SIFTING THROUGH THE ASHES

BY ANNETTE MCGIVNEY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN BURCHAM FIRST THERE WAS THE FIRE. Then there was the flood. Even in Arizona, a state that has experienced more than its share of devastating fires and floods, this was a natural disaster of almost biblical proportions.

On June 20, 2010, the embers from an abandoned campfire in Northern Arizona's Coconino National Forest took flight and ignited surrounding brush. When the first fire crew arrived at the location near Schultz Tank north of Flagstaff, the blaze encompassed 2 acres. But 50 mph wind gusts soon overpowered the crew, and the fire jumped the road, caught the crowns of trees and exploded into a fast-moving inferno as it barreled across the San Francisco Peaks' steep eastern flank. By nightfall, the Schultz Fire had grown to approximately 8,000 acres. And by the time the blaze was fully contained 10 days later, it had consumed more than 15,000 acres of national forest in the heart of one of Arizona's most popular recreation areas.

But the fire wasn't the worst of it. On July 20, an epic monsoon storm dumped 1.78 inches of rain on the peaks in 45 minutes. Nearly 1 inch fell in 10 minutes. The vegetation and topsoil on the mountain normally act like a sponge that soaks up rain, but the unnaturally hot fire had cooked the surface and turned once-luscious meadows and forests into a water-repellent parking lot. Some 30 million gallons of water, along with a torrent of ash, debris and boulders as big as Volkswagens, rolled off the peaks and into residential areas below. The flash flood engulfed homes that had been evacuated during the fire just weeks before, and, most tragically, a 12-year-old girl walking along a normally dry drainage in the forest was swept away and drowned.

"The whole mountainside came apart," says Dan Neary, a research hydrologist and soil scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station. "It was a monumental erosion event that had not occurred on that scale in 1,000 years." Neary estimates the last time the San Francisco Peaks were reshaped on the level of what happened during the summer of 2010 was before nearby Sunset Crater Volcano erupted in the 11th century.

Forest Service contractors and volunteers have individually planted approximately 100,000 ponderosa-pine seedlings in the devastation zone. The effort began immediately after the fire.

On the first day of the Schultz Fire, I stood in my front yard in downtown Flagstaff and watched in disbelief as an orangeand-black mushroom cloud billowed hundreds of feet into the sky. In the next few years after the disaster, when I drove U.S. Route 89 past the peaks, I could barely stand to look at the gaping wound on the east side of the mountain. No matter the season, the slopes were always brown. And I didn't have the heart to hike there and witness the devastation up close. But I could stay away for only so long. By the summer of 2014, as I drove on the highway and studied the peaks from a mile away, I glimpsed tiny patches of green amid the brown. I thought of one of my favorite quotes from Helen Keller: "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." Could there possibly be something good, I wondered, arising out of something so terrible? I would have to get much closer to the suffering to find out.

The LITTLE BEAR TRAIL, on the northeast side of Mount Elden, is about a mile from the Schultz Fire's ignition point. Soon after the blaze started, the fire charged through the wind tunnel of Schultz Pass and came down hard here, devouring nearly 100 percent of the vegetation around the upper reaches of the trail and along nearby Schultz Pass Road (Forest Road 420). "On the first day, the fire cooked the mountain," says Andy Stevenson, a silviculturist with the Coconino National Forest's Flagstaff Ranger District who has been heading up landscaperestoration efforts after the fire. "The heat was so intense, it cracked rocks."

Much of what burned that day was an unnaturally hot "high intensity" inferno that destroyed everything in its path and, in the words of Stevenson, left a "totally denuded, 4,000-acre hole" in the forest.

Under a cloudless sky one morning in August 2014, I am following Stevenson into the hole. We are hiking the Little Bear Trail and donning hard hats to guard (at least a little) from falling trees. Before we get to the burn area, Stevenson points out what he considers the signs of an unhealthy forest that contributed to the highly destructive nature of the Schultz Fire. The trees are spindly and closely spaced, and the forest floor is filled with dead and downed trees like a rag soaked in gasoline, waiting for a flame.

As we make our way up the trail, we repeatedly scramble around deep gullies that were carved by flash floods in July and August 2010. In one place, a narrow gash cuts down 4 feet and is filled with microwave-size boulders that tumbled down the mountain. Higher up on the peaks, where the slopes are nearly straight up in some places, the erosion is even worse. In these severely burned areas, the topsoil has completely washed away and gullies slice deep into the mountain, eroding all the way to bedrock.

around deep gullies that were carved by flash floods in July and August 2010. In one place, a narrow gash cuts down 4 feet and is filled with microwave-size boulders that tumbled down the mountain. Higher up on the peaks, where the slopes are nearly straight up in some places, the erosion is even worse. In these severely burned areas, the topsoil has completely washed away and gullies slice deep into the mountain, eroding all the way to bedrock.

In the years after the fire, volunteer trail crews worked diligently to restore the Weatherford, Little Elden and Little Bear trails, which had been washed out and littered with charred, fallen trees. "This used to be a giant boulder field until the volunteers moved the rocks," Stevenson says as we walk over a newly constructed drainage crossing. (While all the trails were reopened, a 2013 monsoon event washed out the Little Bear Trail, which now is closed again until funding to restore it is secured.) Climbing up a hillside, we are surrounded by black snags that look like telephone poles, but the ground is profusely green, filled with invasive weeds, native grasses and the occasional wildflower. Stevenson explains that the heat from a fire even an unnaturally intense one releases nutrients from the soil, which jump-starts the revegetation process.

"The grasses are coming back here more than I've seen in the past," he says. "Right after the fire, pronghorns even came into this area from Sunset Crater to graze, which I have never seen before."

However, Stevenson points out that the fire hit ponderosa pines especially hard. The slow-growing conifers are designed to tolerate moderate-intensity fires that move through the forest floor without disturbing the forest crown. Ponderosas were decimated in the 4,000-acre, high-severity hole left by the Schultz Fire, so Stevenson is carrying out an ambitious replanting program. Forest Service contractors and volunteers have individually planted approximately 100,000 ponderosa-pine seedlings in the devastation zone. The effort began immediately after the fire, with Forest Service staff growing trees in greenhouses from seeds collected years before the blaze. It takes a full year of tending in just-right conditions to coax the seedlings to the stage where they're ready for planting. And once they're in the ground, there are other challenges.

After our hike, Stevenson and I check on some of the ponderosas planted in 2013. Each seedling is covered with a 2-foottall plastic cone intended to give the baby pines a fighting chance against elk, which are enjoying the bounty of greenery after the fire.

"Oh, man! Here's a dead one!" says Stevenson as he pulls up a cone to find a tiny, brown tree. He blames this death on gophers eating the seedling's roots from underneath. Accord

ing to Stevenson, about half the ponderosa seedlings planted after the fire have died, mostly from gophers, elk or lack of moisture.

"We've got a live one!" he says with a smile as he pulls up another cone to reveal a 1-foot-tall ponderosa that is making a go of it amid a dense field of mullein, an exotic weed species that has overtaken the area. "This one has really sprouted up."

Nearby is a cone that has been fortified with a circle of rocks, and inside we discover another healthy pine. Stevenson notes that the trees planted by volunteers have a greater survival rate than those planted by Forest Service contractors. "The volunteers put more into it," he says.

UNLIKE PONDEROSA PINES, aspens are designed to survive even thrive after high-severity crown fires through their ability to regenerate quickly through root suckering. Along Waterline Road (Forest Road 146) on the upper slopes of the peaks, where mixed-conifer forests were devoured by fire and topsoil was swept away by flooding, about the only things growing four years after the burn are aspens. Even in higher elevations that experienced moderate fire damage, the level of aspen regeneration is surprising Forest Service scientists.

"Individual aspens are relatively short-lived and die so they can regenerate through the same root system," explains MaryLou Fairweather, a Forest Service plant pathologist who is based in Flagstaff and has been studying aspen mortality in Arizona for more than two decades. Since 2003, Fairweather has gathered data annually from more than 50 plots established in aspen stands on the San Francisco Peaks. She originally started monitoring the plots to study the effects of drought and try to determine why aspens were in precipitous decline on the mountain. But after the Schultz Fire burned through 14 of 18 plots in a stand there, she also began monitoring the aspens' response to the blaze.

“I was excited about the fire because I knew I would get all this new data,” says Fairweather. It is October 2014, and I am hiking with Fairweather up a steep, aspen-covered slope toward her plots. The study area occupies 40 acres above and below Waterline Road, east of Schultz Peak. It is located in a mixed-severity region of the Schultz Fire, which left parts of the forest disturbed but not burned completely. We scramble over downed aspens and through pockets of coal-black snags. Fairweather holds her GPS device in front of her to home in on plot-location coordinates. “Here we are!” she says as we arrive at a 6-inch-tall stake in the ground that is marked with pink flagging tape. Each regeneration plot is a hundredth of an acre, and every fall she measures the height and health of every aspen seedling and sapling in that area to gauge change from one year to the next.

Fairweather expected the sucker growth, but what surprised her was the high number of aspen seedlings that began sprouting up. Born from copious amounts of seed dropped after the fire, these new trees will establish their own root systems, and Fairweather believes they could be critical to saving aspens on the peaks because they increase genetic diversity and forest health. That is, if the seedlings and saplings are not eaten first.

The abundant aspen growth has provided an all-you-can-eat buffet for elk. Fairweather's data documents heavy - sometimes devastating - browsing in her plots. “I haven't found one yet that isn't browsed on this plot,” she says as she measures a stem that is about 1 foot tall and has been stripped of its leaves.

Arizona Game and Fish Department managers have responded to the elk's increased browsing of aspens since the fire by increasing hunting pressure in high-elevation areas. They established a new sub-unit in 2011 within the larger Unit 7 East hunting area. Over the last four years, elk permits issued in the sub-unit have been increased, from 200 in 2011 to 585 in 2014 and 2015, as a way to reduce the population and minimize aspen browsing.

While Fairweather still views elk as one of the biggest threats to aspen health, she has seen the browsing in her plots decrease slightly since the new hunting regulations were put in place, from 77 percent of all trees munched in 2013 to 62 percent in 2014. But even more promising is that some saplings are growing taller than what she observed before the fire. In areas of the burn that are not inviting to elk - on very steep slopes, amid barriers of fallen trees or along Waterline Road - aspen saplings are 7 feet tall and thriving.

“These are so adorable,” says Fairweather. “I've never seen seedlings in such abundance here until after the fire.” We have trudged up to the highest plot and the last one she will measure for the season. A handful of baby aspens with tiny green leaves are pushing through black soil. Nearby, a mature aspen stand untouched by fire is in full autumn splendor. We sit on a carpet of fallen leaves to catch our breath as a gentle wind unleashes a shower of shimmering gold discs that swirl all around us.

While Stevenson wishes the Schultz Fire never happened, he says Forest Service scientists are learning a great deal from post-fire recovery efforts. They're also learning that the disaster served as an important wake-up call for the citizens of Flagstaff. In November 2012, Flagstaff voters overwhelmingly approved a $10 million bond to support the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project. It is one of the first municipally funded forest-restoration efforts in the country, and it will facilitate thinning and controlled burns on more than 10,000 acres of Coconino National Forest land around Flagstaff to prevent another Schultz Fire kind of disaster. Although it may be a century before the worst part of the Schultz burn area returns to the scenic ponderosa-pine forest that it once was, there is a phoenix rising from the ashes in the form of volunteers who are on a mission to help heal the land.

Although it may be a century before the worst part of the Schultz burn area returns to the scenic ponderosa-pine forest that it once was, there is a phoenix rising from the ashes in the form of volunteers who are on a mission to help heal the land.

Among the most dedicated of this group are the students at Ponderosa High School, a Flagstaff accommodation school that serves at-risk teens and others who benefit from a non-traditional learning environment. On October 2, 2014, I join the students for their Service Learning Day project: planting 100 ponderosa seedlings in the scorched earth around Schultz Pass Road. After receiving instruction from Stevenson on how to plant the seedlings, the students don hard hats and carry shovels and cartons of seedlings into a field of jagged black snags and green mullein stalks. “These seedlings will survive. We've taken good care of them,” says a student named Feather as she swings a pick to remove a rock and make room for the new plant. She gently sets the seedling in the ground and pats dirt around it. “We take pride in what we do,” adds another student, Isaac, who is relishing the sense of accomplishment that this project brings.

Since 2011, Ponderosa High students have tended seeds collected from the burn area in the school’s nursery. They have watered and nurtured the plants with compost from food waste collected from area restaurants. This latest planting is the fifth such event the students have carried out as part of the Forest Service’s long-term recovery efforts. Stevenson hopes to plant ponderosa seedlings on an additional 1,000 acres in 2015 with the help of Ponderosa High students and other volunteers.

Down the road from Feather and Isaac, a student named Alex is putting great effort into digging the perfect hole. He wants to make sure the seedlings have a good home. Alex says after graduating from high school, he plans to become a personal trainer and open his own gym. But right now, he is finding joy and purpose in bringing life to the ailing forest.

“It took us over a year to grow these,” he says of the seedlings at his feet. “It feels good to finally get them in the ground.” AH