Transformed by Fire

Home Subscribe Donate Merchandise Books Login Account Podcasts Magazine Archive CP+ Perks Archives Transformed by Fire In the Heart of the Kalmiopsis Roger Peet July 19, 2026 I stood at the trailhead for a long time, pacing back and forth, returning to the car, getting into it, starting it, turning it off again, getting out and walking to the place where the trail left the gravel of the parking lot and headed off into the manzanita scrub. I couldn’t make up my mind.

I was parked in a flat circle of gravel in a saddle overlooking a deep valley on the edge of the Kalmiopsis wilderness in the southwestern corner of Oregon. It was early, with the chill of a spring dawn at 4000 feet still lingering in the clear and cloudless air. All around me, the silvery trunks of dead fir trees rose, branchless and barkless, smooth grey cylinders emerging from deep-green hummocks of manzanita and tanoak. The dead trees descended the slope in front of me and rose again on the far side. They appeared on the slope up to the next ridgeline and to the one after that, and again beyond that to the horizon. In a 180-degree arc before me, there was barely a single living tree to be seen.

The Kalmiopsis Wilderness is the second-largest wilderness area in Oregon, and a landscape utterly transformed by fire. Nearly the entire wilderness burned in the catastrophic Biscuit fire of 2002, and fifteen years later it burned again in 2017’s Chetco Bar fire. The ranks of denuded slopes I could see from the trailhead parking lot were bare to a degree you don’t see in many landscapes in the mountains of Oregon, with the soil and stones visible beneath what was once a steep, mature old-growth conifer forest. The forest that once cloaked these dramatic mountains was completely obliterated twice. I was having a hard time convincing myself to enter the wilderness and to see the totality of that destruction for myself.

It was spring, and I was here for wildflowers. Every year, when the weather starts to warm, I head out from Portland as often as I can to pursue the new bloom of spring across the West. With the flowers come the insects, and the birds aren’t far behind, and the surge of life back into the dull temperance of winter consoles me greatly in these deeply stupid and fractious times. Standing at the edge of the annihilated Kalmiopsis, I felt as if I were about to embark on a weekend of missing out and confronting disaster rather than the biological luxuriance I have come to rely on.

I somehow convinced myself to go through with it, and I left the lot and took the trail lined with low bushes and scrub, my peripheral vision dopplering through the silvery trunks. Before I reached the ridge, a bluebird was hopping from severed limb to severed limb in front of me, blinking in and out of sight between the trees, auguring some possibility.

In the heart of the burn zone. Photograph by Roger Peet.

I rose along the rim trail to a high slope and emerged from the boluses of manzanita into a barren dome of weathered serpentine rock. I could see further into the wilderness at this point, and I could make out the point where the scars of the Biscuit and Chetco Bar fires met, the point where even the standing dead trunks of firs had been consumed. I crossed the dome, continued, then stopped and turned back. I walked out into the expanse of rough, silvery scree and looked around. Low to the ground, curved, straplike, leathery leaves, and I knelt next to a patch of them and bent a finger under a rouged bell to lift and reveal the vivid yellow of bright, pollen-covered pistils. A fritillary, dwarfed, and another, and another. Beyond that, tiny stalks bearing miniaturized larkspur flowers, a plant that in rich soil can reach six feet in height. Beyond that, a thick vegetable mass of yellow asters, and the flat mosaics of dwarf pussypaws, their furry pink involucres folded into delicately hirsute spheroids, waxy leaves shimmering in the rising light. The barren dome was a carpet of small blooms. I rose and turned. I was surrounded.

Serpentine rocks are relics of an ancient ocean floor pushed upward to the surface by plate tectonics. They’re composed of ancient igneous rock assemblages that contain high concentrations of metals such as magnesium, as well as rarer ones like chromium and nickel. The presence of these metals in high concentrations makes life difficult for plants growing on serpentine, with the result that plant communities in areas dominated by serpentine show surprisingly high levels of endemism- meaning that they are unique to the area. The serpentine soils of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness yield the highest rates of plant endemism in Oregon, formed as deep-marine crusts intruded from the depths of the earth over millions of years into regions with established plant communities. The communities that found themselves marooned on the new serpentine soils had to adapt or perish, and those that succeeded formed new species found nowhere else on the planet.

Satisfied now that I’d made the right choice, I proceeded into the wilderness. The rim trail descended after a couple of miles to meet an old roadbed, where a path through thick manzanita was sometimes hard to follow. I found myself stooping and kneeling every thirty feet to encounter some small flower or to pursue a microscopic grasshopper into a thicket of blooms. The roadbed followed a dogleg along the slope and crossed over into another watershed, where the full extent of the double burn could be seen.

It had a dramatic effect. The catastrophic Biscuit fire had killed much of the forest in the wilderness, including ancient stands of old-growth pines, firs, and hemlocks, but many of those trees had remained standing. So many, in fact, that in the years following the fire, the Forest Service allowed logging in less protected regions surrounding the wilderness, prompting fierce resistance from local communities who fought each other in the forests and on the ridges over the industrial extraction of the remnants of the forest killed in the fire. This was salvage logging, permitted under the liberal Clinton administration to circumvent federal protections for wilderness buffer zones. I had made camp on the ridge in a field of massive ancient stumps logged after Biscuit, in a period when forest defenders blockaded the roads into the forest to prevent commercial extraction. Logging damages all forests, but logging the deadwood of ancient trees in a region with harsh, limited soils has lasting consequences. The minerals and materials that make up those dead trees would eventually return to the soil and produce a new generation of forest, but only if they are allowed to remain. Research conducted on the burn scar after the Biscuit fire revealed that it was actually a previous generation of salvage logging that had contributed to the fire’s severity.

Deep in the heart of the burn, I found a seep of water crossing the trail, and in the wet soil surrounding the small pod it produced were hundreds of Darlingtonia plants. Darlingtonia californica, also known as the Cobra Lily (although it’s not a lily), is a carnivorous plant with strange, snakelike, hooded leaves that enclose traps of sugary water in which insects drown and are digested. Another regional endemic, these plants use their carnivory to adapt to the harsh, thin, poisonous soil; where they appear, they are found in profusion, covering marshy areas in nodding thickets of serpentlike leaves.

The harsh soils of the Klamath Mountains are under threat from more than just fire: the recent surge in the price of and demand for nickel has mining firms circling like vultures around the mountains and valleys of the rugged Siskiyous. Canadian firm Homeland Mining has been buying up mining claims along the eastern border of the Kalmiopsis wilderness, including the popular hiking destination and botanical interest area of 8 Dollar Mountain, just outside the small town of Selma. Homeland is interested in the nickel laterite deposits present in the region’s serpentine soil complex, and if the decimated forests and bleeding landscapes of Indonesia are any warning, then the communities of Southern Oregon have their work cut out for them to preserve their drinking water, their biodiversity, and the complex forest assemblages that make their region unique. Local environmental organizations like KS Wild and Kalmiopsis Audubon are monitoring the advance of mining claims, and as the demand for data centers and for the nickel ores that make them possible rises, they will need all the help they can get.

I climbed up and out of the burn into a remnant pocket of ancient forest on the south side of Canyon Peak. Massive old-growth firs and pines towered overhead, while the odd saprophytic plants known as pine-drops reared their hot-pink stalks out of the bone-dry duff. It was cool and shady after the long, hot ascent, and I imagined what it must have been like here at the edge of the massive fire that devastated the wilderness, watching the valley full of 800-year-old trees disappear in a cloud of ash. Scientists suggest that the fire ecology of this region may herald its transformation into a botanical complex where trees give way to shrubs, and a new and more arid environmental context comes to hold sway over the crags and defiles of the Kalmiopsis region. For now, the forest endures, despite all the threats the future seems to hold.

Roger Peet is an artist, printmaker, muralist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and helps to run the cooperative Flight 64 print studio in Portland.