Post 24569
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Near my home on the slope of Long’s Peak are the records of an extraordinary succession of forest fires. During the last two hundred and fifty years eight large fires and numerous small ones have occurred. Each left a black, fire-engraved date-mark. The dates of some of these fires are 1675, 1707, 1753, 1781, 1842, 1864, 1878, 1885, and 1900. Each fire burned over from a few hundred to a few thousand acres. In part, nature promptly reforested after each fire; consequently some of the later fires swept over areas that had been burned over by the earlier ones. Here and there a fire-scarred tree, escaping with its life, lived on to preserve in its rings the date of the conflagration. In one old pine I found seven widely separated scars that told of seven different fires. In addition to the records in isolated trees, there were records also in many injured trees in groves that had survived and in ragged forest-edges where forest fires had stopped. An excellent check on the evidence given by the annual rings of fire-scarred trees was found in the age of the new tree-growth that came up in the fire-swept territory in which, or on the borders of which, were the telltale fire-injured trees.
Some fires swept so clean that they left behind no date of their ravages, but here and there the character of the forest and of the soil in which it stood made me feel certain that the growth had arisen from the ashes of a fire, and that I could tell the extent of the fire. In most localities the fire-killed forest is at once restored by nature. That ever enthusiastic sower, the wind, reseeds most burned areas within a year. Burns on the Western mountains commonly are covered with young lodge-pole or aspen within three years. There are a few dry wind-swept slopes or places left rocky for which years or even centuries may be required to re-earth and reforest.
Some members of the Pine Family endure fire much better than others. The “big tree,” the redwood, and the yellow and sugar pines will survive far hotter fires than their relatives, for their vitals are protected by a thick sheath of slow-burning bark. The Western yellow pine is one of the best fire-fighters in the forest world. Its vitals appear able to endure unusual heat without death, and it will survive fires that kill neighboring trees of other kinds. In old trees the trunk and large limbs are thickly covered with heat-and-fire-resisting bark. In examining a number of these old fellows that were at last laid low by snow or landslide or the axe, I found that some had triumphantly survived a number of fiery ordeals and two or three lightning-strokes. One pine of eight centuries carried the scars of four thunderbolts and seven wounds that were received from fires decades apart.