Burnt Out – Smoked Out – Still Here – Wallow Fire 2011

Posted By Chris Wilson on Jul 11, 2011 | 0 comments

I grew up in the White Mountains of Arizona.  Mountains you say?  Yep, and they contain the world’s largest stand of Ponderosa Pine trees, well, used to have the largest stand.  If you’ve never traveled north from Phoenix you might not have any idea that there are ski resorts and mountains that stand 12,000 ft high.  There is a little town on the Arizona/New Mexico boarder called Eagar and a two little resort towns, Alpine  and Greer.

Eagar only has about 8,000 residence and is a sleeply little town… for the most part, but it has grabbed national attention twice in the past year with an airplane that crashed into my old high school (click here) and more recently a fire that has destroyed everything I once called home.  My entire life has been spent roaming the forests and valleys in these beautiful wooded areas.   My friends, family and I used to hunt and fish, take Sunday drives, bugle elk, cut our family Christmas Tree, and have corn roasts on “the mountain.”

The Wallow Fire was started near Alpine Arizona in the early part of June.  In only a few weeks it soon became the largest wild fire to ever hit Arizona and in it’s wake left nearly everything charred, damaged, and never to be the same again.

My wife and I always spend the 4th of July in Eagar and have a blast… but this year was a little different.  There was a sadness I had never felt before, and a community that had been changed forever.   Three weeks earlier I had evacuated my mom and some of her most important possessions and fled the town as the fire made it’s way closer and closer to Eagar on it’s way to consuming more than 500,000 acres, that’s over 700 square miles!

We took a drive on a rainy afternoon and I was blown away with what I saw.  Here is a little taste of what the Wallow Fire did to my home town, all because two people felt like they were above the rules and didn’t put out their camp fire.

The forest was closed, except for a few miles down the main highway, and as we drove we came up on the most interesting and beautiful sight.  Right there, in the middle of the blackest forest and chard remains of trees and earth were the most vibrant green ferns and grass I had ever seen.  It had only been 2-3 weeks since the fire had hit the area, yet there they were, nearly 2 feet tall and springing up as if to say “not all is lost, we will be back soon.”  It will never be the same in my lifetime, but I hope for our sakes and for the future of my children we have learned something from this disaster and won’t have to re-live it again. Below is a shot taken in Greer, AZ.  The remains of the Greer Lodge can been seen in the foreground (burned by arson earlier this year) and in the background you can see the chard forest that encircles the valley.  In all, I believe 27 cabins were lost in Greer.  Soon, these blackened areas will be bald as the dead trees fall.