Public Policy, Typology, and Visual Outcomes
Well it looks like our terrible fire season may finally be over as of the last couple of weeks. We had our first real rains two weeks ago on11/26/19, and it has been raining on and off since then. Over recent years, our late summers/autumns have been pretty rough with large wildfires that go on for weeks and wreak havoc on communities all across Northern California. Even if you are not in an actual fire zone, the winds and the smoke are no fun, even at a distance. The photo above is from a very recent shoot east of Healdsburg, about 75 miles north of San Francisco, taken a few weeks ago in the Kincade Fire zone. This fire burned for weeks, and was only finally totally contained about four weeks ago. It would appear due to changes in our winter rain patterns, warmer temperatures general over the last decade or two, shifts in our autumn winds, and delayed electrical infrastructure maintenance issues this may be our new normal.
My interest in photographing fire zones seriously began about seven or eight years ago, however the concept of global warming has been floating about in my mind since the mid 1970s when I was in graduate school studying zoology, and the predictive models were first generated. The mega fires we have experienced in California over the last decade were predicted even back then. I had been on a backpacking trip in the central Sierra Nevada east of Madera, CA, and we had been deep in the backcountry for over a week. On the day we exited near Lake, Edison there was not a cloud in sky, however as we drove down the mountain back towards civilization, over a hundred miles to the north, a giant isolated cloud climbed for miles into the sky. I remember my friend and I looking at each other, and thinking, "big big trouble...". This was the Rim Fire, located on the western border of Yosemite National Park and Stanislaus National Forest, and it burned for close to two months until October 2013. While at the time we did not know it, this was to be the most extensive Sierra Nevada wildfire in the recorded history of California.
In October 2013, when sections of the fire zone were initially reopened to the public, I drove up to the area to do my baseline photography of the area. Besides just wanting to see how it looked, my primary goal was to identify specific locales I would want to return to to photograph over the next decade. My idea to was track changes specific to different habitat types within the fire's footprint. The grid of photos above are from the first two trips up to the area in October and December, 2018. The footprint of the rim fire was extremely extensive, and it had burned irregularly in a somewhat tentacle like fashion. Accordingly, it took two three day trips up there for me to even begin to wrap my mind around the geography of this disaster. The photos in the 2013 grid above are from the Rim of the World Overlook above the Tuolomne River, Evergreen Road/Hetch Hetchy Area, and the western edge of Yosemite National Park north of Highway 120. The reason I settled on these areas was the degree of burn damage, but also areas that might actually allow for a series of interesting landscape photos over time due to vantage point, acute initial damage level, or extensive forest cover. As much as possible, I have tried to take the exact same photos every time I have been back up there to survey the fire zone. n some cases this sight selection process has worked out well, but in other cases not so... And that is the essence of this blogpost.
The "not so(s)" in this case fall into three categories:
1- Initial, or medium term, ground growth obscuring initial viewpoints
2- Species changes associated with altitude/climate change that obscure the vista.
3- How differing federal agencies manage fire zones after a major burn
The first two on the list above are biology, and from the outset the goal of the project was concerned with tracking those changes, and photographing a landscape alien to most people. UGLY was never a concern; the idea was to monitor a view from a specific locale over time, and wherever it went was OK with me. Visual chaos was never a concern either; that is evolution in process. An example of this situation is the photo of the scorched canyon of the Tuolomne River above. For the last three years this view has totally been obscured by scrubby vegetation twelve to fifteen feet high. You can hear the river a thousand feet below, but sure cannot see it through the wall of scrub, and high grasses.
However, differing federal agency post-fire policies really blindsided me. Dumb David! The Rim Fire zone encompassed both National Park Service (NPS) and National Forest Service (NFS) areas, and each agency manages fire zones quite differently. In general, the NPS leaves burn areas alone unless a specific tree is a danger to the public, while the NFS tends to cut down trees that may still have some market value as they are a more oriented towards natural resource extraction and management . Visually this second policy has led to some amazing outcomes I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams back in 2013 when I first mapped out the area. Above are two pictures from Evergreen Road from the exact same location near Camp Mather, west of Hetch Hetchy, exactly six years apart. About two years ago, they started logging out this area. First they started deep into the meadow, and then slowly removed every tree between the ridge line and the road. Accordingly, two years later this grassy meadow flecked with violet wildflowers is the momentary outcome. It is close to impossible to even imagine this could even be the same piece of land.
