Hiking the Apocalypse
For six of the last seven years, our family has traveled to north-central Colorado to escape both the excessive heat of the south Texas summer and the excessive flatness of the south Texas landscape. We stay in a small cabin at the YMCA of the Rockies and use that as a base of operations to explore the adjacent Rocky Mountain National Park. Our family hikes have grown longer and more strenuous over the years as our kids have grown more physically capable.
This year I was hoping to convince my eldest daughter to join me on an overnight hike from one side of the park to the other from. Despite being more than capable of achieving such a traverse, her response to my modest proposal was a polite but firm "absolutely not." Although a fourteen-year-old may have strong physical endurance, that quality is matched by equally strong opinions as to how to deploy those energy reserves.
And so after months of tireless campaigning, I ended up making the 22-mile hike over the Continental Divide by myself. I had hoped this adventure would represent an opportunity to enjoy hours of precious “quality time” with my daughter, but those hours would have probably been filled with innumerable eye rolls, audible sighs, and awkward silences punctuated with pointed questions about my parental judgment. Instead, I enjoyed a little over 27 hours of "alone time" as I climbed past the tree line up to the summit of Flattop Mountain. I ruminated over past choices as I continued across the open tundra of Bighorn Flats and descended into the valley of Tonahutu Creek. I considered the current state of the world as I set up camp within earshot of Granite Falls and fell asleep to the sound of distant thunder. In the morning, I pondered the future as I made my way into the aptly named Big Meadows before turning south and into Grand Lake.
A Forest That Was Living Is Now Dead
The guidebooks I consulted in preparing for this trek promised a phenomenal hike through the Park's diverse climactic regions. More recent online sources—as well as the Park Ranger who issued my backcountry permit—warned that much of the hike would be through areas ravaged by fire a few years earlier.
The Cameron Peak Fire began the day after we returned home from our 2020 Colorado vacation. We anxiously watched as it expanded into the largest wildfire in the state's history and forced the evacuation of the YMCA of the Rockies where we had just stayed. But it was the East Troublesome Fire, a second conflagration that started two months later on the opposite side of the Continental Divide, that would be responsible for most of the damage to the National Park. It was this scarred landscape that I found myself hiking through some four years later.
Fires represent an nonintuitive but important part of the healthy lifecycle of forests. Occasional small burns clear the accumulated leaves and branches on the forest floor, enriching the soil below without damaging the trees above. But well-intentioned efforts throughout the last century to extinguish any and all fires allowed dead organic matter to collect in large quantities. As a result, fires today tend to burn larger and hotter. They often kill the trees themselves, reducing once rich forests of pine, spruce, fir, and aspen to scorched matchsticks.
A number of human factors contributed to the size and severity of East Troublesome Fire and it was easy to feel frustrated that so much destruction had befallen a place of such natural beauty. That feeling was obvious and warranted, but as I hiked through what could be easily dismissed as a "post-apocalyptic wasteland," it occurred to me that there was still beauty to be found. The charred remnants of dead trees could themselves be exquisite artifacts. When the temperatures of the fire were hot enough, the tree's internal sap would vaporize, allowing their trunks to bend to form graceful natural arches. When the winds of the fire blew fast enough, the swirling flames would carve permanent spirals into the blackened remains of the trunks.
Death could be beautiful.
The Planted Corpse Begins To Sprout
As I hiked through the expanse of this desecrated terrain, it occurred to me that the damage was complete only when viewed through the myopic perspective of a human life. The charred and broken stumps of the older trees would eventually decay and be subsumed by the carpet of younger trees that had already begun to grow their place. It might decades (if not centuries) for these forests to be fully recover, but that timeframe is really only an issue for me. My long hike through the aftermath of the East Troublesome Fire occurred during a very specific—but ultimately relatively short—moment in the overall lifetime of that forest. What I experienced was a momentary snapshot of a constantly evolving ecosystem and it is arrogant of me to think this place as being "lost." What existed before may be lost to me, but not to those who will come after me.
I would like to think that a great-grandson I might never meet will hike through this valley with a great-great-granddaughter I will certainly never meet. I would like to imagine him gifted with hours of precious quality time with a daughter who would in turn fill those hours with eye rolls, audible sighs, and awkward silences punctuated with pointed questions about his parental judgment.
August Is The Cruelest Month
In 2023 we skipped the mountains of Colorado for a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the volcanoes of Hawai’i. It was an amazing experience, but our memories will forever be shaded by the tragedy that befell the town of Lahaina on the day we left. Earlier this summer my daughter and I hiked some 50 miles through a portion of Philmont Scout Reservation that had been devastated by the Ponil Complex Fire in 2002. In the closing days of this year's family trip in Colorado, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud associated with the Alexander Mountain Fire could be seen ominously rising in the distance.
Wildfires have come to occupy an increasingly large part of our family vacations. Of course, for us they are mere inconveniences whose long-term effects are left behind when we return home. This is obviously not the case for those whose homes and loved ones are taken by these fires.
Despite their frequency, disasters like these are not inevitable. I'm certainly not advocating that all we should do is shrug our collective shoulders and try to find beauty in the charred remains of our world. We need to learn from our mistakes. We need to prevent our world from burning to the ground. We need to make the hard choices to ensure that there are forests through which our great-great-grandchildren can hike.
