Morgan Territory Fire: After-fire Hike

[David]

A few weeks or so ago I posted some photos of the Morgan Territory Fire near my apartment. This photo shows smoke and fire over North Peak.



A week or so ago I hiked back into the area to see where those flames were coming from.I took my Pentax K-7, 31mm FA Limited, 77mm FA Limited, 50mm Sigma Macro, and Tamron-made Quantaray 70-300. I also snagged my variable ND 40-1,000 filter and 720nm IR filter. Here are some results.


IR-visible light merge. The dark area is North Peak's south face, where the flames in the first picture originated. I had thought the flames were coming from much higher up the mountain.


A cloud helped make Mount Diablo's main peak even darker, but this shows the fire reached further up the main peak than north Peak.


This is basically what all of the burn scar looks like: black and twisted stems from shrubs and trees. In seemingly random places, though, the fire left areas untouched. Some of the untouched areas made sense -- rock outcroppings protected individual plants, for instance. But others represented the fire simply splitting and moving around a patch.


Here, in infrared, living and burned trees appear the same. The burn scar is slightly darker here, but not jarringly so.


This infrared shot shows that the fire just stopped in the trees and left some roadside bushes alone.

But life is returning to the area, too. Turkey vultures flew overhead, though is fewer numbers than before the fire.


This scrub jay (I think) seemed to be doing just fine.


This grass had managed to regrow fairly well in just a couple of weeks.


And it wasn't the only grass to do so. In fact, many part of the burn scar already showed nascent signs of life.

In short, I was pretty surprised by how the area didn't seem as dead and lunar as I expected. I was surprised, though, that it still smelled like a campfire. And when I returned home, my clothes smelled of smoke.

[mo]

Nice reporting,I can imagine the smoke smell on your clothes.I am always amazed at how fast a burnt out area starts to regenerate after a fire....especially the grass.