The first nearby one of the year. 100 acres instantly and at least one beautiful mountain ruined for the next decade+: https://alertwest.live/cam-console/8613
Near this in 2020 the state saw its two largest wildfires almost converge on Estes Park, one of the main tourist towns outside the main national park.
The skies have been smoky for weeks where I live. I try to limit how much time I spend outdoors because you can taste and smell the smoke, and it gives me headaches and makes my throat ache. It's a bad year for wildfires (again)
I'm working outdoors with the smoke from Alberta/California. I started seeing it last week and it gave me the same existential dread that responding to a cardiac arrest call did. The smoke in 2020 was so thick that it rained ash for weeks. In the time since this post the fire has spread from 100 to 247 acres so it has the potential to get big with our 20mph wind gusts today.
These big Wildfires are of course caused by poorly designed forest management and suppression of the smaller fires, which is supposed to provide safety for the human towns and residences close by, and enable commodification of the forest as a tourist site.
They won't, however, "ruin" a forest -- they're a natural part of forest renewal. They are good for the natural growth of local species. These forests may change after the fire but they'll be back, and better.
When I say ruin I mean in the context of climate change. The forests here aren't regenerating like they should because we keep swinging between weather extremes. Soil erosion and drought both heavily impact those natural cycles and prolong the regeneration by a couple decades if it doesn't just revert to open meadow. That's all in the context of a grossly underfunded local forest management programme. I'm a volunteer ranger in that area and there are only two full-time USFS rangers in the district covering the whole of the county this fire is in. The fire mitigation crews are either wildly underpaid, volunteers, or contracted by HOAs developing into the mountains. Restoration efforts are pretty much entirely volunteer-based and it's hard to plant a tree properly in such hostile degraded terrain.
They're very much a part of our natural ecological cycles but it's supposed to be low-grade fires coming through more infrequently. These burn higher, hotter, and in unhealthy forests which will have to regenerate under much more stress than the previous ones did.
Thank you (for this comment as well as for the work you do as a volunteer ranger). It's frustrating when people say "oh well, fire is just part of the natural cycle," which is true in a basic sense, but naive of the complexity of the situation and misunderstands that the fires now and the effects they have are not the same as even decades ago.
I've lived in the same general area of California all my life and have had to repeatedly evacuate due to fires. On average, I've had to evacuate every other year since 2017, but never once before that. (I almost had to again only a few days ago but the >100 acre fire was contained quickly enough that I was only under warning for a day.) As a result of those fires, the biomes in the area have been completely altered.
Yes, but, the biomes have been altered well before these fires by logging practices and misguided forest management*** that is meant to protect forests as commodities and settlements.
I agree that the forests won't return to their "natural" state, but they already weren't. They are and continue to be altered by capitalist human intervention regardless.
It sucks that these fires are so huge, because they are really dangerous. But it is important to recognize that traditional forest practices or pre-logging non-intervention is the only way to actually return the biomes to their "natural" state, if at all.
Edit: *** I don't mean that your forest management is misguided u/happybadger . I mean that most US forest management is not meant to forest regeneration, but meant to provide future log supply or prevent smaller, better fires for the "safety" of local residents.
No shit it's a result of capitalism. If you want to draw the line at logging practices instead of fires as being the ultimate culprit for permanent change, then... ok? Really it's climate change more broadly that is responsible for the decimation of local ecosystems including the fires, but none of that changes the fact that the fires are a sudden, drastic, and unalterable change to the biomes in an immediate way that the last century+ of logging is not. Logging practices and forest management may have paved the way (cynical pun not intended) for these hotter, larger, more destructive fires, but you can't tell me that the area I've lived in since the 80s wasn't drastically changed for the worse specifically as a result of the 2019 fires in an obvious before/after sort of way. Also, what you said "These forests may change after the fire but they'll be back, and better" is just wrong and contrary to your second comment.
Yes, it is climate change, that is true. But you seem to be ignoring the history of the forests in North America. Yes, the fires are worse now, due to climate change. But, they are also worse now due to fires having been suppressed by forest management over the last 70 years, which would have provided the natural renewal needed to keep a population of large, more fire-resistant trees, healthy underbrush, and a diversity of tree types, indicative of a healthy forest that is also specifically not helpful for logging stock.
I understand the fires change the forest immediately. No shit! It burns down! And then trees take years to grow back. Yeah it will be different. I think I'm not explaining my ideas well though, which is that it is the forest policies guided to maintain future logging stock that creates forests that are ready to burst into flames. This is worsened by climate change, and the fact that smaller fires have been suppressed for many decades to create safe areas for housing for people. It is this the combination of all of these things that has led to the situation we're all in with terrible fires.
None of this changes the idea that while the fires are dangerous to people (I hope that you and your house are ok!!), fires are in fact ok for forests. The forests that have been logged and replanted with fast growing pines are not healthy as it is. I don't see why it's a tragedy if they are refreshed and a new forest grows out of the amended soil. Many forests (I don't know yours exactly) were logged were replanted with pine monoculture of all the same age, which is a problem for biodiversity, does not support a healthy ecosystem as it is, and can lead to worse fires.
Obviously I'm not an expert here, and I can understand your frustration. I'm not looking for an argument, I just think that it simportant to recognize that it isn't forest fires that are ruining forests, the fire are the result of forests that are already "ruined" by a hundred years of poorly informed logging and forests management policies, that have decimated ecosystems and prepared monoculture forests ripe for big burns.
It's a grower, not a shower. That 100 acres was in the first hour. An hour later it had spread 140 more acres and the atmospheric conditions are really bad today. I'm used to the small ones that are likely to fizzle but this has the potential to become a much larger fire over the next week. The Cameron Peak fire just northwest of it was 208k acres in better conditions.
Edit: 864 acres now in the space of 7 hours. The smoke plume is now 30% of the sky while regional reservoirs have Chinook helicopters and tanker planes drawing water to pour on it. Winds are getting sketchy tonight so I'm ready to bug out at a moment's notice if the evac zone keeps growing closer.
