THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE DOCUMENTING THE AFTERMATH OF WASHINGTON’S STEPPE FIRES
by Darrin Gunkel
T
he sage lands east of the Cascade mountains are often called desert. A superficial glance affirms the misnomer. Negative space dominates: usually empty skies, bare rock, few signs of life beyond endless sage stands or scrawny coyotes, fewer signs of humans, and big, big silence. That silence is a draw: an escape from the busy clatter of life west of the mountains. Especially once winter begins setting in. So I am in for a shock on a trip to the dry side last November: kept awake all night by train traffic driving an aural spike through the peace and quiet of Yakima Canyon in eastern Washington.
Normally, camping at Umtanum, or any of the few other BLM recreation areas in the Yakima Canyon, you can expect freight trains, thrumming and bumping down the canyon, once or twice a night. They're barely a distraction. This night, fitting in this anything-but-normal year—and appropriately jarring for 2020—I’m assaulted hourly by mile long strings of oil tank cars, screeching with their heavy petrochemcial burden, propelled by four locomotives running at full-throated full throttle. The fossil fuel industry, wrecking my sleep, is also helping to wreck the other reason to come out here. Global warming, the blanketing of the Earth with carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels are burned, is putting enormous stress on these dry lands and their inhabitants, the most immediate climate-related threat being fire. This ecosystem, just like the forests of Western Washington and Oregon, is adapted to periodic burns. The changing climate, however, with its longer, hotter fire season, causes conditions favoring megafires, like the ones in September 2020 that torched 800-thousand acres of the dryland ecosystem, known as shrub steppe, in Washington. The lands spanning the vast gap between the Cascades and the Rockies are anything but barren. Our shrub steppe here in the
Pacific Northwest is one of the great unsung ecosystems of the world. Many west-siders, used to the bio-diverse splendors of our temperate rainforests, might be surprised to learn how rich our dry-side ecosystem is. In many ways, the sage lands are an analog to the forest. It’s all there, just on a smaller, wider scale: canopies of big sage, understories of grasses and flowers, and a ground cover of lichen and cryptogramic crust all mimic the biomes of the great forests in wetter climes. It’s a bird watcher’s paradise: bald eagles, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, gyre falcons in the winter, sandhill cranes and trumpeter swans in the fall, peregrine falcons, prairie falcons, ferruginous hawks, sage-grouse, sharp tailed grouse, burrowing owls, and on and on. One of the best times to visit is May, when a chorus of night birds call from groves of cottonwood and Russian olive along the rivers. A census of the animal community would include big game like deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and even the occasional moose. Coyotes, cougar, lynx, bobcat, black bear are there too, and historically wolves and even grizzly bears found their way out onto the shrub steppe. Badgers, whitetail jackrabbits, black tail jackrabbits, pygmy rabbits, Washington ground squirrels, a host of amphibians and reptiles, many
Above: Lower Umtanum Canyon. before and after September, 2020. Photo: Darrin Gunkel
36 MAZAMAS
