Making Their Way Back: Surprise and Renewal In Southern Oregon's Redwoods

Part One: Who knew Oregon had groves of giant redwoods?

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That’s me, standing among and dwarfed by, an immense grove of Sequoia sempervirens, aka, California Redwoods, aka, Coastal Redwoods.

If you think about Coast Redwoods at all you may imagine immense, woody tree beings reaching heavenward from rainy, fern-floored forests, living pillars who hold up the sky ceilings within towering, woodland cathedrals which have, over many eons, tiptoed to the very edge of northern California’s undulating, Pacific coastline. Which would be mostly accurate, but for the ‘California’ part.

State lines are tricky, you see. They’re ephemeral and sometimes illogical; funny little wisps of thought, proclaimed and drawn upon maps by acquisitive, ever-measuring interlopers only born within the last couple of hundred years. As such, they have little meaning to those countless, ancient trees who were already here staking their claims to the land thousands of years before mapmaking was even a thing, ancient beings who have weathered the storms of winter and the fires of summer for millennia, growing greater, both in wisdom and stature while incrementally ‘inching’ their way northward, via wind, water and animal transported seed cones.

So despite some piffling, human-drawn line on a map pretending differences of actual consequence on the north, versus south side of said line, no one should be surprised to learn that several, very impressive groves of Sequoia sempervirens (Coast Redwoods), also grow quite well north of that inked imagining, as conditions allow, in the fertile valleys and timbered slopes of southern Oregon's coastal range.

Some of those gigantic, old-growth trees, currently thriving at the northernmost limits of the redwoods’ range are an astonishing eight-hundred-plus years old (versus more than two thousand years old in California’s stateliest groves), measure up to ten feet in diameter (compared to many in the twenty to thirty foot diameter range in the older, California groves), and reach, in some cases more than 250 feet upward into the cool mists continually blowing in off the Pacific (again, as opposed to those ancient, California residents who sometimes reach more than 360 feet into the sky).

Many of Oregon’s most ancient giants grow along the majestic, Chetco River, adding magnificence and longevity to many of the other splendors of southern Oregon’s wild and scenic forests.

The Chetco Bar Fire

How a small blaze erupted into Oregon’s largest wildfire

On the afternoon of July 12, 2017, four firefighters dropped from a helicopter into southwest Oregon’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness to try and snuff out a small but challenging, lightning-strike wildfire that was, at the time just a half-acre in size. What they found when they arrived, though was a flaming mountainside so steep that burning logs and brush were already tumbling wildly downhill, headed toward the Chetco River, spreading the fire as they went. This team battled that young fire for two days, bushwhacking and crawling through deep brush along steep slopes while a trio of helicopters dropped water on the flames, continually.

Despite these heroic efforts, according to a U.S. Forest Service, the fire continued to grow until, ultimately the firefighters were forced to pull out of the fire zone for their own safety. That was the beginning of the infamous, Chetco Bar Fire, a blaze that remained relatively quiet for almost a month before exploding into the nation’s most dangerous wildfire at that time, and which would, ultimately torch 190,000 acres, destroy several houses, force thousands of people to evacuate their homes and threaten to wipe out communities from Brookings to Cave Junction over the next few months.

I had heard about the Chetco Bar Fire, but honestly, there were so many wildfires raging across the West that summer and the air was so terrible from so many burning all at once that I didn’t really have any real sense of the Chetco’s scale or even its place within the Pacific Northwest’s wildfire pantheon. That was the harrowing summer my buddy Gary, who lives in Bend, Oregon drove nearly eleven hours up to Seattle from the Alvord Desert playa where he’d been camping, at the eastern base of Steen’s Mountain in remotest, SE Oregon, in hopes of escaping the caustically smokey air and hundred degree temperatures that had settled in there and refused to move. “I think we should go backpacking,” he proposed, hopefully over the phone once he found a pocket of cell service. “You game?”

Smoky sunrise over the mountains just east of the Alvord Desert in SE Oregon.

We did our best to escape the smokey blanket covering Seattle the morning after he arrived by ferrying and then driving out to the Olympic Peninsula where we camped overnight near Dungeness Spit, then stopped in at the ranger station after breakfast.

Wilderness permit and fear-of-god bear warnings in hand we drove nearly an hour to the trailhead, then shouldered our packs and headed into the wilderness backcountry of Olympic National Park, reasoning that such efforts should take us about as high up in the mountains and as far north and west as one could possibly get within the continental United States, and thus, we hoped, breathing the least smokey air in the West.

Pfffftttt. Our grand plan, at least on that easy breathing front, failed miserably.

The view from near the trailhead where we began our trek into Moose Lake.

The smoke lay even more oppressively upon the landscape up there in the wilderness than it had at sea level in Seattle, to the point that our eyes burned continually and we sometimes felt as if we were choking during the more strenuous stretches of trail.

We hiked in, anyway, smoke and heat be damned. No way were we backing down now.

During our three day wilderness stay we hiked out from our base camp in multiple directions, climbing up into rocky fastnesses to see what lay beyond and crawling about on hands and knees in meadows and along trails, studying and photographing butterflies and wildflowers. The beauty was abundant and undeniable, but that pall of smoke weighed heavily on our psyches just the same. Something was terribly wrong with the world we had grown up in and there was nowhere we could find to escape it.

I swam each late afternoon in crystalline, Moose Lake trying to cool down and wash off some of the smokey grime that had accumulated on my skin and hair during our day’s explorations. Then it was supper back in camp and during cleanup, listening gratefully to a call and response concert performed each evening by a family of Barred Owls roosting nearby.

Each evening I waded out into frigid, waist deep waters in Moose Lake, then plunged beneath the surface and began swimming toward deeper water. Breast stroke, side stroke, back stroke, crawl. Treading water. Floating on my back. Repeat. After the first few minutes the water didn’t seem all that cold anymore. After fifteen or twenty, I felt newly alive, utterly relaxed and completely freed from the sweat and smokey grime of the day. (Photo © 2017, Gary Calicott)

At dusk both parent and juvenile owls flew into the tops of nearby trees, exchanging hoots and head bobs while alpenglow faded and shadows continued to deepen. Then each took off, one at a time on silent wings, headed in different directions for their night’s hunts. It was nearly too dark to make out their silhouetted shapes against the sooty sky as they flew but we could still track their movements, vectoring in on their calls from faraway treetops each time one paused to check in with the others for location and progress reports. Hoot owl poems. ‘Barely there’ whispers. Lethargic, smoke-laden, heat-dome-heavy breezes. Sighs among invisible treetops and the rustle of tent fabric; the last things I heard after crawling wearily into my tent before dreams.

Two of the vocal family of four owls that serenaded us each evening as dusk.

I awoke both nights in camp, sometime during the wee hours with a dry throat and need to pee. The second night it had begun to rain. But that first night, the profound surreality of the scene beyond my tent nearly overwhelmed me; eyes, still blinking away the sting of smoke and the cobwebs of sleep. An utterly alien landscape with a dull, orange, mostly full moon glowing faintly through a curtain of umber smoke. Air that held the smells of distant fires but somehow did not move.

I was lost, an unwelcome, hard luck schlub who’d awakened on some desolate, other planet. Where the hell was this place? How had my beloved, wildflower wilderness become this foreign and inhospitable shadowland?

I fumbled for my camera in the dark and mounted it atop my tripod from inside the tent, believing I needed to record this hadean scene before attempting sleep again, wanting proof in the morning, if only for myself, that I had not just dreamed the world I was seeing. It was that hauntingly strange.

The view from my tent that first night: full moonrise over the Olympic Mountains as seen from a meadow above Moose Lake in choking, thick wildfire smoke.

Coming soon… but not necessarily next

Part Two: Fast forward to April 1, 2023.

Making Their Way Back: Surprise and Renewal In Southern Oregon's Redwoods