botanizing

Snow Still

At the edge of the Rocky Mountains, among the first rumples in the western land from low, round hills to high, steep hills that lie not in isolation, but in continuous ranges, we enter the woods. I want to walk in snow. We came here, only an hour’s drive from home, through the round hills and isolated mountains, where the land is high enough to have snow to take a short walk.

We walk uphill through one draw, then follow the trail southward to the next draw, where we are high enough above the bottom that we cannot see it through the trees. Others have been here before us, and they have compacted the snow on the trail. The walking is easy, although I feel the uphill steps and breathe deeply when we stop.

The woods are still. We hear no birds or other sounds. There is no wind, not even the slightest breeze. This stillness is possible only when the world chills and the woods become insulated by snow. Normally the slight sway of trees would cause them to creak, but the heavy weight of eight inches of snow stills them. This is a rare quiet. As we walk we hear only the crunch of our boots against the crust of snow and the depths of our breaths.

The trail forks at the ridge. Those who walked here before us went eastward, over ridge, and down to the bottom of the next drainage. The tracked trail goes that direction. We turn north to follow the ridge. Our trail is untracked, except for the prints of a solitary elk that preceded us up the trail, and our steps sink in the snow, which is here about ten inches deep. The fan-ends of cedar branches, weighted by snow, hang low over the trail—we must duck under these, and I inevitably brush against them, knocking back my fleece stocking cap or catching my shoulder on a limb, and loose snow from the branches falls down my neck. Shrub branches—many of ninebark that dangle frozen brown clusters of dried flowers—also hang low over the trail, and these I knock two or three times with my hiking pole to jar loose the snow, which falls in clumps, and the branches spring upward, allowing my easier passage. Old snags, mostly branchless, have fallen under the weight of snow or the wind of an earlier storm, and we must step over these. Another snag, weighted by the snow forms an arch over the trail—its top and bottom are set in snow and the top of the arch is higher than my nine-foot reach.

We walk back to the trailhead through a draw of cedar and western white pine. I look up from the trail to the passage ahead to see the brown butt and tail of an owl, low among the trees, fly into the forest. The owl, about 25 yards ahead of us, is completely silent. There is no sound of wind pushed beneath its wings or the flap of the wings. In two or three minutes we reach the place where owl had been. A ring of feathers lies on the trail arrayed, much like a target, with soft, gray down feathers in the middle and semiplumes at the edge of these. Now flightless, a few flight feathers lie among the others, where contour feathers—these banded in brown and black and edged in white—make up the margin of the ring. Amid the concentric rings of feathers there is a single red spot—an inch wide—of blood on the crust of snow. At the edge a stem-like smear of greenish yellow marks the spot where an intestine must have been ripped open. The body of the grouse is absent—held most likely in the unseen leading edge of the owl.

The draw is not as quiet as the deeper woods. Ravens kraak among the trees, and I hear wind whoosh through their wings, although I don’t see the birds. My stocking cap is pulled low over my eyes and the late afternoon light is growing dim. I hear the highway through the woods below us, although I cannot yet see it through the forest. The narrow highway is a passage through the woods and high hills at the edge of the mountains. It connects one logging town to another. They are small towns with few people. Few are travelling today, and the whir of a car is an infrequent break in the stillness of the woods.

* * *

The tree arch was photographed by Adrian.

Smoke and rain

The rains have begun.  Through this fall of fires and smoke, we have waited for the rains.  Those rains came last weekend as I sat with friends around a campfire—a controlled fire unlike those that burned in the mountains to the south, east, and west of us—and we let the rain fall upon us.

The smoke of forest fires drifted to us in the middle of August, and for two full months the sky held a smoke haze.  I could feel the smoke’s acrid thickness as I breathed, and it burned my eyes.  One of my colleagues told me that she had put in 30-day disposable contacts just before the smoke arrived in August, but she had not changed the contacts at 30 days because the smoke adhered to the lenses.  She did not want to change lenses only to have the new lenses fogged by smoke—she expected the rain within the 30 days of her disposable lenses—and that rain, she and all of the rest of us anticipated, would end the forest fires and clear the smoke.  But the rains were late.  Weeks late.  When my colleague told me about her 30-day disposable contact lenses, they had already been on her eyes for over 50 days.  The rains came when the 30-day disposable lenses had been on her eyes for 59 days.

I was with friends in the Lostine Valley of the Wallowa Mountains when the rains began.  We had planned to go to a favorite spot in the Bitterroot Mountains, but that spot and the river valleys we would travel to get there were filled with smoke.  One of us talked on the phone to a forest ranger, who told us there was no smoke in the Wallowa Mountains, and there was no fire ban in campsites so we could have a campfire to stay the evening chill.  Our direction for the weekend was changed, and we went to the Lostine Valley.

We arrived at the edge of darkness and set up our camp.  A few rain drops fell as we gathered wood for the fire.  Darkness and the night chill came quicker than the rain.  We put on layers of fleece, raincoats, and wore fleece hats.  The campfire blazed, and the rain came.  Our fire sizzled in the wet and made dense smoke that drifted eastward in the breeze of the cold, wet front.  We sat in chairs in a semicircle around the fire ring.  When the fire smoke coughed, catching us in its recoil, we leaned from the smoke—closing our eyes against its acrid burn.  Sometimes we had to move a chair to avoid the pooling of smoke.  We built the fire against smoke pools, and when the smoke behaved it blew steadily eastward, angling upward to the spruce canopy.  We could not control the rain as easily as fire or smoke.  We sat in the rain, letting it fall upon us, the fire keeping us comfortable in the combined chill of rain and night—it was a pleasure to think that this rain was ending the forest fires, ending the season of smoke.

In Muddy Creek

“Quick sand!” yelled a woman behind me.

My ankles had disappeared.

We had traversed a willow thicket on a sand bench above Muddy Creek.  I had walked at the very edge of the bench in the gap between the willows and the drop to the creek.  Others in the group had wandered through the thicket, pushing willows away from their shoulders and eyes.

The bench ended at a bend in the creek, leaving us on the flat, sand and cobble margin of the creek.   Canyon wall stood at the bend, cutting off passage on our side of the creek, and Scott, the leader of our group, said, “This is where you’ll decide whether you want to get your shoes wet.”  

The water in the creek was only a few inches deep.  Although hardly formidable, no one likes to think about hiking for the rest of the day with wet feet.  Some in our group sat on the sand to remove their boots.  I looked at the array of stones that stood above the water in the creek and planned a route.  The creek here was about 20 feet across, and there were well positioned stones covering about 14 of those feet.  I stepped the stones across the stream, keeping water from my feet.  I placed my right foot on the last stone, while my left foot stood a stone about two feet back. I pushed my right foot against its stone—where I would need firm footing to propel myself from it to the edge of the creek.  The stone wobbled.  Worse even than the wobble, the soles of my hiking shoes had a mud cake.  Without the mud on my shoes, I’d brave the wobble and probably splash my left foot in the shallow edge of the creek just inches shy of the water’s margin.  With mud on my shoe, I’d likely slip on the right foot stone when I pushed-off and end up with both feet in the creek while splashing water all over myself.  Rather than make the attempt, I reversed myself, stepping from stone to stone back to the beach where the others still talked and some were removing their shoes.

Where the canyon wall met the bend in the creek, the water channel was narrower.  I saw my route over a shiny mud margin to a cobble field, where the surfaces of the stones stood slightly above the water.  The cobbles didn’t cover the entire span of the creek, but I could walk the cobbles, getting only a little splash of water along the bottoms of my shoes, and then easily take the remaining span of creek in one long step.

That’s exactly what I did.  Or meant to do.  And attempted.  The mud at the margin of the creek was slippery near the canyon wall.  My balance wobbled.  The mud stuck and came up with my steps, slowing my motion and shortening my steps.  My first step to the cobble bed came up short as I slipped, and my left foot went in to water.  Then my right foot went into water and my arms came up for balance.  That’s when I sank, and woman behind me yelled.  She warned others not to follow me as I struggled and sank quickly.

When steady, I pulled one foot from the reddish gray matrix and stepped for the middle of the creek.  With one foot planted in water, I then pulled the other foot from the sandy mud.  I was pleased that both feet came out easily and with the shoes still on my feet.  My feet then were not only wet but also muddy.  I swished one and then the other in the water to clear as much of the mud as possible.  I stepped across the creek to the bank and walked to the grassy bench above the channel.  My feet squished and water bubbled from the mesh of my uppers.  I had at least solved the dilemma of how to make the many additional crossings of the creek that lay ahead—I would simply wade through the water.

This water was milky.  I expect light colored turbidity early in the season when the flow is higher and faster.  It seemed unusual in the fall, especially in a season and earlier summer that had received little rain.  The water also smelled.  It was a metallic smell—the odor of heavy metals.  Selenium surely.  Maybe arsenic and mercury.  Perhaps uranium.  This was not a creek to drink.  Not far up river, near the start of our hike, was the site of an old mine—a major mine—and we could see the fans of stone debris from the mines on the cliffs.  Was that disruption, the loosening of stone, the long-term dishevelment of the soil crusts and disturbance of the creek banks a source of the water’s milk and its strong scent?  I waded across the creek again. 

Muddy Creek has an honest name.  Mud margins alternated with cobbles.  The mud varied from flat and shiny to complex sculpted or incised forms.  Water run-off through mud made a complex topography of miniature hills and valleys.  Yellow sunlight reflected from the curves of the little mud hills.  The mud was mostly reddish brown, although the hilltops, drier than the mud vales, were gray or even bluish in shadows when I squatted beside them.  Where it met canyon wall, the mud was rippled from waves of water reflected back from the stone.  Where it dried, the mud cracked.  I find a shallow pool of gray mud that has cracked like a tree to have a main trunk and a canopy of branches.

We walked perhaps a mile or two with others of the group, and then we had lunch on a grassy bench.  After the good conversations of lunch, the others turned back, and we continued down the canyon.  We walked over the bench, down to the beach, and along the creek until the way was blocked by canyon wall at a bend in the channel.  There we crossed the creek by wading through the water.  On the far side, we climbed from channel to bench and walked on.  This was repeated over and over.  Bench to beach, cross creek, and climb to the next bench.  Walking Muddy Creek had a rhythm.

As we walked toward the southeast, the canyon deepened.  The high walls left only a narrow band of sky.  These walls were sheered to flat facets and shined from years of weathering.  Where they caught sun, they were warmly yellow.  Many facets had a dark patina of desert varnish and looked like leather patches amid more freshly exposed red stone.  There were panels of striped varnish—bands of siennas, umbers, and pinks—that made a painterly scene.  Sections of wall appeared to consist of laid bricks—orderly rectangles stacked one above the other in rows with a mortared dip between them.  My favorite sections of wall—these curved like a torso from ribs to back that rises over buttocks—held water pockets—fields of rounded holes in the flesh colored stone.  We walked until the canyon walls shortened and began, it seemed, to transition to hills—still reddish orange sandstone, but the walls became round-topped mounds, each somewhat separate, at least in their upper half, from each other.

When we turned back to return to camp, I began to walk up the creek.   Although shallow—hardly covering my ankles—I was surprised at the drag of the flowing water against my steps.  My muscles pulled against the water.  Walking upstream in the creek was not the best route for our return.  I took one more step and went from shoe-top water to shin-deep water, but worse than the water depth, I sank again in the sandy mud—quick mud.  I sank fast nearly to my knees.  Both legs were mired.  The water lapped my thighs.  As I tried to lift one leg and then the other I could feel the mud hold my shoes.  When I tried to lift my left leg, my right one sank.  A classic quick sand situation—sink quick to an awkward depth and then every movement takes you deeper.  I rocked my right foot, trying to loosen the mud hold, trying to keep my shoe on my foot.  It would be a long, long walk back to our campsite without my shoes.  I spread my toes to hold the shoe and rocked my right foot, and then I pulled slowly.  My right leg came out of the mud, and I stretched to plant it out of the mud without knowing where I might find solid footing.  Water splashed, and I wrenched but remained standing.  I began to repeat the process of rocking my left foot, toes splayed to hold my shoe, but with my legs now spread, my entire body rocked.  Back and forth, holding balance as I could.  Then I lifted, slowly and steadily, my left leg and it rose out of the mud.  I stepped for cobbles in shallow water.  My legs and shoes were coated in gray, gritty mud.  I swept water in my hands to clean my legs and swished my shoes in the creek.  When I tried to walk, I found ridges of mud pushed against the bottoms of my feet in my shoes.  I took off my shoes to wash out the mud, but the grit merely shifted its shape, flowing along the inner cushion of my shoe, and as the water drained the mud held, leaving patches of grit on my soles.  

A cottonwood idyll

Kane Creek meanders below high cliffs.  We walk out along a road that has been blasted from the cliff.  The view encourages us to look down on the course of the creek.  My gaze is drawn to the cottonwoods, whose upper branches shine feathery and white in the morning sun.  Although this morning is cool—even holding a sharp chill in the dense shade of the cliffs—I imagine the cottonwoods in a warmer season, when they offer a welcome shade beneath their clattering leaves.  There are no leaves on the trees in this season.  The cottonwoods’ leaves lie along the margin of the creek and in the erosional rills of the terraces that stand between the creek and cliffs.  The fallen leaves have mostly blackened, although occasionally I find one that has reddened as if infiltrated by sand.  I find one reddened leaf in a cage of prickly pear spines.   The cage is frosty, and the first light that comes over the eastern cliff gives the spines’ ice a blue glare.  Aside from the bluish ice, the pale, succulent green of the prickly pear skin, the blackened fallen leaves, and the white bark of the cottonwoods, this is a red world. The iron red cliffs erode to red sand, which is compacted in the terraces and relatively loose in the bed and banks of the creek.  Kane Creek appears to run red.  Even the brushy margin of tamarisk that lines the creek has a rubescent cast.

We cross the creek and climb a detrital fan of fallen stones below the cliff.  We look for petroglyphs, finding some on boulders and others that can be seen higher on the cliff face.  There have been hunters here in the past.  I suspect they may also have farmed.  On terraces below the cliffs, I imagine corn, bean and squash fields amid the boulders.  On hot days after a hunt or the cultivation of crops, I think about those people gathering under the cottonwoods along the creek for the cool water and the calming breeze.

Negro Bill Canyon

Water

We cross the creek repeatedly.  The channel meanders in the narrow bottom of the canyon.  Where the creek meets the sandstone wall of the canyon it has carved rounded alcoves.  Some of point bars have been stabilized—at least temporarily—by willows, alders, and oaks.  We walk through these thickets.  We walk up to the edge of the sandstone cliff of the canyon and cross over boulders and step down again among the sedges that line the creek.  We cross the creek.  The repeated crossings are not difficult.  The creek in this season is little more than a stride wide—in some spots it is two strides or even three.  Stones have been placed in the creek bottom to make crossings easy.  The stones are flat-topped and coated well with red sand from steps by many boots.  Neither the water’s width nor the stones matter much for the creek is only two or three inches deep.  I slip once from a stepping stone and plunge the toe of my boot into the water.   It doesn’t matter.

Stone

The color of the stone in this canyon is like the color of a person’s skin—it changes with perspective and light.  It changes with sky and time of day.  The stone’s skin can be beige or pink. Early in the morning or late in the day, the stone may be orange.

I find great delight in this sandstone.  Faces of the stone can weather smoothly and varnish black.  Fractures of the stone can be as sharp as wrinkles in an old face.   Facets of fractures would be cubist paintings—they could be vases or guitars or a nude’s face.  The facets hold different hues—orange, saffron, yellow—and their shades.  The colors seem painted by Picasso’s brush—you can see almost the brush work—the quick parallel strokes of shaded color on one side to lend the hint of form and the less clear strokes on the side of purer color where the facet seems to flatten.

The stone is cold.  We sit on a broad boulder in the amphitheater at Morning Glory bridge, but the chill is too great.  We retreat to a smaller enclosure—a space between a juniper and canyon wall—where we eat slices of summer sausage on savory crackers and gouda cheese on slices of honey crisp apple.  I am soon chilled and stiff from sitting on stone.  I shuffle awkwardly from the cold as we begin to walk down the canyon.

Canyon

This canyon opens to a larger canyon, which belongs to the Colorado River.   Steep, high walls follow the sinuous course of the Colorado.  Negro Bill Canyon is an opening in the Colorado River’s sandstone façade.  I would like to say that Negro Bill Canyon opens to the Colorado River.  Actually, it opens to a bend in busy Utah state highway 128 and a recently “improved” parking lot.  Beyond the highway, a thicket of tamarisk stands between the canyon mouth and the river.

The canyon has a small, narrow bottom. This bottom has lush sedge sweeps broken by boulders or sand bars.  The canyon wall curves to the bottom like a bulging belly.  There are high flat walls of black varnish or streaks of varnish that look like dumped buckets of coral red, salmon pink, maroon and shades between and beyond.  Above all of this is a sinuous rim, where the stone seem twisted around to be topped in turbans.

Sky

The slit of sky in the canyon is elusive.  It is too slim to be portentous.  Yet we watch the sky for signs of rain and time. We watch the sky change through the day.  The morning blue sky is cloudless and hopeful.  Our destination offers a dim gray sky that leaves no shadows, which is not a sign for dalliance.  Later, after we have walked a mile on terrace above the creek and below the alcove-cut walls, we find that blue sky has returned with cirrus fibratus clouds—a sign of rain but not too soon.   The canyon sky, no matter the color or clouds, is crossed by ubiquitous contrails; these serve as umbilici to civilization.

The sky mirrors the creek.  Each is a narrow band.  Each framed by stone.  Each curves along the canyon’s course.  For just a moment, where stone stills the stream and the canyon frames the pool, the water becomes sky.

Thicket

In a box branch of a canyon, we make our way through an oak thicket.  We must crouch to make our way along the faint trail of the thicket.  We hold back branches of the oaks from our faces to pass.

I hear steps across the creek.  Hooves thump.  Two deer.   They are slowed by the intermeshed branches of the oaks.  This would be the perfect spot for a mountain lion to ambush deer. 

When I was first in this canyon in 1978, we found a dead mountain lion.  It was early spring then, and we were exploring for plants on the sides of the canyon.   There was fresh growth of grasses, and their bright green leaves were long and their tips recurved.  Among the grasses we found the matted carcass—yet still with tawny brown fur—of the mountain lion.  It had probably died during the winter and might have lain for a month or more under snow.

Today, we have followed the fresh tracks of another mountain lion into this box branch of the canyon.  As we move slowly through the oak thicket —catching on branches, tripping on tangles of dried grass—I wonder whether the mountain lion watches my stumbles.

Thundering cliff

We’ve rented a house in Moab, Utah, for a few days.  On our first day, we drive up the Colorado River to Professor Valley to hike.  Although there was sun in the morning, clouds have come, and they hang close to the mesa-tops by the time we arrive at the trailhead.   A few raindrops fall as we shoulder our packs.  We walk over the sand and cobble hills and along a creek bed in a light mist.  Blackened cottonwood leaves that are spotted with mold lie like shingles on the creek margin.  Skeletons of last season’s penstemons and blazing stars, weathered to beige and dried to stiffness, stand along the creek.  The Indian rice grass—its leaves curved like scythes—has delicate fruit stalks that hold nothing—its ellipsoidal fruits have long fallen.

I have difficulty finding the trail, and we wander over hills and through ravine bottoms looking to intersect it.  Eventually, I see the ridgetop where I expect the trail. and we work toward it.  It is work to walk up the hills, then down, around junipers that block the ravine bottoms, over the bouldery edges of the ravine, and up the final ridge.  We find the trail.  We follow coyote tracks.  There are large prints and small—perhaps a mother and pup.

We climb among the iron-red hills.  A canyon has deepened below us, and hoodoos stand close on ridges above us.  Clouds have thickened and descended over the mesa-tops to obscure their high faces.  We are perhaps a mile from our destination and have entered the bottom of the cloud, where the mist is more persistent and more chilling. 

I hear a crack of thunder—sharp, then rumbling.  I look toward it—expecting lightning—half expecting the dark face and puffed cheeks of a storm god to look at us from the pass we are trying to reach.  Instead, I see a red cloud.  It expands from a high cliff face across the canyon from us.  The thunder was rock fall.  A slab has broken from the cliff and tumbled into rocks below, raising the loud crack, the cloud of red dust, and the rumble of falling stones. We watch the stones fall down a steep, narrow shoot in the fan of stone below the cliff face. How long does it last?  Long enough for my heart rate to raise and beat hard and fast.  A few seconds.  The dust cloud expands and dissipates in the mist.  We can see the oblong scar where the rock broke loose.  We see also the darker red trail of disturbed stone where the stones tumbled.

We continue to walk upward, but I am now very conscious of the cliffs directly above us.  I look from one detrital shoot to another where rocks have fallen repeatedly over the centuries.  How often do rocks fall?  How often do cliff faces fragment and send room size boulders tumbling down.  I look among the huge boulders that stand along the trail—each has fallen at some time and tumbled from the cliffs above us.  I wonder whether—if I heard another thunderous crack above me and saw stones coming down toward us—we could run for protection behind one of these large boulders.

Cloud driving

We have been driving through days filled by clouds.  Soon after we left home, we reached the margin of the plateau above the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers.  The valley of the rivers was filled with clouds, and the midday sun above them suffused the gauzy cloud body with yellow.  A hard yellow shine reflected from the upper arcs of some cloud billows.  The mill in the valley pumped smoke into the cloud.  The smoke seemed almost the source of the cloud mass, which was most dense and dark around the mill.  The smoke billows had brown shadows, and their sunlight was sulfurous.

We drove through mountains where the clouds lay like seas that spread across the sky to cover all or the peaks and ridgetops.  Among other mountains. the clouds meandered like rivers along the bases of ridges. 

Clouds hung on meadows and stood on willow tips above wetlands.  Old barns sagged it seemed under the mass of cloud.

We drove in and out of fog, slowing as needed or speeding up as allowed by cloud. 

It was nearly the end of our second day of driving before we saw the unobscured tops of mountains.  These were the round-topped peaks of the Black Pine Mountains, which stood on an ochre- and winter green-colored plain amid other nearby clouded ranges.  Their peaks and sinous side ridges caught an orangish-yellow light of the late day that edged through a pass of blue sky between broad, charcoalish clouds. 

Low clouds slept at the foot of the Black Pine Mountains, where the landscape rose between ranges.  We drove toward that rise of land, and soon we were in cloud.  Mist gathered on the windshield and our wipers, set to sweep periodically, made a squeaky scrape as they wiped away the drops of clouds.

Snow

As I lay in bed this morning, after the radio had come on, I listened to the list of school closures and could tell where the snow overnight had been heaviest.  There were towns along the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula and the northwestern most part of Washington, towns on the central coast just south of the Peninsula, and towns near the eastern end of the Columbia Gorge.  The schools were open in our area.  We had received only three inches of snow during the night.

I shoveled the driveway before going to work.  The snow was powdery and light.  It was easily scooped and pushed.

Watching the snow fall was one of my primary occupations through the afternoon as I worked at home with a computer on my lap.  The snowfall was heavy and continuous, except for a 15 or 20 minutes near 3.00 pm when the snowstorm had a respite.  After the break, the snowfall became heavier.

I looked forward to evening.  Darkness is different during a snowfall.  Light becomes caged between snowy ground and cloud-covered sky.  Street light reflects from both snowy ground and cloud to create a curious luminescence.  Unlike daylight, this snow light surrenders shadow, which makes it feel depth-less.  To walk at night in snow light, as a heavy snow falls, is to enter a pointillistic landscape in which one’s vision softens.  The snow, when as large as large as today, is dark, and it seems as if night itself has fractured and the darkness falls in flakes.

Fire

White trees stand on a ridgetop.  For a moment I think the trees and surrounding ground are covered in fresh snow.   The fall days have, however, been far too warm and dry for snow.  It must, I think, be the light—which is now growing low beyond the hills—that has made the trees white.  As I look at the trees, I realize they are neither ‘full’ nor conical as I would expect for spruce and Douglas fir.  The white trees are thin trunks.  They are skeletons stripped of foliage and branches.

 After we round a bend in the river, we see smoke rise from the forested flank of the hill at the end of the river’s reach.  There is a forest fire.  I realize that the white trees on the ridge top have been burned—their lightness and high albedo is surely a consequence of having their bark burned away to reveal the more reflective surface of pale wood.

We stop opposite where the fire burns on a hillside across the river.  Much of the hill’s high flank has burned.  Most of the trees in the burn are now boughless and consist only of trunk.  The high, burned flank looks open and airy even in the obscuring smoke.   The active core of fire, which is neither broad nor raging, is about halfway down the hill.  We cannot see flames, although the smoke that rises from the core glows orange.  Even though the fire is across the river from us, we can hear, above the sound of the water, the pop of resinous wood as trees burn.

 Fires in forests of the Selway drainage must occur almost annually.  Perhaps most years many start.  Most of these must be small—limited in acreage and days—and very few must be large.  Few stretches of forest along the river, where I have walked, lack signs of fire.  Blackened scars are common on the trunks of living trees and hollow bowls of burned-out trunks are hardly less common.  Some drainages above the river consist of old black snags of trees and remain largely barren of undergrowth.  These most devastating burns are startling.  They demonstrate the awesome subtractive power of forest fires, but they provide also ecological opportunity. 

 I do not think about the ecology of fire in these natural communities as either good or bad; I can do that only when I add humans to the communities or to the broader set of ecological relationships.  As I stand across the river from the fire today, I can feel safe from it—at least in a cautious manner.  Yet I can also look responsibly ahead to realize the potential danger and force of a fire in a forest.  I think of that danger sometimes when I travel deeply into a forest along some narrow, rocky road in the dry days of August.

We might have camped today at the end of the Selway road, but the smoke from the forest fire blows upriver through the campsite.  Instead of remaining close to the fire, we drive back down the river a few miles, where we expect to be well beyond the reach of smoke and fire, even if the winds this night should shift.