Post 00390
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Two prospectors were found at work in a spruce forest near which the fire started but which it did not reach for a week. These men said that, an hour or so after a thunder-shower of a few days before, one of the brown beetle-killed pines had sent up a smoke-column. Apparently lightning had struck this tree. The following day a small fire was burning near it. This expanded into the forest fire. Commonly it is a standing dead tree that is set on fire by the lightning, but the bolt sometimes fires accumulated trash around the roots where it enters the earth.
Within this extensive burn the trees had stood from thirty to one hundred and forty feet high and from two hundred to three thousand to the acre, and they were from thirty to four hundred and fifty years old. A majority were about two centuries old. The predominating kinds were yellow pine, Douglas spruce, Engelmann spruce, and aspen. Different altitudes, forest fires, and a variety of slope-exposures, along with the peculiar characteristics of each species, had distributed these in almost pure stands, an area of each kind to itself. There was some overlapping and mixing, but lodge-pole pine noticeably stood by itself.
Where first encountered, this fire was roaring through a thick second growth of lodge-pole pine. Scattered through this young growth were hundreds of dead and limbless trees killed by a fire of thirty years before. The preservative effect of their fiery death had kept these great pillars sound, though they had become checked and weathered. They burned slowly, and that night while the fire-front was storming a ridge, these columns spread sparks and flames from split sides, or as gigantic candles blazed only at the top. Yellow pines and Douglas spruces killed in an intensely hot fire are so cooked and preserved that they will resist weathering or rot for decades. I have seen a few of these pitchy broken fellows standing erect in the depth of a century-old second generation of forest with the arms of the living trees about and above them.