Teri J Pieper

Author Archives: Teri J Pieper

Photo Points

August 16, 2014 – 2:21 pm
Posted in photo points
Tagged photo points, recovery, Rising Eagle fire
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We are in the clean up process of recovering from the fire. We know that our landscape will continue to reflect the fire’s effects for as long as we live here. Many of our beloved ponderosa pines will not live. Some will. Most of the shrubs are gone. A few will sprout back and seeds spread far and wide by birds and other animals will sprout in the spring. Grasses will return too. We have an opportunity to watch these changes and document them. It will be exciting as we see each new green thing poke through the ash. So far I am mostly seeing invasive grass and knapweed but yesterday I found a wild rose coming up on the edge of the road.

I am going to make photos from three photo points that I have selected for as long as I feel like the changes are occurring. I did this at my neighbor’s place starting two years ago and it was fascinating to compare the images taken just months after the fire. Here, I have selected a point at the bottom of our draw looking up at several boulders that we didn’t even know were out there; the brush was so thick they were completely obscured. A second photo point looks down a hill that was once covered with bitterbrush and at the bottom is our neighbor’s garage which burned in the fire. It will be fun to see the ruins disappear and the new garage emerge. The third point looks down on the bench of land in front of our house and across the valley bottom too. That bench of land had some of our biggest weed problems and we hope to work hard on a restoration project across that flat to bring back the natives and once again enjoy watching the deer as they make their way across there in the evening.

I started out with wooden stakes but they were too short plus a certain labrador retriever was very interested in them. Yesterday I replaced those with rebar.

Photo point 1

High winds knocked the needles off of the pine trees

We had heavy rains causing some erosion

Looking back. Sometimes there will be dogs.

I replaced the wooden stakes with rebar yesterday.

Photo point 2

Photo point 3

Ed’s Images

August 10, 2014 – 3:54 pm
Posted in Rising Eagle Road Fire
Tagged Ed Stockard, helicopter, home, wildfire
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Our friends Ed and Torre live directly across the valley from us and a little higher on the hill. They had a perfect view of the perfect storm of a fire that burned here on August 1. Torre was on the phone to me telling me to get out as I was grabbing stuff and throwing it in the truck as fast as I could. Later we kept in touch by phone as they watched our house disappear into the thick smoke and then later reappear to be saved by helicopters with buckets of water. When the smoke first covered the house there were three fire trucks from our local volunteers – Okanogan District 6! We believe they saved the place the first time as the initial fire raced across the hill.

Here are some of Ed’s photos of the helicopter action. You can see more of Ed’s work at his Flickr site.

Ken found the pilot of the orange and white helicopter that put out that burning woodpile and expressed our undying gratitude to him.

That burning wood pile had the huge potential to set the shop on fire and then the house. We are so lucky.

This one stopped the fire.

Remains

Pictures below are what remains after the Rising Eagle Road fire. It’s been nine days since it happened and we have been on a roller coaster of emotions. Elated that our house survived and is intact. In despair over losing 2/3 of the bee hives. Happy that our well did not get fried and that we have a generator to run it and keep things wet and green as much as possible. Saddened over every little lost thing we notice each day. Really happy that our insurance company is being easy to work with. We are sorry for people who have not had such results with the bureaucracy.

We think the fire fighters on the ground and in the air are the best and we are forever grateful to them. The utility workers who replaced burned up poles and strung the wires and fiber while working sixteen hour days without complaint are another set of heroes.

And we are deeply saddened by the tremendous loss of homes on the hills around us and also in other locations around the Methow Valley.

Our address sign needs a new post

We never knew we had so many rocks

Nails from the neighbors’ garage

Remains of a remote camera

Our dog cemetery – hard to believe it used to be shaded by pine trees and serviceberry

Sam’s tag

The deer are very nervous

Fire fighters returned for days to put out the remaining smokes

A single Chipping Sparrow. Normally I’d see at least two together

Killer trees?

Fire truck from Johnson County Kansas

Remains of a vacation home

I put up feeders for the birds

I’ve found several dead rubber boas – a gentle snake that lives underground for the most part

Guess what this was

Melted glass

The day after the fire a tremendous wind blew through here and toppled trees

This used to be the tiny path we walked daily. The utility workers used it to repair the power lines.

Our house in an island of green surrounded by a blacked landscape

The hummingbirds are still here. I am surprised.

Only two bee hives where Ken once had six

Wasps eat the remains of the honey from the burned hives

I loved that arching serviceberry and tall pine

My favorite aspens

Two days ago the dogs and I finally walked uphill above the fire line into the tall grasses and sage

Smoke from the Falls Creek fire

Rising Eagle Fire

We were trying to find a new sense of normalcy after the big fires began to lay down within their containment lines. Last Friday MA and I picked apricots and went to lunch and played with our dogs. I returned home to get back to work processing wedding photos.

Fifteen minutes later a neighbor was here telling me we have to evacuate. There was a fire on the next road. I could see the thick black smoke column roaring in our direction. I threw a few things in the truck and loaded the dogs. The sheriff sped into our driveway and told me to go! Now! A woman was with him and I asked her to drive my car down to the highway.

There we sat and watched as our hillside turned into an inferno and fire trucks raced up the hill. The temperature was already 100 degrees. My phone buzzed with calls and messages. Where was I? People could see it from across the valley. A dozen helicopters were in the air. We had glimpses of them through the smoke. A friend who could see it called to say it didn’t look good for our house but the helicopters were still dumping water there. Emergency workers told everyone to leave that area and go somewhere safer. There were lots of vehicles clogging the road with people taking pictures and staring.

In Winthrop I was finally able to call Ken and tell him we might have lost our house. The dogs stayed pretty calm despite the heat and chaos. I got them in the river to cool off. Our friend across the valley called to say the smoke cleared and our house was still standing! Oh my gosh. I could hardly believe it.

We stayed with those friends that night. Another couple was there whose home burned in the big fire. We watched as fire fighters on the ground and in the air continued to work the fire and a DC 10 poured a long line of retardant across the top of it to prevent it moving to the west. We also saw homes of our neighbors burn to the ground.
Saturday morning the fire was calm and we returned to our home – an island in a sea of burned landscape.

Views from our Porch

The reality is that these wildfires are going to continue til the snow falls. More than 250,000 acres have burned already and while some areas of the fires are contained, others are not. Fire managers will probably let some areas burn up to the Tripod fire where no homes or roads are threatened. Tripod burned nearly 200,000 acres in 2006 and we thought that was the biggest fire we would see around here. Other areas of the fires are being fought with forces – helicopters, water trucks and ground crews – to keep them from spreading towards Twisp, Chelan and Okanogan. Anyway, I need to get used to smoke in the air and flames on the horizon. At night, the fires are mesmerizing. It’s hard to tear my eyes away from them. Of course, after dark is the nicest time to be outside since recent high temperatures during the day have been over 100 degrees, fahrenheit.