“We’ve lost a huge area of native vegetation,” said Debra Hughson, deputy superintendent for the Mojave National Preserve. “A lot of pinyon [pines], junipers gone forever, and a lot of the Joshua trees, likely.”
Archive link: https://archive.ph/QUr4r
Patrolling the Mojave makes you wish for a nuclear winter
Hmm… not a lot of fallout fans, eh?
Guess not lol
This makes me so sad. This is/was such a beautiful place. Hopefully it can recover, if even partly.
This is so heartbreaking. That ecosystem is so much more fragile than it seems. I wonder if replanting would help in this instance, or if it would be too difficult/expensive.
I’ve been out there before when I was in wildland fire with BLM, one of the issues with the Preserve is (and issue meaning making things more difficult, not that it’s a bad thing in general) there’s a very strict ban on vehicles going anywhere besides premade roads/trails.
That means that instead of like most fires in this type of fuel where engines can drive up and directly attack it, it’s a hiking game. And even then there is strict rules about what kind of damage you can do to the area. In any other area this would a straight forward, put dozer line in, have crews start burning, and engines start mobile attacking areas they can get to. That’s why seeing fires like this sucks, because I know the crew (if they haven’t all left yet) from the Mojave National Preserve, and I know they’d want to do more to stop it.
So this fire made pinyon and juniper extinct?
