August 26, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicola Twilley’s “Trailblazers.” It’s about the use of prescribed burns to prevent megafires. The first paragraph hooked me:

Before Terry Lim handed me an aluminum flask filled with a blend of gasoline and diesel and asked me to set fire to the Tahoe National Forest, he gave me a hard hat, a pair of flame-resistant gloves, and a few words of instruction. “You want to dab the ground,” he said. “Just try to even out the line.”

I read that and just kept going right to the end. What a trip! First stop was the Sagehen Creek Field Station, twenty miles north of Lake Tahoe, in the eastern Sierra Nevada (“When I drove there, in May, there were still patches of snow in the shade, but the banks of Sagehen Creek were dotted with the first buttercups of spring”). Second was a hike through the Sagehen Experimental Forest. Third was a hike along Caples Creek, in the Eldorado National Forest, just south of Lake Tahoe. And fourth was a visit to the Illilouette Creek wilderness area, in Yosemite National Park, resulting in this superb passage:

On a two-mile hike to one of three monitoring stations she maintains there, we passed perhaps only a hundred and fifty feet of what most people would consider picture-postcard Sierra Nevada forest—dark-green, conifer-packed woods with a rust-colored carpet of fallen pine needles. The rest was a surprising patchwork of landscapes: rush-filled meadows, crisscrossed with fallen logs; large, sunny grasslands punctuated by a few big trees; copses of young pines and willows; and recently burned expanses, where the ground was brownish black, spattered with delicate pink flowers and adorned with carbonized trunks, gleaming and sculptural.

Along the way, I learned about megafires, prescribed burns, drip torches (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”), masticators, slop-overs, and other interesting things (e.g., “Lodgepole pinecones do not open until heated by fire“; “Black-backed woodpeckers dine almost exclusively on seared beetle larvae”). 

Twilley’s engaging first-person approach and vivid nature descriptions (“A foot-long alligator lizard skittered in front of me, pausing to pump out a couple of quick pushups before vanishing into the brush”) remind me of the work of John McPhee and Ian Frazier. I’ve been wondering if there’d ever be a successor to those two greats. Maybe Twilley is the one.