Well, I’d expected that I’d have got to go to Griffith Park to do a hike and maybe show you some pictures to give you an idea of the changes since the fire (fire posts here and here). This has not happened yet, partly because last I heard they were not allowing people close to those areas… that may have changed by now. It has been over ten days since I checked.
Anyway, Colin Brown of Silver Lake was up there quite soon afterwards, and took many photos. They are not really for the squeamish, since he focused a lot on the animal remains that he found. So don’t look if you are likely to be disturbed by the images. There is a Metroblogging LA link here (via LA Observed), and from there you’ll find the link to Colin’s Flickr stream of photos.
While the images are disturbing, I found it actually quite instructive that fires of this sort are so easily able to trap animals, big and small. In retrospect it is sort of clear that this must be true, but I’d not really thought about it before. Usually one sees footage of these wildfires and thinks of them in the abstract: There’s brush and trees burning – perhaps one thinks of it as a natural cleansing of the area (when no homes, favourite places, and observatories are threatened of course…) – and that’s it. It is worth knowing (just for a more complete picture) that there’s a lot more going on at the ground level that you don’t see from the helicopter shots. Animals -who call the area home- are probably dying in some of those flames.
Very sad, but true.
-cvj
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Those pictures are in quite a strange way very beautiful, especially the deer […snip… cvj]. It has a story.
I once was camping in southern france, and 2/3 miles further along there was a huge fire in the woods. The airplanes kept dumping water on it, quite a spectacular site. I’ve never been confronted with the to the ground effects though. It must be horrid to die like that.
Wow. Those photos are amazing. We had a fire on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs almost 13 years ago, which killed 14 firefighters. I haven’t hiked there yet this spring, but I’ll probably head up in the next couple of weeks. They placed crosses where the 14 fightfighters fell, and it is difficult to imagine a steeper, less accessible location than where they were trapped and died. I’ve wondered about the animals in a fire. If humans, who knew what was going on, could be trapped and killed, how much more likely would it be for wildlife to die. The photos bring that home. Storm King is where my daughter researched lichens to see how well/much/if they had started growing after the fire (for her high school science fair project). Orange and white 1 or 2 centimeter lichens stood out on the charred black of the trees.