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