It is always interesting how current events can trigger memories of the past. With all the forest fires going on, I thought about the first time I worked in a burn. It was a rather recent burn that had gone through the area I was working in a few weeks previously.
It was the late sixties, and I was part of a small crew checking out properties for their uranium potential. A float plane would take us to one of the properties. We would set up camp and spend a few days traversing the area and then get moved to another property. It happened that one of the properties was in a burnt-out area. We chose a campsite at the edge of the burn because it looked more inviting and cleaner. It meant a little more walking but at least we got a bit of shade.
Now one good thing about working in a recent burn is you get to see a lot more of the rocks and geology because the underbrush, leaves, mosses, and lichens have been burnt off. However, once you cross into the burn, anything you touch or brush against leaves a sooty black smear. Also, there is no shade and all the blackness around makes the area rather hot from the sun. In a few hours we looked like old time underground coal miners, at the end of a shift. The air had a distinct acrid smell, and it seemed that every step stirred up a puff of ash.
It was hot dirty work and walking back to camp late that afternoon, we were beat. We were walking along the edge of the burn close to camp and we came upon a very small, picturesque pond or small lake surrounded mostly by outcrops. It looked so nice, cool, and refreshing, we decided to go for a swim to cool off and get cleaned off.
We shed our clothes and I decided to dive in from a little cliff. Something about the lake bothered me, but I couldn’t decide what it was. I dove in and swam out underwater. I really enjoyed the cool refreshing water. I came to the surface and tread water while I tried to wash as much of the soot off as possible. I was a reasonably good swimmer back then and enjoyed the swim while the others stayed closer to shore and were more wading than swimming.
After I had gotten cleaned off, I decided to swim back to shore underwater, but when I dove down and opened my eyes, visibility dropped to almost zero as I swam into a roiling cloud of ash. It was like trying to swim in a blizzard and was a little scary, so I came back up to the surface and swam ashore. When I got back to shore and climbed out of the water, most flowed off but some of the ash stayed behind and when you touched it, it turned into a white streak. It also felt a little soapy, which is not surprising I guess because ash is used as an ingredient in old style soap. I realized that it was the layer of ash on the bottom of the lake that had made it look odd because the ash gave the bottom an off-white ghostly appearance. .
Close to shore you can often see the rocks through the water but on this lake, they were covered by a layer of ash. People often don’t think about lake bottoms but every year they get a layer of sediments made up of dust, pollen, spores, organic material, leaves in the fall and of course ash from forest fires. One can take a core sample from the bottom of a lake and get a good picture of its past. The experts can look back hundreds and even thousands of years.
One thing we learned over the next few days was that working in a recent burn was a dirty affair. Even the one day it rained a little made things worse. Our clothes, sleeping bags, tent and gear all took on the acrid odor of the burn and everything we had needed to be washed or cleaned when we got back to town. The ash got in everything and even washing didn’t completely remove the acrid burn smell.
It takes a year or two and several rains for the land and forest to get rid of that smell but just think of all the fireweed that will be blooming next year.