Readers’ wildlife photos

As I’ve recounted before, reader Robert Lang‘s home and studio burned down in the Los Angeles-area wildfires earlier this year. Not only that, but he and his wife Diane had a new home under construction a block or so away in Altadena, and that burned down, too (the older house hadn’t yet been sold).  The New Yorker did an article on the disaster (Robert lost nearly every item in his personal origami collection), which you can read here if you subscribe. Robert and Diane are now living in a rented house nearby, and I have to say that, having had dinner with them when I was in L.A., they have a remarkably sanguine attitude towards it, which I much admire. They will of course rebuild the home and studio as soon as the city permits.

Robert sent in some photos of the damage, along with a narrative, that I’ll put below. His words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

RWP: Death and Life in Altadena

As readers of this website may know, on January 7–8, the Los Angeles area town of Altadena was destroyed by the Eaton Fire, which was driven by 60–100 mph Santa Ana winds. (It was one of several fires that day—another big one, the Palisades Fire, laid similar waste to the town of Pacific Palisades). The Eaton Fire began near the boundary of suburb and wildland, but the winds drove it both miles into Altadena and miles across the front range of the San Gabriel mountains. Across the mountains, it turned the dense but dry chapparal-covered ridges and canyons into bare dirt and rock studded with tiny blackened stumps of the formerly lush vegetation.

The San Gabriels (and, for that matter, most areas of Southern California) are lands of extremes; just a month later, on February 13, an atmospheric river barreled into town, dropping in some places 12 inches of rain in 24 hours (one of those places being the rain gauge of my neighbor, one of the lucky few who survived the fire). The downpour sent black torrents of water and debris flows roaring down the now denuded canyons and carved channels through fans of debris that poured down the mountainsides (*), damaging—and in many places, completely erasing—the network of hiking trails that were used by tens of thousands of hikers each week, including myself. My (now former) studio backed up to the Angeles National Forest and I had gone hiking almost every day; photos from my hikes and from my trail cams at and near my studio have been occasional RWP entries in recent years.

The Forest Service has closed a large portion of the Angeles National Forest, the burned area and then some. Alas, we’re not allowed to see, or even go repair, any of the damage in the ANF for at least a year. However, one of the organizations that I volunteer with, the Arroyo Foothills Conservancy, has their own inholding in the ANF, and our trail maintenance team recently did a reconnaissance of their property and trails. There was devastation; but there was also new life, welcome signs of both resilience and recovery.

The start of the trail—if you can call it that. This hillside had been covered with a dense thicket of laurel sumac (Malosma laurina), California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum), black sage (Salvia mellifera), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), and much else. Not much left. Once the vegetation is gone, there is nothing to stop the downpours from cutting deeply into the dirt that is left. That gully to the left used to be a road that the trail ran along:

Last year, an Eagle Scout project posted old-fashioned metal signs at all the trail junctions. The metal is still there. The trail is visible here and goes to the left of the burned tree where debris has restored the original slope. But there’s a dusting of greenery; after the rains, the plants immediately start to come back:

A Whipple yucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei ), resprouting. All of the leaves had been burned off, so the green you see is all new growth:

Looking up the hillside. There’s a trail weaving back and forth under all that deeply gullied loose gravel:

We were the first people to try to follow the trail since the fire and rain, but someone, or rather, something, had been there ahead of us; these are hoofprints of the California mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus californicus). The deer were already hard at work recreating their own trails. Of course, many of the original hiking trails had followed trails made by the indigenous Tongva—who had, in turn, initially followed animal trails long ago.

California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), coming back:

The denuded hills. You can see some of the surviving trails as light lines on the hills:

There are several species of live oak in California (I don’t know which one this is). They evolved with fire and even with their leaves and small branches toasted, they resprout almost immediately. A large oak in the San Gabriels has likely been through many fires. Sadly, the one way that fire can kill even a large oak is when it’s coming from a house next to the tree; many of the hundred-year-old oaks in the neighborhoods of Altadena will be lost because of the hot and long-burning torches of the houses that were next to them:

Another “oak”—which is not at all an oak—is Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), a shrub, vine, or bush that is highly variable in form, widespread in the San Gabriels, and the bane of hikers due to the incredibly itchy rash it induces in most people who have the misfortune to brush against it. Its leaves turn bright red in the fall, but the new shoots are also brilliant, as seen here. Yes, it’s an irritant (at least to primates), but the deer love to eat it, and it’s an important source of browse for them:

New lush grass is springing up all over this hillside. Unfortunately, it’s a noxious invasive. Fountain grass (Cenchrus setaceum), an escapee from landscaping, outcompetes the local natives and is also fire-adapted; sadly, once established, it is close to impossible to eradicate. It will quickly dominate this hillside:

I like how the branching of the gullies mirrors the branching of the dead bushes, probably laurel sumac (Malosma laurina). Laurel sumac is incredibly resilient; I had several in the meadow behind my studio. I cut them down to the ground every spring for fire abatement, and by the next spring they’re four feet tall again. They’re just now burned off, but they, like the ones you see here, will be dense bushes again within a year:

Many animals died in the fires, but many survived; the herbivores are dining on the fresh young shoots, and the carnivores are dining on the herbivores. Our neighborhood trail cams have picked up coyote, bobcat, and even a mountain lion since the fire. We saw plenty of deer sign on our reconnaissance, and at the end, saw the source of some of the prints. This was shot with an iPhone at a distance, so it’s not particularly high resolution, but it is a nice reminder that Nature recovers and provides some inspiration for the rest of us Altadenans to go and do likewise:

(*) For an excellent overview of the cycle of fire and flood in L.A., see John McPhee’s New Yorker article “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” collected in his 1989 book, The Control of Nature.