Earlier this summer I managed to juggle some time off to go four wheel driving and exploring in Washington state and the back country discovery route. This is a very remote area, which follows Mountain ridge line. We started from Portland Oregon travelling north east to the Canadian border.
As this was so remote it meant we had to carry everything from drinking water to tents, etc. The adventure took us through many types of terrain, from deep forest to open arid desert, and we also explored areas which had been destroyed by a wild fire. Some of the areas had been burned as recent as two years ago and others five plus.
From my experience when a fire sweeps through a forest it destroys everything but, the greenery will eventually grow back. It's a lot like looking at life and death at the same time. It's like a display of history in the forest. What I did learn was in some of these burnt areas, some of the older Douglas fir trees have survive as they have thicker bark, but the fire does clean the forest floor and it made us feel like being an alien in the forest. It has the isolation and remoteness that not many people would experience.
Fires in the landscape can be a good thing like in Australia, there the bush fires are a natural cycle in nature and are needed for regeneration of species. But here in North America they destroy just about everything and can take decades before they recover, and in most cases need human intervention for replanting. We need to think about putting a value on trees that are alive and not cut down.
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