The first thing you notice in this fire-scarred forest is the color. Not long ago this square of land south of Yellowstone National Park was a monochrome of ash and burned pines. But last summer, shin-high seedlings and aspen shoots painted the ground an electric green. Purple fireweed and blood-red buffalo berries sprouted around blackened logs. Yellow arnicas danced in the breeze. Five years after 2016’s Berry fire chewed through 33 square miles of Wyoming, this slice of scorched earth was responding to fire as Rocky Mountain forests have for millennia: It had entered a season of rebirth.
Monica Turner was cataloging that recovery. On a sweltering July day, Turner, a professor of ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shuffled along a line of tape she’d stretched 50 meters across the ground. She and a graduate student were counting every lodgepole pine seedling within a meter on either side. We were far enough from paved roads that there was no telling which forest inhabitants might be lurking—elk, deer, moose, wolves. The air was so hot I wondered fleetingly if the bear spray canister on Turner’s hip might explode.
Fires in the past two years killed up to a fifth of the largest sequoias
So many tiny trunks crowded the researchers’ feet that covering a distance they normally would walk in seconds took almost an hour. In the end they counted 2,286 baby trees in an area half the size of a tennis court. This spot was producing 70,000 pines an acre. “This is what lodgepole pines do,” Turner said. “They come back gangbusters.”
Yet the previous day, in a neighboring patch of burned timber, Turner had documented something unsettling. Instead of a river of new pine seedlings, the ground was a mix of flowers, grasses, and caked earth. Aspens were there, but so were invasive grasses and sour weeds. Along one 50-meter tract, Turner had spotted just 16 baby pines; on another, only nine. All told, this patch was producing fewer than one-fiftieth as many young conifers as its neighbor.
The two patches of forest were almost identical. Before the Berry fire, both sites had burned around the time of the Civil War. But one distinction set them apart. The site with fewer pines had burned another time as well, in 2000. Trees that sprouted after that fire had not yet matured to produce enough seeds before being wiped out in 2016. In this place, rather than reseeding the pine forest, the Berry fire was resculpting the landscape into something new, perhaps for centuries or even millennia.
