Some Species Need Forest Fires to Survive : Plants Sprouting in Charred Oregon Woodland

Last summer, walls of flame roared down Silver Creek into the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in Oregon’s worst forest fire in 50 years.

But, as spring returns to this rugged country, plants, bushes and trees that have evolved to live with fire are sprouting among the charred ruins of the forest.

One spot of color among the shiny blacks and dull browns of burned trees is the pink flower of the Kalmiopsis bush, which grows only in this southern Oregon area.

Fire ‘Pretty Hot’

“The fire came up here pretty hot,” said Lee Webb, a wildlife biologist for the Siskiyou National Forest.

He and Tom Atzet, a U.S. Forest Service regional ecologist, were scrambling down a steep slope of crumbling rock to a canyon live oak marked with white flags.

Although madrone and sugar pine on this slope were killed by the fast-moving fire, a clump of Kalmiopsis survived, sheltered by the seared leaves of the canyon live oak, which died in the fire.

Some of the Kalmiopsis stems were seared, but a look at their roots with a magnifying glass showed that the critical cambium layer underneath the bark still lived.

The Kalmiopsis, discovered in the Siskiyou Mountains in 1930 by Portland pharmacist J. R. Leach and his wife, needs periodic fires to survive.

“It lives in some pretty rough places,” Webb said. “Maybe what happens is it lives where the fire doesn’t hit. You expect fire to burn places it’s been before.

Competitive Edge

“It grows in the harshest sites because it can’t compete. As things go on and sites become better, it loses ground to other plants. When the fire comes through and it is growing in these little sanctuaries, it has a competitive edge.”

The madrone trees that lay in the path of the fire as it ran up this slope have been killed above ground, but many of them show tiny green sprouts around the base of the trunk.

Throughout the North Kalmiopsis Roadless Area of the Siskiyou National Forest, these evergreen hardwoods, valued as clean-burning firewood, commonly are grouped in rings, evidence that fire has been a frequent visitor. Each time the sprouts come back after a fire, the ring grows wider.

Across the canyon on the south slopes of far ridges, broad bands of madrone show up distinctly as a lighter green this time of year because of the white blossoms at the tips of their branches.

The swaths of madrone show where fire burned its hottest in other fires many years before, killing the Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and sugar pine and allowing the hardy madrone to move in.

“Madrone is a pioneer,” Atzet said.

Burned Area Replanted

Where the fire overran the remains of a clear cut near Chinaman Hat, new Douglas fir seedlings already have been planted to grow a new forest.

But, in other parts of the Kalmiopsis, the forest is healing itself as loggers and environmentalists fight over whether to salvage the burned timber and replant the land or leave the job to Mother Nature.

Following a trail left by a surveying crew laying out a logging road through the fire-scarred forest near Chinaman Hat, Atzet stopped to dig out a fawn lily, also known as a trout lily, blooming where, just months before, fire seared the top of the soil with temperatures around 800 degrees.

“The lilies are just loving it,” Atzet said. “They store all their energy underground in this bulb. Whether there is a fire or not during the summer, it doesn’t care.

“We are finding that leachates from the ash left by the fire stimulate these things to grow. That gives them a competitive advantage (against plants knocked back by the fire). It’s a war out here for every bit of nitrogen and every bit of water.”

Atzet stopped again, to drill into the bulging bark of a cat-faced sugar pine. The cat face is a ring of bulging bark that has grown to heal a scar left by a fire. Because the healing bark is loaded with pitch, it tends to burn more intensely each time fire sweeps past, and the cat face grows.

“I’ve found trees here that are 200 years old that have burned four or five times,” Atzet said.

A Blaze Every 50 Years

By examining the old-growth trees, Atzet has found that fire returns to the Kalmiopsis an average of every 50 years.

“It could be 150 years or it could be 25, but the average is 50,” he said. “If we look at our records, we find that there was a fire in the Kalmiopsis area in the 1930s, so this one was right on schedule.”

Atzet initially was confused when the rings of trees growing close to one another showed fire scars in the same years, but trees on a nearby ridge didn’t.

“In my own biased mind, I thought that fire had to be uniform over hundreds of acres,” he said.

But a look at the far ridges that burned last year shows that fire moves in tongues, burning up slopes, stopping at ridge tops, killing some trees, sparing others.

Throughout the 47,000 acres outside the Kalmiopsis Wilderness charred by the Silver Creek fire, less than 10% suffered the kind of high-intensity burn that leaves nothing but blackened sticks and ash.

Low-Intensity Fire

More than half was low-intensity fire that creeps through the decaying vegetable matter on the forest floor but leaves the big trees alive.

The rest was in between.

“Nature provides diversity,” Atzet said.