The wildfire season in California and Oregon has been even more extreme this year than last year which was itself considered to be extreme. Fortunately I have not been in harm's way during my hikes in the region but I have seen something of the power of these infernos.

 The photograph above shows the mighty granite outcrops of Castle Crags as seen from the Pacific Crest Trail hiking out of Castella to Mount Eddy in 2018. The haze is smoke which hung heavy in the air from a fire burning forty or fifty miles to the north. It added to the effort of that day's walking- uphill all the way, the air is thinner at these alpine elevations and I could feel the smoke in my lungs.

 The previous year I hiked a section of the PCT where it skirts around Crater Lake in Oregon. I came upon a section of the forest that been decimated by fire a number of years ago. None the less nature was renewing itself from the ground up.

 

 Wildflowers were carpeting what was previously the forest floor. The tree canopy would have shaded out this kind of growth but the soil is a repository of seeds waiting to germinate when conditions allow. It's worth bearing in mind that this part of the world has a fire ecology. It has always burned and always will and the endemic species have adapted to this over millennia.

 

 Indeed the earliest inhabitants used controlled burning as a tool. Above is Big Meadow near Lake Tahoe on the California/Nevada state line. That's the Tahoe Rim Trail going across it which I used to circumnavigate the Meiss Meadows Roadless Area in 2019. The Washoe Tribe lived round and about the lake before the continent was colonized and they were forced from their lands. They would set fire to the meadow periodically to encourage the regeneration of plants for food and medicine.

 Wildfires have become increasingly destructive for a number of reasons. One is that climate change is distorting the natural ecology of fire. Another is that so many people and settlements are in wildfire zones where once there would have been semi-migratory tribes. 

 Back in 2017 I visited Santa Rosa, an attractive town about an hour's drive from San Fransisco. Returning the following year it was shocking to be see whole neighbourhoods had been erased by the Tubbs Fire that burned across the Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties.

 On a similar note San Fransisco is a city I know well and it was disturbing to see the apocalyptic images of day turned to night by the smoke of huge conflagrations this year.