Wildfires and wildflowers. The wildfire season has burned long and hard in California and Oregon this year. It's been quite widely reported in the UK and these accounts prompt me to consider some of my own observations concerning this phenomenon.
 Fortunately the closest I've come to an actual fire was my first day hiking in Castle Crags this year. A big blaze was developing about 50 miles to the north and a fair amount of smoke was blowing downwind, like a hazy day only the haze was smoke. I took advice at a Ranger Station; the fire was moving north and the trail to Mount Eddy runs south-west so there wasn't a safety issue.         
 In July 2017 I made a day trip from San Fransisco to Santa Rosa a couple of hours drive away. The town was hit by devastating wildfires several months later. I passed through the town again this summer and it was shocking to see that whole neighbourhoods had disappeared with only the foundations of houses and some scorched debris remaining.
 Rightly there's talk of man made factors like climate change influencing these events but it's important to bear in mind that many of these territories have what is sometimes referred to as a "fire ecology".
 I saw signs of this when I hiked near Crater Lake (also July 2017). The Klamath-Siskiou region traverses northern California and southern Oregon comprising a vast area of interconnected wildernesses of which the Crater Lake National Park is one. Following the Pacific Crest Trail to the west of the lake I came upon a large area of burned out forest, an expanse of charred of pine trees sticking up like blackened telegraph poles. This whole sector was becoming carpeted in wildflowers (Lupines in particular), as the forest floor regenerated from the ground up.
 Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a fire and ice ecology. When I arrived I couldn't access the PCT at first because the landscape was still under thick snow. Within a few days the snow had largely melted and already there were meadows blooming- another reason that these alpine areas can be so flowery is the very short season in which they have time to flourish.
 Back home a month later I noted a report that this section of trail had been closed due to a new wildfire burning further west caused by lightning. In autumn the snow began to fall once more; this is a very volatile landscape.
 The mountainous forests of this region have burned and regenerated many times over millennia. None the less human activity is increasingly a factor- case in point several of the huge fires in 2018 were caused by electrical faults. It has some bearing on the toll on life and property that more and more people are housed in what were the homelands of the indigenous semi-migratory tribes. Before European exploration and colonization what we now call California is estimated to have had somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 inhabitants. 40 million people now live there.