Fire

For many many decades, fire has fascinated me both scientifically and photographically, all the way back to graduate school in Colorado in the late 1970s. Even back then, the environmental models were predicting both an increase in both the intensity and number of fires per year in the American West associated with projected shifts in climate associated with the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Specific to this blogpost, my goals here are mostly to discuss fire as both a subject to photograph, and its influence on light quality. In places we may need to also discuss some climate science, botany, politics, and meteorology. Fire is a very thorny topic these days, especially after three weeks of the western U.S. being on fire, people all over the West Coast having to be prepared to evacuate on a moment's notice, and directives to stay in the house due to acutely elevated levels of particulates and ash suspended in the air.

Here in northern and central California, the first wave of major fires this summer were associated with a series of unseasonal lightning strikes, associated with a hurricane breaking up off the coast of Baja California, on August 16th and 17th. On August 16th, at 2:30AM, I was awakened by thunder and lightning strikes for close to an hour. With each lightning strike, my pale-yellow kitchen walls turned every imaginable shade comprised of blue, indigo or violet imaginable. Little did I know at that time, that fire and fire related issues would dominate our lives here right up until this present moment.

The following morning, I took off for an eight day backpacking trip above Mineral King at the south end of Sequoia National Park, actually unaware of the fires triggered the previous evening, but by the morning of August 20th, fifteen miles into the backcountry, smoke from over two hundred miles north began filtering into the Kaweah River drainage where I was camping. By the following evening, everything had that odd orange glow with the open shadows, the firelight. While I love shooting in this kind of light, this light always comes to tell a very sad story...

So, I decided to sit still the follow morning, and seriously consider bailing out of my trip, not only because of the smoke, but also because from the beginning of the trip watering up had been a problem. The southern Sierras had less than 40% of their normal rainfall the previous winter, a many small perennial water sources noted on the map were as dry as a bone. After lunch, I headed back north from Redwood Meadows, where I had been camping, with intent of coming out two days early. The photos from the rest of the trip are all bathed in either that orange firelight, with the disturbing open shadows, or that obscured warm gray light where visibility starts to deteriorate within a hundred feet. The photo above of the Sierra foothills northwest of Mineral King really illustrates the latter.

When I got home, the firelight persisted, but as the week went by a heatwave moved in, and forced the smoke out to sea and compressed it out over the Pacific Ocean. The photo that opens up this blogpost shows this total inversion of the smoke over the ocean up in Sonoma County. This was a mere respite from this situation, and on Wednesday morning this past week, the fog came in with the smoke riding on top of it. I awoke that morning to orange light so thick with ash that it was like night time the whole day.

Pretty unbelievable, huh? Ironically while looking like a badly done scene from a 60s sci fi movie, the air quality was just fine, as the ash was riding on top of the fog, not mixing with it. In actuality, the present conditions, fog and ash mixed together, while brighter, and more a sagging grayish yellow/orange is far more unhealthy, as the suspended ash is at ground level. The kitchen wall grid below clearly delineates the different types of firelight we have experienced this week; dark orange associated with the ash blotting out the sun, dense fog/ash at ground level which is brighter, and has a somewhat warm shift, and finally midday sun through the fog/ash which has the least shift into the orange. It is only under the latter conditions, that the actual pale-yellow of the walls is almost tonally accurate. Firelight is always warm, the only question is, JUST HOW WARM?

Since October 2013, I have on a regular basis photographed the Rim Fire Zone, both in Yosemite National Park, and in Stanislaus National Forest documenting both the initial conditions and the recovery of the area. At the time, it was the largest wildfire ever recorded in the Sierra Nevada. It was the kind of super fire first predicted by climate scientists and biologists back in the mid 1970s. In comparison to the last few weeks, that fire now seems almost meager, and it was a beast!!! Even seven years later, the damage from the fire is still quite obvious, and the recovery is slow. Not only is it slow, but what is setting up could possibly portend even more severe fires to come in the area.

While initially after a fire like this, scrub and chaparral are the initial plants to bloom along with explosions of spring wildflowers, as this was a transitional area to oak/conifer forests, the hope would be that the preexisting plant community would reestablish itself over time. However, where this area is going botanically is still unclear, but from my numerous trips into the area, it would appear young oaks are growing higher up the mountains than previously, and at least for now, outcompeting the young conifers until close to 4500 feet. This is significant because chaparral burns hotter than trees, oaks burn hotter than conifers...

It is my general sense our predicted future has arrived in the past few weeks, and our fires from here on in will begin earlier, be larger, burn hotter, and really require some real changes in all of our behavior, and public policy decisions. As soon as the Creek Fire, east of Fresno, comes under control, I plan to begin to document that area much in the same way I have worked in the Rim of the World area the last seven years.