It rained last night, big time. I woke up at 3 a.m. to the sound of water hitting our house’s metal roof, pouring off the eaves and splashing onto the deck. It was a blissful awakening, even at that hour, because it meant the effective end of our 2020 fire season. We had made it through a risky summer of too many tourists and too many new campsites established in dry grass and brush. A chance lightning strike or an unattended campfire would no longer turn our green valley to ash, our lives into reconstruction projects.
The fire ten miles out Highway 21 from Stanley is in the mop-up stages. Human-caused, it burned 2300 acres over five days and turned both sides of the highway into vistas of bare black lodgepole trunks. Julie and I drove out to see the damage, in part because we had cut firewood there earlier in the summer.
We should have cut more. Everyone who was cutting firewood should have cut more, because all the dead and dry trees had burned up, and they had kept the fire expanding faster and further than it would have if they had earlier been carted off to a winter woodpile.
The Forest Service is in the awkward position of having to treat dead trees as forest resources when in fact they’re sitting on thousands of acres of unexploded bombs. Decades of putting out fires have meant the fuel that’s built up, when it does catch fire, burns so hot it sterilizes the soil. Cheat grass and other invasive species colonize the burned areas.
A climate that’s getting warmer, precipitation that comes all at once on the rare occasions it does come, and policies that focus on managing increasing numbers of tourists rather than resources all mean that the Sawtooth National Recreation Area is going to burn and keep burning as long as there are dense, deadwood-rich forests inside its perimeter. Once it does burn, it leaves viewsheds of rock and sand backgrounded by smoke-dimmed dry mountains.
The scar of a decade-old human-caused fire, across from where Fourth of July Creek hits the Salmon River, now exists as a barren heat-island: 300 acres of black and white trunks occupying a bare landscape of granite and decomposed granite, one where new trees will not grow, and where the winter’s snow leaves a month early. It’s an ugly sight: barren, monochrome, and life-poor, compared to what it was before it burned.
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This morning’s air is cold and clear. Clouds remain in the sky from last night’s storm, and the fogbank that forms over Redfish Lake on fall mornings has kept us from seeing Heyburn and Braxon Peaks. To the south, we can see mountains with snow on them. Now and then unfiltered sunlight hits us, and its warmth is unexpected and welcome.
The morning’s news is about the nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and about Donald Trump’s insistence that if he loses the election, it will be because of Deep State fraud. The right-wing Proud Boys are demonstrating in Portland, along with left-wing counterdemonstrators. Brain-eating amoebas are in a Texas city’s water supply.
Also, Idaho’s COVID-19 one-day cases have hit 601, close to the record. Also, Boise State’s athletic department is focusing on mental health issues of its athletes due to “the uncertainty of sports during a pandemic.” That uncertainty has increased this morning, with the news that BSU will have a football season after all, subject to the players in its league staying healthy, a couple of state quarantines being lifted, and no superspreading events resulting from tailgate parties.
Uncertainty in sports or anything else can’t compete with the beauty of the world this morning and the joy that Julie and I find in being alive in it for one more day.
If beauty in the world is one of the things that keeps us sane, it occurs to me that we shouldn’t keep setting our forests on fire.
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Last Sunday we parked our car at the backcountry lot at Redfish, hoisted our packs on our backs, and started walking up the Fishhook Creek Trail. The trail ends in a mass of deadfall at the wilderness boundary. The microclimate downwind from Thompson and Horstmann Peaks has produced a rainforest along the creek, an oasis in the Idaho desert.
We kept going, stepping over logs and wading through alders, avoiding the boggy spots where we could, all the way to where the canyon walls get vertical. It’s only three or four miles on the map, but it’s longer on the ground.
In places the deadfall was so thick we had to backtrack and try a different route. In other places we climbed up steep hillsides, only to find ourselves high above the game trail we were trying to follow. We ended up doing a couple of miles on steep and shifting talus slopes, side-hilling through dwarf aspen and avalanche debris. Fatigue became a factor. Knees and ankles became factors. We started thinking about things in our packs we probably could have left at home.
It was a six-hour slog to our destination, a lake with beaches of glacially-polished rock in a high hanging valley. We set up the tent in a place where the soil was deep enough to hold tent stakes, rolled out our pads and sleeping bags, and cooked a quick dinner. We were asleep by nine. Ten hours later it was light again. Julie got up and made coffee, and I, awakened by the smell of it, put on enough warm clothes that I could leave the tent, stumble over to our kitchen site, and beg a cup from her.
By the second cup, the sun was hitting our campsite, and the temperature was finally above freezing. Mist drifted across the lake. A meadow glowed red, green and orange on the far shore. Above the meadow, a jumble of glinting talus, and the high sunlit cliffs of the northern horizon. Above the cliffs, a cloudless dark blue sky.
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Counting backtracks and circles, we covered the distance of a marathon on our trek, although it took us three days rather than three hours. Once we got beyond maintained trails, we saw no other people or evidence of people.
In spite of this summer’s huge increase of visitors to the valley, the high backcountry has stayed mostly intact. The mountain meadows still hold enough water to stay spring-like all summer long. Occasionally, if a cold front comes through from Canada, it will rain in the high peaks even when it stays dry in Sawtooth Valley. It’s a delicate biosphere up there, but it’s a biosphere that still looks much as it did a century ago.
That’s not true of Sawtooth and Goat Lakes, or Alpine Lake above Redfish, or Hell Roaring Lake, or Cabin Creek Lakes. All these have become sacrifice areas, places so impacted by human presence that they’ve become artificial environments.
At Saddleback Lakes, an easy day hike from the shuttle-boat dock at the end of Redfish, the lack of an official trail has resulted in a kind of stock driveway, a beaten path fifty feet wide. The same thing has happened on the way to Goat Lake above Stanley. At some point it becomes less damaging to the wild to construct a real trail, even if it means blasting one out of solid rock.
We passed by Alpine Lake on our way down to the Redfish Creek Trail and the shuttle dock. It was going to be our lunch spot, but the lakeside logs had been polished by too many butts, and the forest floor was a barren stretch of lifeless dirt all the way to the edge of the lake. A few years ago, the Forest Service had attempted to get green things growing there again by fencing off overused campsites with crime-scene tape. Now the tape was gone, and fires had been banned on the lakeshore, but the crime scene remained.
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We reached the shuttle dock at 3 p.m. Seventeen people were waiting before us, and when the Lodge trimaran arrived we packed it to capacity. After three days on foot, it felt good to stand on a boat deck and watch the world go by, courtesy of an internal-combustion engine. But it also felt a little like living in an oxymoron, being packed on a boat with other masked nature-seekers, headed for a car in a wilderness parking lot, in a once-unspoiled valley now filled with giant houses, recreational vehicles, motels and hotels and a 300-person fire camp. Sawtooth Valley has become a great human swarm, mostly caused by people trying to escape the even greater human swarms of cities and suburbs.
Coming back into a human swarm of any size was a shock. I walked the quarter-mile to the wilderness parking lot. I got our car and drove it to the Lodge parking lot, and happily found a parking spot next to our backpacks. Julie had ordered margaritas from the bar.
We sat at one of the outdoor tables long enough to drink them, but it was hard to relax. Being out in the wild might have been good for our sanity, but when we looked at our fellow humans, it was hard to see them as benign creatures. They didn’t look entirely stable to us, and they looked enough like us that the resemblance was disturbing.
These were people who were deeply damaging the natural world that they depended on for food and oxygen and mental health. Julie and I, for all our low-impact camping, had our own internal combustion engine, pumping greenhouse gases into the biosphere. Besides, if you counted the environmental cost of our packs and sleeping pads and stove and freeze-dried food and down-filled bags, Kindle and phone and emergency first-aid supplies, our camping wasn’t low-impact.
We were just as crazy as everybody else. At least we hadn’t had kids.
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A few radical thinkers have suggested that civilization itself is a psychosis, and that if you’re sane, you better not act that way or you’ll end up in a locked ward supervised by Nurse Ratched. Listening to the election news on NPR on our way home from Redfish didn’t do much to contradict that suggestion. Three days of wandering through terrain unmarked by humans had shown us that it’s not easy to leave civilization or its mindset. It takes effort, and, at my age, pain, to get to a place where there’s some kind of bedrock to reality, even if the human touch reduces it to—well—bedrock.