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An Understanding of Fire
In 2018, we took a three week vacation to California, during which we road tripped around a good chunk of the northern part of the state, spent six days horseback (muleback, in my case) riding in the mountains…
…and ran headlong into fire season. The photo above was taken in Yosemite National Park two days before the Ferguson Fire forced the closure of most of the park. That haze isn’t fog.
That haze is smoke. The Ferguson Fire started near the Savage Trading Post area in Sierra National Forest on July 13, 2018. By the time it was contained on August 19 (yes, over a month later) it had burned 96,901 acres. It wasn’t declared inactive (that is to say out) until September 19, 2018.
And these kinds of fires are becoming more common. Two months after the Ferguson Fire, the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise.
Burning the West
When the white settlers went west, they thought they knew how to farm. After all, their ancestors had been farming in Europe for centuries, and in the eastern part of the United States, similar tactics worked.
They planted trees as windbreaks, they drove out the indigenous people…and they doused any fires the second they started.
In the western Prairie, this accelerated the destruction of grasslands. (Yes, the…