North of the Border
September 2007

Blazing Fires and a Brave Weed
by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

It's another summer of fires in southeastern British Columbia, surpassing even the hot and toasty season of 2003. After months of unusually high temperatures and only a fraction of normal precipitation, the forests here are a stage set for fires. Since July, I've been watching the smoky drama unfold. Lately, I've even wiped ash off my deck railing from a blaze that started just north of Metaline Falls in the Pend Oreille and swept quickly across the border.

For many decades, wildfires were fought aggressively by Canadian and American governments, both for the risk they posed to human populations and to protect the timber values of the forest. More recently, scientists have discovered that fires play an integral role in the function and biodiversity of many plant communities. Governments have decided to allow some fires to burn.

Recently, I took a hike into the remote sub-alpine forests of West Arm Provincial Park southeast of Nelson to see a landscape that burned in 2003. Given the fire's remote location, it spread for days without any intervention. Only once it approached the Whitewater Ski Resort and the communities of Harrop and Procter did the B.C. government begin to contain it.

Three years later, I scrambled along a high alpine ridge near Ymir Mountain that afforded me commanding views of the 8,000 hectares of burned, sub-alpine forest. The size of the fire zone took my breath away. That evening, I pitched a tent at its fringes and hiked in to take a closer look.

Decades of fire suppression, combined with other human-caused environmental change has backfired to create some of the most intense fires yet. Fire suppression supported the accumulation of what ecologists call "fuel load," dead, dying branches and trees, thick carpets of needles and cones, and other forest refuse.

I could see the effects of fire suppression around me, in the shattered remains of a forest that had clearly burned hot and hard. Mature sub-alpine fir and larch do not have a thick bark like the ponderosa pine to protect them from intense fires. Not a tree had survived. Some stood dead, their charred bark lying in heaps around them. Some had fallen hard into blackened graves.

A blaze of less magnitude can function in a largely positive way for the ecosystem, allowing some trees to survive at the crown or root. Fires release nutrients into the soil, making them available to sprouting plants. Some trees, most notably the lodgepole (also know as "black" or "jack" pine), even depend on regular fires to open cones for seed spreading.

Not so here. Everything dead, except for fireweed. This aptly named native plant seems to like the carbon-rich soil of a recovering fire zone. It spreads rapidly in the exposed, mineral-rich soil, both by seed and through the propagation of plantlets from the root. I saw and heard a host of flying insects in the flowers, as well as hummingbirds, though I yet saw no signs of larger birds or mammals.

Abundant and swaying bravely in the mountain wind, the fireweed is a pink torch that lights the way for a forest that will someday rise again, though full recovery in the short, sub-alpine growing season may take a while. I've marked my calendar for another hike in 2010, to see how things are coming along.

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes is the author of Geography of Memory and The Inner Green, coauthored by K. Linda Kivi. She lives in the West Kootenays of British Columbia.

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