Mill Flat trail...redone by forest fire...contrasts.

Paul and I hiked up to Anderson Valley on Saturday to see if we could get an old rusted crosscut saw blade he had seen up there to make a sign for the scout troop. We didn't know if it would still be there or if the whole area had been burned in the recent fires. We found out. Anderson Valley is still intact, cabin and all. You can see some fairly distant burns from there, but nothing close on the trail over to it from Mill Flat. The Mill flat trail is another story. It was a great day for hiking. Starting out from the trail head it had rained quite hard the night before and it was really nice and cool and not dusty like it usually is in that section. As we moved up, things looked really good with a few oak and aspen leaves starting to turn. There was actually still some water after you got up a ways. We noticed that the mud in the stream areas was very black from ash washed down from further up. About a quarter of a mile from the old mill site is where we began to see the burns. As we were crossing a little meadow we could see lots of mud washed across it and when we looked up the hill there was a big burn. The erosion problems are starting already. As we hiked further along the trail the burn areas increased with them coming down one side and going up the other in random places. Kind of strange how random it is. There were still lots of green spots. Lots of logs would have the centers burned out and just have a shell left. We even found one big aspen still burning. There were trees with sap just weeping all down them from getting so hot and kind of boiling over. In some ways, the fire seemed to have done what they want as in clearing out lots of underbrush and dead wood. The very worst place is just before you get to Mill Flat. It's totally burned up with even the foliage and weeds in the stream bed just gone. It's like a forest cemetery, totally black. We thought we might find the whole meadow and the big campsite at the top gone. It was so great to come out on the meadow and find it still there. Some of the grass had been burned off and a tree here and there, but thankfully nothing more. The electric fences are gone and some cattle were there eating things up. They will have to get that taken care of or they will over graze it. Hiking over to Anderson Valley was a green paradise after the other. We lunched on a summit and could see some of the burns over the New Harmony way. Coming back down was good with lots of clouds rolling in on the breeze and keeping it cool and thunder claps in the distance. We thought we might get rained on, but didn't. We were glad we hiked back down to the green and not the other way around. It was good leaving the blackness behind and coming back down to the green. We speculate that the trail up there will have some real erosion problems next year with the coming of the snow melt and rain washing off the denuded hillsides. Just glad that so much of it survived.

PS - I did my first tree carving. Can you believe I have never done it before? Another PS - We found the remains of an old dam on the way down. It's rocks all stacked up double sided across the stream. You can see where the stream broke through. We'd like to find out the history behind it.