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Author Archives: Teri J Pieper

Fire, Flood, and New Growth

We drove up Lester Road and walked to Campbell Lake yesterday. This is an area that burned in the Cougar Flats Fire, part of the immense Carlton Complex of wildfires started by lightning last month. This is the fire we could see from our house. Photos of it burning are here. We got home just as the next big rain storm with thunder and lightning was beginning.

These aspens are already sprouting new growth from the roots.
The patterns of green and burned are pretty amazing.
aspens
A huge mudslide that followed the last big rain event.
The rocks of Pipestone Canyon.
I think this is snowberry
New lupine growth!
What triggered this serviceberry to start blooming?
Rosehips – good food for the birds.
Chokecherries that survived the fire
We drove farther up Lester Road to get a closer look at the mud slide
Can you see MA and the dogs?
Snowberry?
Snowberry?
Currant
Yesterday the surface was parched dry and cracked
A spot of color
Yesterday’s storm turned out to be another wild one causing far more destruction to homes and roads.

American Kestrel

This male American Kestrel perched near our bird feeders this morning searching for a meal. Since most of our hillside is blackened and many of the small mammals were killed in the fire, it makes sense that birds of prey might be hanging around our house. Chipmunks, gophers and mice have found some refuge in our ‘green’ spot. I am happy to see the kestrel as well as the Great-horned Owls that we’ve seen and heard after dark. We don’t want to be overrun with these small mammals.

The American Kestrel also eats small birds and insects. It is North American’s smallest falcon. Its eyes are huge for the size of its head and that makes it an effective predator. They are cavity nesting birds and will use nest boxes. Our neighbor has built two or three boxes specifically for kestrels and this bird may have used one earlier this year. I know that at least one box was active. This species has sexually dimorphic plumage, meaning that the male and female look quite different. These images were made looking through the dining room window.

Scanning the sky for something to pursue
He turned his head a full 180 degrees
And there he goes

Something to Celebrate

Sky had her first birthday yesterday! Where did the time go? Do you remember when we first brought her home? What happened to that cute little puppy? She’s still adorable and we love her to pieces and she’s a pretty good dog.

So what to do? How about a party? We invited dogs and their friends to an evening picnic on the lake featuring sticks, lots of sticks. People even brought her fresh sticks since they knew her sticks burned or were covered in soot. We discovered that she can retrieve sticks from the lake longer than we can throw them. I’ll bet she jumped in the water close to 100 times last night. She’s tired today but still ready for agility practice. We walked, biked and boated to this sweet beach and had a very nice evening.

Happy Birthday Sky!

Traveling in style to the party
Jennifer could not be here but she sent along the birthday tiaras anyway
The one image that features all seven dogs
Luna wants to know what all the fuss is about
Sweet Mavi is 14
Little Bear
Here, I brought two of them!
A lovely evening on Patterson Lake

Photo Points

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

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.