I recently had a work trip to the Midwest, and my return flight (Denver to Redding) took me right over the Feather River Watershed and the massive 2021 and 2024 Dixie and Park Fire burn scars. This was the first time I’d been on this particular transect of a landscape that I know really well, and it was an incredible 30 minutes of my life. The video, below, mixes my view from the airplane with satellite imagery and fire history maps to tell some stories about the area, and to show the extent of these two fires’ impacts on the forested landscapes of Northeastern California.
The forests of the Upper Feather River have changed immeasurably during my 30 years of working there. Since 2020, over 70% of the 2 million acre Feather River Watershed has experienced wildfire. Many of these fires have burned with high severity, often re-burning areas that we recovering from previous fires. Some areas in the Feather River Canyon, or on the east side of the ‘Escarpment’ (the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains which comprises the eastern boundary or headwaters of the Feather River), have burned as many as five or six times in the past century.
This is a difficult place to try and make sense of fire behavior, fire effects or fire ecology. The conditions within the burn scars are the result of complex interactions between factors including previous land uses (logging, mining, grazing, tree farming), terrain, and the weather and fuel moisture conditions during the time when each fire arrived. Without knowing a lot about each of these factors, it can be hard to figure out why a particular area burned hot, while just a quarter mile away, the fire effects are something completely different.
It’s hard to know what we should do next, when it comes to managing these lands. Many things we’ve tried in the past (including planting a lot of trees, or doing nothing, after a fire) haven’t held up when the next fire comes. And it’s easy to prescribe short-term solutions, forgetting that anything we start doing (tree planting, thinning, burning), we’ll have to keep on top of forever.
If anything, I think we need to build a common language to describe the new landscape we find ourselves presented with. There are still some intact forests to be found within the burns, and I think anyone who cares about forests needs to learn where these places are, and advocate for work we can do to make sure these ‘green islands’ survive the fires that are still to come. The Feather River is fire country. We can’t pretend another one isn’t coming soon. In the meantime, we can thin, burn, and tend to the places we care most about.