Soil, the Forest’s Fragile Foundation

For the last two summers, I’ve been working as a wildland firefighter in order to pay for college. My interest in forests and the outdoors began when I was a kid in Parkdale, a small town at the north base of Mount Hood in Northern Oregon, in a house surrounded by woods. Every few years, we had smoke-filled summers, and occasionally evacuation scares. I remember sitting inside one summer watching ash fall like snow in the middle of August. As the intensity of wildfires in the Northwest grew, so did my interest in them. 

These days, I travel towards the fire rather than away from it. I work for a type two hand crew, meaning all of our firefighting work is done with boots on the ground and tools in our hands. Almost all of our hours on the fireline are spent hiking and digging through soil and ash. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it.

We use a variety of tools to cut small trenches so the fire can’t burn through the ground. Hazel hoes have a sharp, wide blade to scrape and mix large amounts of surface soil. The Pulaski, an ax with a hoe-like blade on the other side, cuts through roots and breaks apart soil, making it easier to move. And, of course, we use shovels to dig deep into the ground. 

That soil on the forest floor has captured my interest. When we fight wildfires, we kick up ash and dust, inevitably covering ourselves in it. It’s something that we just have to accept, but part of it makes me feel like a child playing in the dirt again. The more I fight fires, the more I become intrigued about the effects wildfires have on the soil in forests.

Under the summer sun, with no tree canopies to offer shade, the sun’s hot rays are only slightly dimmed by smoke lingering near the ground. The few Douglas firs left upright stand limbless like telephone poles, and the ones that fell have burned into ash, becoming indistinguishable from the scorched ground. During the Fir Mountain Fire, on the slopes of Mount Hood in the summer of 2020, my crew and I walk through the blackened land that once resembled a forest, searching diligently for any remaining heat after the flames died out.  

The fire swept through a couple of days prior to our arrival. It burned some of the trees deep into the ground, leaving stumpholes that could smolder for months. We used our tools as we walk, testing the ground ahead to ensure we don’t step into one of them. The forest floor, wiped clean of any plants, litter, or insects, has been transformed into a layer of gray ash a foot and a half deep. It’s a wasteland that we call ‘nuked.’ Kicking through the moon dust, I occasionally find a glowing red ember, the only color left in the forest. 

Our mop-up job as firefighters is to find heat in burned areas and make sure there’s no chance of reignition. Without water, one of the methods to do so is by mixing glowing embers into mineral soil. With a single swing of my hazel hoe, I cut through loose ash and the hardened layer of dried dirt below the surface. Digging deep for moist mineral soil that will extinguish the smoldering embers makes me break a sweat. 

The soil I need to dampen the remaining embers lies about a foot below the ash and is hard to locate between remaining tree roots and rocks. Any signs of critters or green plants that usually reside there have vanished from the fire. 

As we work, we bury glowing red embers, mixing them into soil until we can touch them with our hands. It’s an intimate ritual. If they can’t burn me, they likely won’t burn any more of the forest. But with so much obvious damage, a land that’s ‘nuked,’ so stripped of its life and color, I wonder if there’s anything left. With no branches or twigs, birds will likely have a hard time landing or making new nests. But I wonder what lies below the thick layer of ash.

Soil burn severity map, by Jenna Travers, of the Holiday Farm Fire showing each location that I photographed.

The concept of using managed wildfires to clean litter off forest floors has been around for centuries. But watching a nuked, ashen, gray hillside smolder, it’s hard for me to imagine life returning. 

Fire can burn hundreds of feet into the sky but also several feet deep into the ground. Where the Holiday Farm Fire burned soil moderately, the litter was cleaned off, and more than a year later, the forest floor is now covered in new life: chirping birds, scurrying squirrels, sprouting burn morels, and signs of deer. Where intense fire scorched the forest floor, like at Finn Rock, the remaining ground was left lifeless, covered in rocks and loose soil. 

Life in the forest relies on healthy soil. A year and a half after the Holiday Farm Fire burned along the McKenzie River, life seems to be returning. People are building new houses, animals are finding new homes, and where the fire allowed for it, life on the forest floor is making a comeback.

As I pack my bag for the next season, I grab my ash-stained boots hoping I can get one more run out of them. With every wildfire I fight, I’m able to see a new way that fire burns through a landscape, but I usually don’t have the opportunity to go back. The time I spent where the Holiday Farm Fire burned showed me how life in the forest recovers from the severity of fires we witness today, and this perspective will carry on with me in my career as a wildland firefighter.