The trees of our region write their own histories year by year, recording the wet and the dry winters, the heat and the cold, and the fires, especially the fires, in their living bodies. The study of tree rings and fire scars has revealed a wealth of information about our forests, and has confirmed that frequent fire was almost universal throughout the Klamath-Siskiyou until the beginning of the twentieth century. The following is the life story of one ponderosa pine and its experiences with fire.

1723. A New Life. On a soggy April day, the needles of an infant ponderosa pine pierced the duff, and a tree was born. Eight months earlier, the seed had whirled out its cone and had flown spinning to a fortunate landing under the shade of an ancient and half-dead black oak. Falling into ashes left by a fire just weeks before, it was quickly covered. There it sheltered through the summer’s heat, the autumn’s rain, and the winter’s snow, until springtime lit the fuse of life.

The tiny pine’s world was a valley in the eastern Siskiyou Mountains. In the park-like forest of great trees, only three grew within a hundred feet of the seedling: the black oak, an giant sugar pine, and a well-grown Douglas-fir. The seedlings’s parent, an old ponderosa pine, was nearly two hundred feet further up the slope. Between the two, a trail worn by the feet of elk, wolves, and Dakubetede people angled upward toward the ridgeline and dropped over a low saddle into the next drainage. At the bottom of the valley, Pine Creek rushed north toward the Ta’khoo-pe River, later called the Applegate.

1732. Nine years old. The pine had grown well. It stood over 10 feet tall, and was 4 inches across at its base. The oak above it had died, and the slow process of decay was sending a steady trickle of nutrients into the pine’s roots. In September, a line of flames blew up over the ridge and swept down the slope. It was not a large fire, but it kindled more strongly in the pile of fallen bark heaped under the oak, and the side of the pine nearest the flames was scorched. In the following weeks, the young tree repaired itself with tough new bark. Hidden beneath that bark, the pine recorded its first fire scar.

1737. Fourteen years old. In the depths of winter, a starving porcupine waddled across the open expanse of snow to the young pine and laboriously began to climb. Reaching the topmost rosette of branches, it settled into place and started to gnaw. Within a few hours, the uppermost trunk of the pine was stripped of bark, and its growing tip was dead.