Wildfire

Kenai Mountains – Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area

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The Kenai peninsula today captures a lot of Alaska’s tourism especially by boat, from fishing boats in Homer, to float trips on the Kenai river, to Kenai Fjord tour boats in Seward, to the Alaska Marine Highway in Whittier and cruise ships on their way to Anchorage. The greater area around Anchorage is flat in the river delta of the Cook Inlet surrounded by mountains. To get from Anchorage to the Kenai peninsula, you drive around the Turnagain Arm, a branch of the Cook Inlet with the highest tides in the US. Watch for the tidal bore and telltale mud flats.

This heritage area celebrates the various communities from Coopers Landing in the west with river and lake guides, to the port of Whittier in the east, to the Iditarod trail connecting Seward in the south to mountain resorts like Girdwood north near Anchorage. Girdwood has an appealing upscale hippy take on Alaska, with popular summer festivals and winter Nordic spa experiences. Honestly, compared to where I grew up, the history is a bit sparse, but the tiny museum in Seward includes Native American artifacts and relates engaging stories showcasing how tough Alaskans are, including surviving bear attacks, a 9.2 earthquake, winter and running incredible endurance races for fun.

Mostly, you need to appreciate just how wild and seasonal Alaska is, in order to have an enjoyable visit. Winter can extend well into May on the mountains, and the short summer season is frenetic, with locals working long hours while the sun shines. Major hotel chains and national franchises have trouble adapting to Alaska, as their business models don’t normally allow for months of darkness, closing up and waiting for the thaw. Local businesses adapt much better, using the ample open spaces to run strings of seasonal businesses, often following fish and wildlife. Small villages like Moose Pass on Trail Lake below in the middle of the heritage area hold small communities tightly together during winter and then open up to visitors in summer.

Life in Alaska is both simple and also nuanced in how in tune it is with nature. Unfortunately, our carbon pollution is changing the environment, helping cause a devastating forest fire in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge west of the heritage area. We need to respect our fascinating and fragile natural world more.

Klamath

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Until about a year ago, the valley above used to be called Iron Gate Lake. But the dam (far right) was removed to restore salmon to this stretch of the Klamath River in northern California. Four dams have been removed recently, and in May the local tribes began their traditional calls for the salmon to return. I believe the valley will now revert to its traditional name K’účasčas (or Fall Creek).

The Klamath is an important waterway, and there’s long been battles over its use. Above and below Klamath Falls in Oregon there are wildlife refuges for birds, but maybe 75% of the wetlands were lost when the water was diverted for agriculture. When traveling around Lava Beds and Tule Lake my car choked on clouds of locusts, and I saw few birds as the lower refuge was virtually dry.

Dams don’t increase the amount of water at all, but they do control when it is released and how it’s used. Besides the diversion of water into farms and factories, dams obviously block salmon, and the lowest remaining dam (near the CA-OR border) has a fish ladder that the salmon are unable to climb. Another problem the dams cause is warming the water in artificial lakes, which increases algae and disrupts the salmon’s cool water lifecycle.

Removing the dams is a step in the right direction, but the huge Klamath watershed still has a significant number of dams. The Klamath tributaries include the Salmon, Shasta and Trinity rivers and many creeks, with various artificial lakes. Logging and mining have also diminished the salmon, but I was able to find a delicious local steelhead fillet in Trinidad Head about an hour south of the mouth of the Klamath.

The even more serious and growing problem is wildfires. This year I drove along the Klamath through the forests to the sea. Much of the trip traveled through badly burned forests. The forests were noticeably healthier in tribal lands, where there is greater diversity of tree species due to less logging. In the middle of the trip, I saw the sign below in Happy Camp California on the banks of the Klamath, but surveying the damage, I was not a happy camper. The climate crisis is already devastating our public lands, despite all our efforts to protect them. We must stop burning so much carbon.

Giant Sequoia National Monument

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The US Forest Service manages this national monument inside the Sequoia National Forest in California. I took the photo on the popular Trail of 100 Giants in the south part of the monument, and you can see some of the fire damage from many huge carbon-pollution driven wildfires. Outside the monument, the devastation is far worse, and I drove through over 30 miles of fatally burned trees to get to the protected Giant Sequoia grove above.

Despite all the fossil fuel and timber industry attempts to avoid talking about the actual cause of the unprecedented new age of fire, it’s very clear that the climate surrounding these groves has changed dramatically due to man. The snow is on the ground for a much shorter period of time, the air and soil are drier, the temperature is higher and there’s even more wind and lightning. These trees evolved for cold, high altitude winters with lots of runoff all year long from snowmelt. On a hot day, a mature Giant Sequoia needs to consume 500 to 800 gallons of water. Today, the creek is tiny, the soil is very dry and the climate is much hotter than it was before the oil industry began. Forest fires, once limited to small areas in cold wet forests, now burn unprecedented huge areas, hotter than ever before, for a longer fire season than ever before. Make no mistake, the primary threat to these trees is our carbon pollution.

The few remaining multi-thousand year old Giant Sequoia are surrounded by giant stumps, where loggers once cut them down to make shingles and pencils, seen at places like Stump Meadows in the north part of the monument. Environmentalists began saving the groves, creating Sequoia National Park in 1890 and expanding the area over the years to protect more groves. Clinton made this grove a national monument in 2000. Now the forest service must treat the groves as special gardens, regularly removing other trees, spraying fire retardant in the area, wrapping famous trees with fire resistant tarps, and even using sprinklers and helicopters to spray thousands of gallons of water per day to protect specific trees from imminent fires.

I first visited the Trail of 100 Giants with my family many years ago, when we appreciated the stroller-friendly hiking trail. Years later, my grown kids wanted to stop here again, and I took the photo below on August 14, 2020. I remember saying how terribly dry everything was. A few days later, I was driving them north on I-5, and I watched the incredible lightning storm that sparked the SQF Complex fire that burned 171,000 acres around here, killing around 10,000 Giant Sequoias. I remember saying that it was the most lightning I had ever seen in my life. The next year there was the 98,000 acre Windy Fire, which killed 1,000 Giant Sequoias, and also the 88,000 acre KNP Complex Fire, which killed 2,000 Giant Sequoias. And the fires continue to threaten the last remaining groves, while we continue burning fossil fuel unnecessarily.

Kings Canyon National Park

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John Muir loved the view from Panoramic Point above, as did Stephen Mather, the first national parks director. I visited the park years ago with my family, and the scenery was stunning. Both the North Fork of the Kern and two forks of the Kings River are designated wild and scenic here.

But the view was less inspiring when I visited this summer. Smoke from a wildfire shrouds the view of Kings Canyon in the distance. You can hardly see the lake in the photo above. Behind me stand acres of dead trees burned in the huge wildfires of the past few years, and the main road into the heart of Kings Canyon wilderness was still closed this summer due to fire damage. If Muir & Mather visited now, they would be as heartbroken as I.

Experts employed at this California park have long argued influentially in favor of more fires, have implemented prescribed burns in forests across the west, and they chose to let the wildfire above burn itself out. Their dogma blamed past firefighters for causing today’s wildfires. Even though park rangers are not allowed to smoke, leave campfires unattended, burn out shelters in trees, or use fire to hunt, this park’s scientists used to argue that we needed those ‘Native American burn practices’ for forest health, even though these forests evolved without humans. Too many forest rangers and climate change deniers use this illogical nonsense to ignore and dismiss the danger of carbon. 

This year 46 million acres of wilderness forests burned in Canada in roadless wilderness areas consistently ignored by firefighters in the past. How could these wildfires have been caused by past ‘fire suppression’? The dogma is wrong. After the unprecedented recent wildfires, park scientists here have belatedly begun to recognize the predominant threat of climate change, far worse than any prior suppression errors. 

When Muir & Mather described the area, they did not remark on seeing any large areas of burned trees, made no note about any fires that regularly demolish many thousands or even a million acres every few years, and they did not write about the supposed benefits of Native Americans regularly setting fires while pelt hunting. Instead, they were inspired by the beauty of huge swaths of living forests and pledged to protect them forever. Scheduled fires, tree density limits, species removal, reseeding, and other human intervention are not what Stephen Mather had in mind when he called such places ‘untrammeled wilderness’. Muir would have harsh words against the ~$250 million annual timber sales in the forests he and Teddy Roosevelt protected. 

If Muir & Mather could return, they would notice that the whole forested range has changed dramatically, the air and ground are drier, the temperature is unseasonably hot, the rivers and creeks are dry, and that the snow is gone from the mountaintops. They would be dismayed by the decline of once abundant wildlife. Muir, who never rode in cars, preferring horses or hiking, would see the lines of buses, RVs and cars burning gasoline, and he would shout ‘STOP’!

In the future, doubtless people will be horrified to learn that in the face of climate change fueled wildfires, we chose to burn our remaining forests ourselves, releasing even more carbon into the air. It’s like using leeches to cure people, even though they make the patient weaker. Or like destroying the village to save it.

Forest science must face the future, not misrepresent the past. We need national policies to limit carbon pollution, not taxpayer-funded ‘prescribed burns’ that increase carbon pollution. If new conditions require fire breaks or dead trees need to be removed, then why can’t trees be cut down and buried with sand, instead of being burned? If certain types of trees will no longer survive in the future hotter climate, then we shouldn’t be paying people to plant seedlings for more of the same trees in the same places that burned down two years ago. We need to charge visitors in gas-burning vehicles a carbon surcharge to encourage people to switch to electric vehicles (and to mitigate some of the damage they do). 

We ended wilderness. Our carbon pollution is trammeling every species on earth. We have precious little time remaining to figure out how to save species before they go extinct forever.

“Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America.
Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan
go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.”

Harvey Broome, founder of the Wilderness Society

Yosemite National Park

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In 1859 John Muir built a Sugar Pine cabin some yards from the spot above and lived in the Valley for 2 years. Sugar Pines can live 500 years, so the decades John Muir spent saving this valley are just a fraction of their long lives. Muir saved Yosemite, lost neighboring Hetch Hetchy to a dam, and influenced Teddy Roosevelt who ended up protecting 150 million acres of forests nationally. Now the park is a World Heritage Site, with the Merced River running through Yosemite Valley and the headwaters of the Tuolumne River running through the meadows designated wild & scenic; it’s my favorite park for waterfalls. But in the near future, the crown jewel of John Muir’s legacy may still be lost forever.

Some species of trees still living here evolved in the Jurassic, long before the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs and millions of years before humans arrived. Millenia ago, natives started fires for hunting and agriculture, and over a century ago, the timber industry clear cut forests throughout the Sierra Nevadas. But humans now present a threat bigger than any logging or dam. Now the threat is carbon pollution, which dwarfs all others, even logging. Fires burn hotter, more frequently and many times larger, because we have changed our planet’s climate dramatically—and it’s still getting worse. Species here, despite evolving 1000 times earlier than humans, are now threatened with extinction by our vehicle exhaust.

10 years ago, the 250,000+ acre Rim Fire burned over 10% of Yosemite, killing many Sugar Pines and Sequoias that had survived fires for centuries or millennia. At the time, it was the second largest fire in California history. Now it doesn’t even make the top ten. I visited the park with my family before that fire, and the park was undamaged. Now, the park is still beautiful, but it is still scarred badly, with many areas still closed.

Yosemite Falls should not be so glorious in the photo above taken in July. The snow should still be on the mountain tops, melting slowly over many months. Instead, every decade is warmer than the last and the rate of temperature rise in increasing. The Lyell Glacier that Muir saw in Yosemite has lost over 95% of its mass, no longer moves and will be gone in a few years. Man has messed up the climate, and many of the species, including the largest trees, can no longer live here safely. And it’s not the fault of Smoky Bear telling people to put out their campfires, it’s the fault of people who continue to drive gas powered vehicles. And yet the park is full of them, blithely surveying the damage they contributed to and continue to cause. If I were in charge of the park service, I would convert the shuttle buses to electric and ban all fossil fuel vehicles.

Here are my visits to all parks in California.

Waterton Glacier International Peace Park

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Canada is to the left of the mountain with the historic Prince of Wales chalet on the far left bluff, and to the right is Glacier National Park in the US. This World Heritage Site includes both parks. Waterton village is accessed from Canada, uses Canadian dollars, but is mostly on US soil. Not that it matters. I saw no border officials here, and it indeed very peaceful. There’s a classy old tour boat which runs down into Montana, as well as camping and lots of interesting trails.

Unfortunately, there was a terrible forest fire here in 2017, and the only glacier above is far off in the distance to the right, a shadow of its former self and a reminder that we all must reduce our carbon footprint. I was happy to spend several hours charging my car at the marina’s destination charger, walking the shoreline, eating, trying the local beer and just soaking in the view above. I enjoyed my detour to Alberta’s five world heritage sites very much, and I didn’t have any trouble charging in Canada. The Tesla even converts the speed limit to mph, so you don’t need to do any math.

Here are my visits to all parks in Montana.

Tonto National Monument

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This cliff dwelling was protected by President Theodore Roosevelt, and the lake in the distance bears his name. My maternal grandfather used to read The Roosevelt Bears to me, and he loved the west, wildlife and birds in particular. So it was especially meaningful for me to wake up beside Apache Lake, spot a hooded oriole, and then drive up to the monument in the morning. Despite a wildfire and protective burns in 2019, the wildflowers were beautiful. Unlike Montezuma Castle, visitors can climb up to and stand in the main alcove to inspect the ruins.

Click to see my photos of all national park units in Arizona.