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PANGUITCH — This summer's devastating Brian Head wildfire has long been extinguished, but the damage left behind is still felt in the community.
Experts say it could be decades before things get back to normal in southern Utah.
Forestry experts have been looking at past wildfires, trying to figure out when the area will truly be healed. They say the answer could be found in Yellowstone National Park.
Just about once an hour at Old Faithful, it’s tough to find a good seat. It is without a doubt the most popular attraction in Yellowstone National Park, but according to Yellowstone vegetation specialist Roy Renkin, another place in the park is far more interesting — the Norris-Canyon Blow Down.
“This spot is my favorite spot in Yellowstone just because of the surprises it demonstrated to us,” Renkin said.
In 1984, a mysterious wind storm blew about 22 miles of trees to the ground. Four years later, during the Great Yellowstone Wildfires of 1988, flames reduced the spot to ashes.
“(It) made the front page of Newsweek Magazine, Time Magazine: ‘This is what Yellowstone looks like. It’s destroyed. They’ll never be the same,'" Renkin said.
However, nearly 30 years later, the area is once again full of trees. They aren't as tall and as big as they were before the wildfire, but there is new growth in nearly all of the 800,000 acres that burned.
“If you look more in the background there up against the hill, you see almost a line of trees,” Renkin said. “In the (middle ground) in front of that, you have a much younger forest.”
Scenes like that give hope for those viewing what is left of the Dixie National Forest after this summer’s Brian Head Fire.
“It has some devastating effects because it’s a scale we’ve never seen down here before,” said Richard Jaros, Dixie National Forest ecosystem staff officer. “It was a big fire, but yeah, it did have a big effect, and we understand that. It will affect things for a little while to come.”
Already, just a couple of months after the fire was extinguished, there are signs of new growth coming naturally and from artificial reseeding efforts. But the many people who live and recreate in this area wonder when the forest will again be filled with healthy trees.
“(The trees) could be 3 to 4 feet in a couple of years,” Jaros said. “They’ll start growing quickly, but the overall stability, I can’t put a date on that.”
Jaros said you can't really compare how Yellowstone looks now to what the Dixie National Forest might look like in 30 years because the trees are different. Yellowstone is full of lodgepole pines, trees that release seeds when they're burned in a fire. The Dixie National Forest has more aspens and white furs, which Jaros said have a much more slow response time, “so the reforestation process comes along very slowly,” he said.
But, Yellowstone signals that new growth is possible.
Renkin agrees that the trees will grow slowly and take decades to get back to normal. Those alive now might not see the Brian Head area fully reforest, Renkin said.
“But their children and their children’s children will be able to experience these forests as they continue to grow and mature.”
It's important to remember that fire, intentional or not, is a normal part of a forest’s life cycle and the lifespan of a forest is longer than humans live.
"When is the forest going to look normal again? It looks normal now and it looks normal in 40 years,” said Gary Bezzant of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. “It’s just a different stage of succession."
