Wind & Fire: Some Reflections on Trees.

Some of the most beautiful terrain in Colorado can be found in the mesas and mountains of that state’s southwest. Over the last 45 years, as family visits took me through that terrain, I watched as huge swaths of healthy green forest first turned red, then gray, with beetle-kill. Large swaths have simply blackened from wildfires. One night a traffic jam slowed our journey through Cortez; locals were gathering in the fairground’s parking lot to watch a nearby ridge at Mesa Verde that was ablaze with wildfire. The entire ridge was burning. 

It is quite startling to see what was once grand mountains covered in green transform into slopes of barren tree trunks and fallen timber. It is a landscape in deep transition.

In many cases throughout the western United States, on-going drought has severely weakened the forests. Well-meaning fire prevention and overprotection of the forests can provide excessive fuel for wildfires. A National Park Service publication states that from 1996 to 2003, nearly 28,000 acres burned within Mesa Verde National Park. Lighting strikes set afire pinion and juniper forests that represented over half of the area inside the park boundary.

Confronting a severely damaged tree is astonishing. An individual symbol of life, representing strength, a member of a group, that tree represents mortality and inevitable transformation.

Microbursts from a recent thunderstorm provided another, more familiar landscape. These damaged trees are stark reminders of nature’s power and the impermanence of life. It is not possible to pinpoint blame on any wildfire or weather event on global climate change. The disruption seen in these trees, though, is traumatic testimony to what may be in everyone’s future.