I couldn’t miss seeing the green, since for the last two hours I had been in the land of black and brown, black trees, black and brown soil, with occasional orange, which I learned was from clay having been burned. The few times I looked up from my work recovering the Pioneer Gulch trail, I could, if I stared hard enough, see some distant green across a valley through and behind the silent black trees around me. There were perhaps a dozen green plants growing in a pile of large rocks. Presumably the relative lack of fuel here plus the rocks helping to protect soil and moisture allowed the seeds to germinate. The leaves looked familiar but I couldn’t identify them.
We were working in the post-fire zone on Pioneer Gulch Trail, in and adjoining the Diamond Peak Wilderness. The 208 fire burned 11,263 acres (about 17 square miles) between mid-July and the end of October 2024, when it was contained. Lightning caused, it was never a danger to property, but it burned wilderness in which we had worked for several years along the west side of Diamond Peak, well below the 8700 foot summit and the 1000 foot lower treeline, but high enough above the surrounding valleys, where beautiful Happy, Blue, and Corrigan Lakes were all in the burn zone. I had been on the trail several times but recognized nothing.
The official burned zone is not always a blackened moonscape. Fire footprints are a mosaic, where there can be surviving trees and ground cleared of downed brush. The Rebel Fire in 2017 cleared out the forest floor nicely. The place looks good. The 2018 Terwilliger Fire was another example of a mosaic.
Unfortunately, this part of the 208 fire had burned hot, and all the trees had burned. Pioneer Gulch climbs steeply 1100 feet in 1.3 miles and is used by climbers to access Diamond Peak. The Middle Fork Ranger District made restoring the trail a priority for us. We had finished our bridge and trail building on the Middle Fork Trail the week before and finally finished Cloverpatch work three days earlier. Those two trail jobs occupied 41 work days for me alone, although I missed out on three or four. Our job here was to cut the downed logs, remove them, find and repair the trail.
By working virtually every inch of the trail, we could make it visible for hikers. Burns kill roots, which disappear, leaving tunnels in the ground that can collapse under a hiker’s weight. They often move logs and rocks to where we don’t want them, like on the trail.
Seven months earlier, we worked on Bunchgrass Trail 30 miles north, two years after the Cedar Creek Fire. That was a moonscape with minimal regrowth and soil like powder, easy to dig in but difficult to find something solid below that would qualify as a trail. Here, there was a hard packed trail with frequent large holes, where the trail had disappeared. We filled the larger holes with rocks and then found nearby dirt to cover them, not unlike the approach to building a ramp to a bridge. Some places, the trail had eroded or would soon erode, so we moved it back into the hill a foot or more. Other places it was difficult to see the trail, but sometimes looking where a trail might be allowed us to find it. I used a Rinehart tool, a cross between a hoe and a shovel that had been bent 90 degrees. We had a Pick Mattock, a cross between a pick axe and a Pulaski, and other digging tools: Travis, McLeod, Rogue Hoe and a square shovel. I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but the Rinehart worked fine. It could dig, acted as a small shovel, could cut many roots which were destroyed by the fire, lever moderate logs off the trail, and tamp down my fill dirt. It was light and easy to carry, doubled as a walking stick.
As we ascended, we found more trees that had survived the fire, so there was some shade. It would take us two work days to repair the trail, and we would need to do the same further south on Rockpile Trail, as well as the connector trail between Pioneer Gulch and Rockpile, and south of that junction with an east-west Forest Service road, ending a series of trails that started at Salt Creek Falls, 20 trail miles, 65 road miles away.
A short while later about ten yards past the group of plants, I had an “of course” moment when I saw one more living plant with similar leaves as the others, but this time blooming, immediately recognizable as a Bleeding Heart.
Bleeding heart plants (Lamprocapnos spectabilis)
Boreal B[l]og 