Western climate fires

The extent of the fires sweeping through the west this summer is sobering. As I perused an interactive map published by the New York Times earlier this week, zooming in and out on fire after fire, it dawned on me that several locations I have visited for recreation or traveled through in just this calendar year – in multiple states even – have now burned in the summer fires.

The extent of wildfires in the western US on 15 Sept 2020. Map from InciWeb.

During April, in one of my first hiking excursions since the coronavirus lockdowns began, with my daughter I hiked among and photographed flowers and oaks along the western shore of Lake Berryessa in Northern California. In the LNU fire to tear through that area this summer, most of the western shore of the lake burned. In fact most of the coast range hills down to Interstate 80 between Vacaville and Fairfield have burned.

Oak woodland and blooming lupines during April 2020 on the western shore of Lake Berryessa.

To the east of Lake Berryessa is a hiking location I visit often, the Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve. It is a teaching and research reserve operated by the University of California, Davis but is open to the public for hiking. Like other places in California was closed for a time due to the coronavirus pandemic. Within a short time of opening back up this summer, I briefly hiked there on a warm day. Signs of a fire several years ago were still evident on the landscape, particularly on the western side of the canyon, but smaller shrubs and smaller plants have recovered. According to the maps though, it appears the whole canyon has burned again.

Also succumbing to the same complex of fires was an area to the northeast of Lake Berryessa, a hiking place I only discovered this spring in my search for more local hiking areas during the pandemic. Valley Vista Regional Park is a small county park located near the scenic Cache Creek and California highway 16 and it features grasslands and lovely oak woodland. This whole area too, it according to the maps has burned.

Oak woodland at Valley Vista county park earlier this year.

The extent of the LNU complex of fires in northern California during summer 2020. Asterisks mark approximate locations I had been hiking at earlier times in 2020. Map from InciWeb.

Finally, on my road trip through Wyoming and Colorado this July, I spent a night camping, and few enjoyable hours hiking in the Roosevelt National Forest north of Rocky Mountain National Park. I hiked into the Comanche Peak Wilderness near the headwaters of the Cache de Poudre River, a lovely valley of aspens and conifers. Virtually the whole wilderness was covered by a large fire.

The Roosevelt National Forest in July 2020. At left: Cache de Poudre River; at right: a grove of aspens. 

The Cameron Peak fire extent in the Roosevelt National Forest. Map from InciWeb.

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We increasingly see signs that climate change is here now. It is not just a phenomenon modeled to occur in the future. While scientists are often reluctant to attribute any specific natural disaster to changing climate, it is becoming more clear with each passing year that we may be entering uncharted territory. In the bigger picture, warming seas are making Atlantic hurricanes more intense. Sea-level rise due to warming and glacier melt is increasing the frequency of nuisance flooding in American cities. And for the last several years in the far western US, the fires have become worse and worse.

The summer fires of 2020 – some call these climate fires – have been everywhere in the western US. In addition to the very places I hiked or photographed or camped in this year, other western landscapes have burned. The beautiful, remote coast of Big Sur: a major fire. The Mendocino National Forest: a massive complex of fires that is still burning. The gorgeous Oregon Cascades: fires so bad they sent air quality levels in Portland and the Willamette Valley to extremely hazardous levels making the region have the worst air quality on Earth for a while. In the Sierra Nevada: several large fires. And northeast of Los Angeles, east of San Diego, and in eastern Washington: more fires.

With each passing year the most pressing question is less about the science and impacts of climate change (although science will always be crucial to monitoring, predicting, and responding to climate change), but rather whether society sees the accelerating pace of change and wants to seriously do something about it. Without reducing carbon inputs into our atmosphere, our future may becoming increasingly uncomfortable, costly, and even deadly.

Burned oak woodland just south of Interstate 80 near Vacaville and Fairfield in northern California. Photo: 16 Sept 2020. 

The Sea of Cortez

Earlier on this blog I wrote about a remarkable field biology course I took as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz where we spent half of the academic term in the northern Gulf of California. Two items lately have moved my mind back to the Gulf.

The first is that I just finished reading John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett’s account of their 1940 expedition from Monterey, California to the Gulf (a long, subtropical sea also known as the Sea of Cortez) with a small crew aboard the Western Flyer. This book was in fact either assigned or optional reading during my UCSC course but I confess that I probably read little, if any, of the book back then.

The route taken by Ricketts and Steinbeck on
the Western Flyer to the Gulf of California.
Image in public domain. Source

Over the course of a six week journey, the biologist Ricketts and his famous writer-friend Steinbeck traveled down the Pacific side of the Baja California Peninsula and northward into the Gulf where they hopped nearly daily from location to location collecting invertebrates during low tide. In addition to describing the fauna they observed, collected, and sometimes aggressively hunted (there is seldom mention of the marine flora, except such brief notes that the mangroves stank), they otherwise pontificate on the science, philosophy, the idiosyncrasies of human nature, and insights gained from various peoples they encountered during their travels.

The second point of convergence is the development of my recent interest in film photography, principally medium format film (but more on that later), which has branched out in a few directions. One trap of the new interest, into which I am not alone in succumbing, is the purchase of more cameras than I probably need, but one of these purchases is at least partly nostalgic as well as functional – a nice specimen of an underwater Nikonos III camera.

The Nikonos series of underwater cameras originated in a collaboration between Jacques Cousteau and a French camera maker. It was called the Calypso originally. The well-known camera manufacturer, Nikon, picked up production of this 35-mm film camera and it became the premier underwater camera line for quite some time. My first use of an underwater camera was in fact a Nikonos camera, also at the time I was a student at UCSC. I shot my first roll or two of underwater film on kelp forest dives in the Monterey area, but as students were also able to use some of these university-owned cameras during our field course in the Gulf of California.

I still have nearly three dozen of the underwater photos I shot in the Sea of Cortez, preserved as color slides. Though not of notable quality, they generally came out better than the surviving slides I first took underwater in Monterey. The Gulf photos show the vibrancy of the marine organisms of the Gulf. Like Ricketts, I was pretty interested in marine invertebrates at the time, and I often aimed the camera on colorful benthic invertebrates of this warm sea.

Various benthic invertebrates from the northern Sea of Cortez. Original: 35mm film, Nikonos camera.

After over a month of collecting, Steinbeck and Ricketts returned up the Pacific coast of Baja back to the central California coast where the Western Flyer would end that chapter of its career as a floating invertebrate laboratory. This boat would go on to fulfill several careers as a fishing and surveying vessel in the North Pacific under a long list of owners, fall into disrepair, and even sink on several occasions in Washington state. In a very interesting story, however, the Western Flyer is on track to return to the service of marine science. After near death, a non-profit group has recently purchased the boat, is exhaustively repairing it in Port Townsend, and plans to return the boat to Monterey and re-trace the 1940 journey by Steinbeck and Ricketts in the year 2022. That year would mark 24 years since I have been to the Gulf; and how fun it would be to arrange a trip to Mexico to see the Western Flyer back in the Sea of Cortez!

The brown alga Padina (Dictyotales).