Several years back, the foothills a half-mile from our home suffered extreme fires, two years in a row that obliterated every sign of vegetation on the entire mountain range! The second year’s fire had flash burned across the mountain so suddenly and with such intensity, that the wildlife, regardless of their normal inclinations to fight or eat one another, attempted to seek refuge and laid down together in a stream that runs through the area.
The devastating loss of animal life in that fire was so extreme, that officials were called in to remove the bodies. Unfortunately, we live next door to where the staging area was set up for that task. It took almost a week of trailer after trailer being piled with carcasses before the gruesome job was finished. During that time, there wasn’t a single day I didn’t cry over the loss of wildlife, our mountains forever being altered and over the grim looks upon the faces of the officials charged with that task.
I’ll never forget the shell-shocked looks on their faces. They closely resembled those of soldiers fresh off a bloody battlefield. I spoke to some who told me that they’d never seen anything like it—bears, foxes, deer, snakes, coyotes, hawks, squirrels, etc., laying down in the water side-by-side, charred into a gruesome solid mass.
It took me almost a year before I could actually bring myself to traverse those mountain trails after the second fire. Every time I’d try sooner, I’d make it as far as the head of the trail or perhaps even to the oak grove with the stream where the majority of the animal bodies had been found, before I’d burst into tears over the tremendous loss and have to turn back.
Many of my friends felt the same, and we decided to tackle getting back on the mountain as a group. And so we set out on walks together.
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