Things We Lost in the Fire

DOCUMENTING THE AFTERMATH OF WASHINGTON’S STEPPE FIRES

by Darrin Gunkel

The 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

endemic, all thrive in the shrub steppe. Or the parts that remain undisturbed, undeveloped, unburnt.

I’m out here enduring the November chill to witness the devastation of the 2020 fires, particularly in areas filmmaker Ted Grudowski and I documented earlier in the year for a short movie about the shrub steppe. We spent spring and summer battling the logistics of making a film during a pandemic, managing to make it work—social distancing is almost the default, wandering these huge open spaces. Still, delays meant the two month project dragged on for six. We were nearing the finish line in September, when much of the land we’d filmed burned.

The Evans Creek fire burned 75 thousand acres in the LT Murray Wildlife Area, which ecompasses the cliffs, side canyons like Umtanum, and high ridges west of the Yakima River between Ellensburg and Yakima. In the spring, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Downes, guided me and Ted through the canyon. We meet him this morning on a post-fire survey up Umtanum Creek, a tributary of the Yakima. The creek runs in a near-straight line away from the river, through an old homestead long lost but for twisted apple trees planted a century ago.

It’s a fantastic hike, one I’ve returned to again and again over the years: here in the sage lands, views begin the moment you set foot on the trail. The way passes through meadows, groves of aspen, and beaver ponds. It’s mobbed with wildflowers in the spring. Draws lead up from Umtanum’s depths to a plateau where bighorn sheep range, and eventually to the heights of Umtanum Ridge, with views from Mt Adams to the Stuart Range. The spring flower show features some of the finer lupine, balsamroot, and flox displays I’ve seen. But my favorite has always been the stands of ancient, twisted sage bushes, some having endured a hundred summers of triple digit heat. Part of me doesn’t want to see the fire’s aftermath.

Strangely, the devastation is patchy. One of the ancient sage stands used to greet you at the beginning of the trail. It’s gone now, nothing more than a field of black ash, this morning frost-rimed and glittering in the low sun, the skeleton of a burnt ponderosa pine presiding. A grove of Russian olive trees just beyond the former sage stand is largely unscathed. Some meadows are untouched by fire, and in some places, just the sage and rabbitbrush burned. The first big aspen grove has been spared, the brush at its feet reduced to ash and its understory completely cleared, but the trees appear unharmed. The big grove two miles up the creek was not so lucky, reduced to a thicket of charred trunks rising from seared earth. The beaver pond a half mile up the creek, and the thicket around it, untouched. So are the old apple trees, still producing tart heirloom fruit. It’s strange to see how capricious wildfire can be.

Scott is actually pleased, “This could have been a lot worse.” He believes the creek bottom here is intact enough that Fish and Wildlife can focus its limited restoration resources elsewhere. I venture some optimism about the overall effects of the fires. He says, “Well. Are you going up to the plateau [above the creek]? It’s a different story up there.” He grimaces when we mention we’ll soon head to our other main filming location, Spiva Butte in Douglas County. “Be prepared, probably by having a stiff drink ready.”

We leave Scott by the creek and head up to the plateau. The devastation looks complete. The sage forest at the foot of Umtanum Ridge used to seem endless: now it’s all gone, reduced to stick figures on a grey plain. The ridge, once a grey-green wall rising six hundred feet, is now black, streaked with an early snow, under a lowering autumn sky. Neither of us feel inspired to make a cold depressing climb to the top, so we explore what used to be prime bighorn sheep habitat. The views are still long and dramatic, but the mood of the place is all wrong.

It’s not entirely grim. Looking closer at the ground, we notice root tufts of many grasses and sedges remain. This is a good sign. As with crown fires in forests, which kill trees, the hottest and worst fires on the steppe burn everything down to mineral soil, and recovery becomes a much longer, much trickier process. That organic matter survived up here means the sage forest may be gone, perhaps for good, but wildflowers and grasses will be back continued on next page

Spiva Butte before and after the fire. Photo: Ferdi Businger

Fire, continued from previous page.

Ancient Sage in Umtanum Canyon before and after the fire. Photo: Darrin Gunkel

come spring. All the shrubs burned, but some patches of grass look barely touched. Already, scant autumn rain has coaxed new green shoots out of the ash. We capture film and images of the aftermath, and head back to camp. I realize this place may be vastly changed, but it is not lost.

The next day, my optimism is dealt a blow. Douglas County lies in the great bend where the westbound Columbia River makes a left turn to head south towards Oregon. This is the heart of the Channeled Scablands, too difficult and marginal for wholesale conversion to agriculture like much of the steppe further south. So it’s home to some of the best remaining shrub steppe habitat in Washington.

The area is critical for several species hanging on by a thread. Ninety percent of Washington’s sage grouse live in Douglas county. Or lived. The Pearl Hill Fire, at 225 thousand acres one of the largest in Washington’s history, ripped across Douglas County with such ferocity that, at its peak, it burned 10,000 acres per hour. Biologists still don’t know the extent to which sage grouse suffered, but initial estimates are grim: maybe half of the resident birds perished. Important sage grouse leks, sites where male birds put on their famous courtship display, now lay under ash. What’s more, a critical part of the birds’ diet, sage, went up in smoke. Washington’s sage grouse were listed as a threatened species in 1998, and much energy has gone into their recovery. It’s likely 20-years of conservation effort have been erased, and Washington’s sage grouse will be relisted, now as endangered.

Attempts to re-introduce endangered pygmy rabbits were also set back. Last spring, Ted and I shot video at one of their recovery sites. We recorded the exuberant release of young rabbits into their new home. Fire swept that site clean. Stories of firefighters reaching into burrows to save rabbits are hopeful, but it’s doubtful any we saw released that day survived.

We arrive at Spiva Butte Nature Preserve in the heart of Douglas County at the last light of day. Through unbelievable luck, our base camp during last spring’s filming, the two tiny cabins at the center of the preserve, and the propane tank next to them, escaped the fire. A cold fog settles in as the day fades, and exploring is bone chilling. We don’t brave the cold for long, since there’s little left to see. The handful of low buttes, once covered in sage, rabbit brush, and a thick understory of grass and wildflowers, are now a moonscape. The northern harrier hawk that patrolled the compound is nowhere to be seen. The pair of kestrels that scolded us last spring have moved on. I’m left to wonder the fate of the deer, coyotes, and porcupine we spotted before. Did they escape or succumb to the smoke and flames? We find no green shoots, barely any charred sage skeletons like at Umtanum; just sand and blowing ash in a cold wind. Scott was right, I do need a drink. And to go home. I’ve seen enough.

It’s a long drive back to Portland, through the dense fog that can socks in the Columbia basin in the winter. Most of the way, the fire-changed landscapes are out of sight. What I see from the highway has been changed too, in a more permanent way, by development. About 10 percent of Washington’s original shrub steppe remains, according to the Washington Native Plant Society. That means endangered grouse and rabbits, or bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and all the other life forms depending on the health of this ecosystem, don’t have many places to escape when disasters strike. Oregon’s steppe has fared better, but it’s just as fragile, and just as prone to giant, devastating fires. This land is not a desert, and it’s just as much a part of the character, the ecological fabric, of the Pacific Northwest as the mountains, coast, and great forests. It’s up to us to care for it the same way.