Fire on the Rim

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Stephen J. Pyne. Fire on the Rim

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FIRE ON THE RIM

Grove Karl Gilbert

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Kent discovers the coffeepot under a soiled fireshirt and plugs it in. I step out the door and yell to Gilbert to bring some ration coffee from the cache. The air is damp and chilled, alien to fire. We find chairs or chair surrogates and accept the nostalgia of fires remembered and the more powerful nostrum of fires promised.

Three times during the past week observers on the South Rim have reported a smoke near Bright Angel Point. There are six inches of fresh snow on the ground with one to two feet of old snow in the denser woods. The reports are viewed with skepticism until a routine helicopter flight sees, then flies over, the source—a puffing, live white fir on the Uncle Jim Point trail. Our own Uncle Jimmy and E.B. begin the hike in. For more than an hour they crash through snowbanks. The sky has glossed over with filmy cirrus; it is impossible to discriminate between sky and smoke; they ask for assistance. Recon 1 guides them painfully to the smoldering snag. The tree is huge, alive, hollow, and rotten at the top. From the ground they can locate no smoke, much less flame. Convinced that the fire can only go out, they leave it alone. A week later the fire is still simmering and actually ignites some freshly exposed fuel on the ground. Uncle Jimmy and E.B. return to fell the tree.

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