WOLF CREEK PASS – To anyone who could have withstood the thousand-degree heat on June 20, a ravine above the Big Meadows Campground would have been a blur of orange, yellow and red as the West Fork Fire raced through.
Today, it is all pink, black and green, with the burned sticks of the spruce trees hanging above a carpet of fireweed in bloom.
It has been a long, long, long time since anyone saw these colors here.
It was long before bell bottoms and the Beatles. Long before the Second World War and the First. Before Mark Twain, the Emancipation Proclamation or the Declaration of Independence.
High-altitude spruce forests are slow to yield to fire, and slow to return.
“They’re really not fire-adapted,” said Mike Blakeman, spokesman for Rio Grande National Forest and a forest education specialist. “They don’t burn that often, so it takes a long time for them to recover to a spruce fir forest again.”
The forest’s recovery from the West Fork Complex of fires will look different in different areas, depending on how the fire behaved.
The fire burned in patches. So if a stand of spruce trees was left alive, it can provide a seed source for a nearby burned area, Blakeman said. Aspen trees might colonize slopes that were dominated by pines until this summer. In their shade, spruce can grow and take over once the new aspen die, more than a century from now.
But other patches in thoroughly burned areas are likely to end up as meadows.
“Over time, the meadow will disappear. The spruce will encroach on it and fill it in. But that’s centuries,” Blakeman said.
The forest already had changed forever before the fire, thanks to an outbreak of spruce beetles that killed almost all of the Englemann spruce trees wider than 5 inches.
Those dead trees carried the fire well, but contrary to conventional wisdom, fire behavior specialists don’t think they made the West Fork Fire worse.
“We can’t blame the fire on the dead spruce. It was really the weather that pushed this fire along,” Blakeman said. “This fire probably would have happened if the trees were still green.”
In the short term, floods are likely. The forest will be a dangerous place on windy days, as trees tip over or their charred tips fall off.
But an initial damage report by the Forest Service estimates only 11 percent of the fire burned at a high intensity, meaning that life will take hold quickly in much of the burn zone.
Standing in a drainage that’s now lush with willows and fireweed, Rio Grande Deputy Forest Supervisor Adam Mendonca is witnessing a rare sight: the beginning of a new life-cycle for the forest.
“Although we had a very hot fire, we’re starting to see some good things coming up,” Mendonca said.
jhanel@durangoherald.com
