrast, where private landowners salvaged logged and replanted, there is a healthy productive early and mid seral forest. The untreated Forest Service lands are impenetrable brushfields. Brushfields are more susceptible to future fires. Without human intervention, these brushfields may get locked into a perpetual fire-shrub cycle and never become forest again. The Sierra Nevadas could eventually look like the mountains of southern California.
Because of the elevation, I am not sure much of the Caribou Wilderness will have ceanothus. Pinemat Manzanita and Chinquapin were the primary understory shrubs.
For scientifically unsound political reasons the FS will not be able to do very much salvage, and is mostly restricted to hazard tree removal along roads and around infrastructure. Salvage logging on FS lands generates the revenue that finances repair to trails, fisheries, wildlife habitat, reforestation, and other forest improvement projects. Without the funding from the salvaging, all the recovery work must await appropriated funding from Congress. Dead trees have a short period of time they are merchantable before insects and disease render it worthless except for biomass powerplants.