Resilience

Ted, Kenidee, and I were booking along the North Cottonwood Road on Elk Ridge in our little side-by-side when we came to a huge puddle blocking the road. The water looked blackish after running off the charred ground. Ted stopped, got out, and gingerly stepped onto the ground bordering the water. He immediately sank before stepping back onto the solid road. Kenidee, our little dog, and I hopped out, too, and I edged along the side of the puddle to see if we could skirt it. After discussing the possibilities, my hubby said, “It’s probably not worth it, so we clambered back into our ATV, and Ted did a three-point turnaround.
It was our third trip across Elk Ridge and Blue Mountain after officials reopened the roads. The first time, about a month-and-a-half after the Babylon Fire started, we drove onto the Ridge via the South Cottonwood Road. A great sense of relief filled me to see that Babylon Pasture, despite the name of the fire, had survived devastation. For my family, Babylon Pasture is the site of many memories, including camping out with my brother, his wife, their three children, my mom, and my son the first summer I moved to San Juan County.
Despite the fact that all the adults had all grown up on the prairies, we’ve always loved the mountains, especially high mountain meadows with ponderosa trees. Babylon Pasture is just that—a grassy meadow bordered by aspens and ponderosas. As we sat in our camp chairs that first summer, chatting and laughing, I felt like I’d come home. I listened to the wind moving in one grove of trees, quieting, then moving to another. After all these years, the imprint of those sounds remains with me, and this year I was grateful the meadow, ponderosas, and aspens had survived.
Ponderosas are beautiful, stately trees, growing up to 200 feet tall and sporting long needles and reddish-orange bark. I’ve heard if the bark is red, it means the tree is at least a hundred years old, but they can actually live up to 500 years. The sweet-smelling bark, sometimes six inches thick, is fire resistant. In fact, small wildfires are good for ponderosas because they clear out brush and smaller trees, allowing the ponderosas to flourish.
Aspens are also beautiful mountain trees with white bark and silvery leaves that tremble in the slightest breeze and turn brilliantly yellow in the fall, but they’re very different from ponderosas. According to the National Forest Foundation, a grove of aspens “is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in the extensive root system. . .. each tree is a genetic replicate of the other.” Most amazingly, believe it or not, “the oldest known aspen clone has lived more than 80,000 years on Utah’s Fishlake National Forest,” making it the oldest living organism on earth. Aspens are hard to kill because of their root system. That was why on our recent drives across the mountains, we spotted a few tiny aspens poking up through the charred soil. Many oakbrush babies also sprouted at the base of their scorched mothers, and flowers bloomed—daisies and lupine—as well as lush, green grass, a refreshing contrast to their blackened surroundings.
New growth was not what I expected though we did see some areas that had been completely blistered, especially across the Big Notch and down into Dark Canyon. The Forest Service has worked hard cutting down dead timber beside the main thoroughfares, piling it up, and, in some cases, sawing it into chunks.
The fire also scorched Mormon Pasture, Mormon Pasture Mountain, and Mormon Pasture Point, killing many of the junipers and pinyons in those areas. The loss was incalculable since Utah junipers can live up to 650 years and pinyons up to 1,000 years. We may have seen one of those ancient pinyons a few years ago on a hike up Mormon Pasture Mountain where we spotted the biggest, most beautiful pinyon tree I’d ever seen. Unfortunately, it and the other trees succumbed to the fire, but even there life was resurging. Why? As many cultures around the world can attest, fire can actually be good for the soil, releasing nutrients from burning plants into the ground to foster the growth of new ones.
The rains have helped, and they keep coming, not so much in Blanding, although we’ve had some nice soakers, but more on the mountains and in Monticello. One Monticello friend recently commented, “There for a while, we thought we were going to burn up. We’re so grateful for the answer to our prayers.”
The g-normous puddle blocking our way to North Cottonwood was part of that answer, and we were grateful for it.
My friend, Sandra Skouson, wrote a poem titled, “End of the Drought,” in her collection, Poetry for the Ages, published by Covenant Books. The first stanza of Part II and the first stanza of Part III go like this:
II
The desert drinks herself to returning life. Red clay darkens, gleams, and softens. Roads crack
And break away. Washes widen. The heart of the mountain draws water to deep shale, where coolness pools and oozes toward the seeps.
III
Our prayers are answered, blessings open the pores of our skin. Our hair loses its crispness, Our shoulders lose their tension.
Roses bloom against the eastern wall.

Indeed, as Sandra penned, our prayers are answered, and with new growth popping up from blackened soil and among dead trees, nature gives us evidence of miraculous rebirth.