Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Year After Wildfire Expectations

And the soil type. If the soils are typical of those that form over granite, they have low capacities for storing nutrients and moisture and new growth is much slower and less nutritious. If they are typical of soils that form over shale or limestone, new growth will be much faster.

FB, I can't imagine yall not getting summer rains in Oregon. powdr

A year after the high park fire in Colorado it was pretty grim.. following right after the fire record heavy rains so a lot of soil was washed away. The forest service airlifted a lot of mulch and seed but a lot of it was washed down into gullys or was completely washed away. However quite a bit of grass popped up in areas that were burnt but not so steep.
I hunted deer and there were pockets of them but few and far between. I did not see any elk sign at all in the areas I was in, but it was a huge burned area so I can't really say about the entire burn.

Now some 4 years later lots of new growth. More deer than I have ever seen and elk have moved into areas where there were none before. Lots of mountain lions too!
So long term the burn prolly improved habitat.

I even have good views from my house now that the trees are gone.

First year after the fire grim and then improving each year there after.

LC

Both of those are genus names that are commonly used as catch-all names. Ceanothus has more than 50 species and manzanita a lot more than that. It takes a botonist to sort them out. We have a lot of ceanothus in southern Idaho but it's usually just called chaparral, which it isn't really.

The thing that's really screwed up the ecology in much of the west is cheat grass. It spreads and grows thick between the sagebrush. It matures and drops its seed early in the summer then the stems dry out. If a fire gets going, the cheat burns extra hot which kills the sage and other native plants. All that's left if the cheat grass seeds which come back with a vengeance the next spring. With the sage gone, the cheat is all that survives. Without cheat, the sage will survive many of the fires but with the cheat, the fire clears the land completely except for the cheat seeds lying in the soil.