On cold mornings in camp there is the thermal imperative to keep moving and, even as I prepare my simple bowl of cereal and coffee, my eye casts about for tasks to be done close to hand. With the cereal finished I rinse the bowl and the pace of organization increases. I am on a long road trip and so while I would like to stay another night or two in this place the road and my next destination calls. My simple camp is organized and stowed between sips of coffee and watching the splendid sunrise over the high volcanic desert of Lava Beds National Park.
Until I looked on a map yesterday for a likely camping place I had never heard of this place. Once I arrived I was at first appalled for most of the park looked to be burned-over many years ago. The dark outcroppings of lava were interspersed with the blackened skeletons of pine, juniper, and manzanita.
This seems to be a more common sight lately. Two days earlier I was driving down the magnificent Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border and was shocked to see most of the Oregon side had been burned between Multnomah Falls and The Dalles. This gray furze of fir and spruce snags edged the upper part of the rim like an old man’s closely shorn head.
I have written before (and I am certainly not alone) how fires have become larger and more intense in the inter-mountain west. So they seem to follow me on my journeys. Last summer’s trip along the Bitterroot river in Montana revealed great patches of dead standing timber all along the valley.
As I drove about Lava Beds yesterday I did become enamoured with the place. I suppose in large part, as it reminded me of parts of my native Flagstaff. To the northeast of town the geology is dominated by extinct cinder cones that burned out around the time of the Norman Invasion of Britain 1066 AD. There the forest consists of ponderosa pine and juniper and pinion trees set in amongst lava flows and plains of cinders. The source of this in Arizona is a plume of hot magma within the mantle that created the San Francisco Peaks that stand 5000 feet over Flagstaff. As the crust moved west the plume pushed up small cinder cones and lava flows through weaknesses in the crust.
Here it is a wide open country with vast vistas across lava beds and out across what is left of Tule Lake. Cinder cones populate the area. Here in northern California the source is similar to Flagstaff except the source is the Medicine Lake shield volcano. Lava Beds the park is just the latest in a 500,000 year history of fire and geologic violence.
Lava Beds it is much like what I recall of Flagstaff. There is more lava here, the cinders tend to tan here rather than red and black but it has the same feeling of place. Here it is just as dry at high altitude. (4800 ft at Lava Beds vs 7000 ft in Flagstaff but Lava Beds is much further north which equalizes things in terms of climate.) Porous soil not allowing water to remain for long. One difference is that some of these lava flows are 500,000 years old while some are as young as the ones around Flagstaff. Here in late spring there is rich green grassland that covers the areas where fresh lava does not dominate and the elements have broken it down to a sandy cindery soil.
So part of the redemption of my first impression is due to this. Whenever the fire was, it was long enough ago that the grasses and flowers have now recovered. The trees have a much longer timespan to recover.
And so my eye turned to what was aesthetic. Fire, after all, is neutral as another element, though we think of destruction and extinction as it appears here. Hence the title Burned. I set about making terms with the fire and see if I could make some fine images not withstanding my earlier post about needing to learn a place. I feel here more at home.
The images are in the next post.