Miles of destruction, the land cremated; valleys pocked by scorched debris; green forests reduced to funerary pyres, black hills and mountains; and stubborn signs of life emerging from the ash.
This is what about 40 people confronted on a June tour of the year-old burn area left by the West Fork Complex. Lightning ignited the fire last summer. Eventually, a complex of three fires burned about 110,000 acres in the San Juan and Rio Grande national forests.
Bill Trimarco, coordinator of the FireWise Chapter for Archuleta County, said San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership spearheaded the tour to get a firsthand look at the damage the fire did to the wildlands with the goal of better understanding fire management and the fire’s consequences for people and the environment.
“The amount of acreage was just incredible,” he said. “To look at vast expanses of burnt-out forest, it was like a macabre cathedral, made of black sticks. But it was also good to see how quickly things are recovering. The grasses are coming back.”
Jimbo Buickerood of San Juan Citizens Alliance said even though the depredation wrought by the fire remains clear – parts of the burn look like a wasteland – the resilience of the ecosystem was even more remarkable to behold.
“There are already aspens that are 4 feet tall, and some just didn’t burn at all,” he said. “Aspen seeds are white and fluffy. You look up, and you can see them in the sky. In the natural regime, forests are a mosaic, which means diverse habitats with lots of tree species are a real strength.”
Humans have not rebounded as easily.
Trimarco said people on the tour from the Rio Grande Watershed Emergency Action Coordination Team told the group that the fire deeply wounded the towns of South Fork and Creede, and even a year later, the scars haven’t faded.
“The economic impacts were devastating. They’re still losing a lot of business from it,” he said. “This is something communities don’t understand. Even though only one structure – a small pump house in Creede – burned down, the impacts are long-term.
“In the aftermath, eight South Fork businesses closed up,” Trimarco said. “That’s huge for a town that size. Almost all their income is made in three months over the summer. The fire wiped all that out, and people don’t realize until years after.”
The unusual path blazed by the West Fork fire makes it especially compelling to fire managers.
“It was a really intriguing fire that by all accounts burned in a dramatic and unexpected manner,” said Aaron Kimple of the Mountain Studies Institute.
Indeed, the fire remains a chilling reminder of nature’s great danger and the limitations, and triumphs, of human effort to contain it.
The fire complex – a combination of the West Fork, Papoose and Windy Pass fires – caused authorities to order the evacuation of South Fork, required a crew of more than 1,400 to fight it and jumped from one national forest to another.
“The dynamics of the fire were unprecedented,” said Larry Floyd, assistant fire management officer for the Rio Grande National Forest in a press release. “We ran the typical models but had to adjust our calculations to maximize how well they represented actual conditions, and we still struggled to get the models to indicate what had happened on the ground.”
According to projections, based on complicated mathematical models, there was less than a 4 percent chance the fire would run into the valleys and jump the Continental Divide.
Yet, the fire defied probability, engulfed the Continental Divide and blazed through two national forests.
While the West Fork Complex defied firefighters’ expectations, Trimarco said history could easily repeat itself.
“The general public is under the impression that the West Fork fire happened because of beetle kill, but this kind of event happens every 100 years at that elevation,” he said. “And it could easily happen this summer with the lightning storms, even though it’s a little moister. Just as an example, we’ve had 68 fires in the last 12 days. The drought we’re still in and the high winds – 70 miles per hour – are what got that fire going.”
Buickerood said some experts worried during the tour about how the moose population was faring.
After the tour ended, he and his 14-year-old son, Quincy, went hiking and fishing.
“There were plenty of fish in the river,” he said. “Then, when we were coming back, we saw a moose standing right there, about 75 feet from where we’d been talking. The regeneration is just amazing.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
