Look at the forest through here and you'll start to notice whole hillsides of standing dead trees — silver skeletons — with a green fuzz of new growth and young aspen rising beneath them. You're driving through a burn, and not just any burn. In the early summer of two thousand eleven, right in these mountains, two campers walked away from a campfire. The wind found it. And it became the Wallow Fire — the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Arizona, sweeping across more than half a MILLION acres, an area larger than some entire states, driving thousands of people from their homes. It burned for over a month. Drive through the scar today and you can read the whole story in the trees: where the fire raged hottest, bare silver snags; where it crept, the big pines lived; and everywhere the aspen, because aspen LOVES fire, exploding up in golden groves from roots that outlast the flames. It's a sobering lesson in how one careless campfire can remake a landscape for a century — and a hopeful one, in how fiercely the forest fights its way back. Drown your campfires, folks. Dead out, cold to the touch.
Photo: Jesse Allen · Public domain