What I Learned Walking Through a Burned Forest

Published by Arizona Backpacking Project | September 2026 | Filed under Beyond the Trail

I was reading an article from the Forest Service about wildfire and prescribed fire the other day, and it got me thinking about a hike I did exactly ten years ago. I hadn't thought about that hike in quite a while, which is funny because I've had plenty of memorable days on the trail over the years. Every once in a while, though, something will bring one particular day back to you. This time it was an article about how we're learning to live with fire, and suddenly I was back on the Arizona Trail near Jacob Lake in 2016.

I was hiking Passage 42 and knew I was coming into a prescribed burn. In fact, I knew the burn had been completed. There was still a Trail Closed sign up, but apparently the rangers simply hadn't gotten around to taking it down yet, so I walked past it. I wasn't sneaking into some active wildfire. I knew what had happened and knew the fire was supposed to be there. What I didn't know was what it would feel like to actually walk through the aftermath.

The first thing I remember is that the forest felt different. That's a difficult thing to explain because it wasn't any one thing I could point to. There were a few small logs that were still burning and others that had gone out but were still smoldering, so even though the fire was considered complete, there were little reminders everywhere that it had only recently been there. More than anything, though, I remember the silence. I'm one of those people who probably wouldn't suffer much from solitary confinement, so it wasn't that I felt lonely. It wasn't peaceful either. There was simply nothing else. No wind moving through the trees, no birds that I could hear, no little noises coming from the forest floor. Nothing except my footsteps.

The smell was strange, too. I personally love the smell of campfire smoke. There's something about the way it gets into your clothes that brings back an entire evening around a fire. This wasn't that. It smelled like burned pine, but without any of the nostalgia. At one point I remember thinking it almost smelled peanut-buttery, which is a description that makes little sense to me now but is still exactly how I remember it. The forest looked burned, smelled burned and sounded different, and even though I knew this was a professionally conducted prescribed fire, I remember thinking that devastation seemed like a pretty good description of what I was looking at. I hesitate to use that word now because it makes it sound as though I thought the Forest Service had simply come in and destroyed the place. I didn't. I knew why they had done it. But if I hadn't known it was a prescribed burn, I'm honestly not sure how I would have interpreted what I was seeing.

After a while, the initial strangeness gave way to curiosity. I started paying attention to individual things instead of trying to make sense of the whole burned forest. There were large piles of ash that made me wonder what had been there before, as though something substantial had simply burned completely away. Then I came across a huge overturned root ball attached to a burned tree, and there were holes where the roots had burned away. I thought those were pretty cool. It hadn't even occurred to me that roots would burn like that. I suppose I had always pictured fire as something that burned trees and logs and whatever was sitting on the ground. I hadn't really considered what it could do underneath the surface.

I spent probably two or three hours hiking through that area. My reaction wasn't fear or sadness, and it wasn't one of those moments where you suddenly feel connected to the universe. It was more of a whoa mixed with curiosity. Eventually I came out of the burn area, crossed a road and found myself looking at an untouched section of forest. The contrast was almost ridiculous. On one side was this strange, blackened landscape I'd just spent hours walking through, and on the other was a mature forest that looked as though fire had never visited the region. By then I was tired and ready to stop hiking anyway, so my whoa meter was already maxed out. I was much more interested in finding a flat patch of ground for my tent than contemplating the juxtaposition of fire and forest. Still, that day has remained one of my fondest hiking memories.

At the time, I understood that prescribed fire was part of forest management, but I hadn't spent much time thinking about why. Reading that Forest Service article brought some of those questions back. Fire isn't an intruder in many of Arizona's forests; it has been part of them for a very long time. Ponderosa pine forests in particular developed with relatively frequent fires, many of them low-intensity surface fires, although the fire regime varies considerably depending on the ecosystem and location. Indigenous peoples also used fire across the landscape for a variety of purposes long before the Forest Service existed.

Our relationship with fire changed as settlement expanded across the West. Fire suppression became an important part of federal land management, and there were very good human reasons for that. If a fire is threatening a community, a home or a life, nobody is going to stand around admiring the historical fire regime. You put the fire out. The problem is that forests don't stop being ecosystems while we're suppressing fires, and over time the absence of frequent fire changed some of those forests. Fuels accumulated, forest structure changed, and in some places the next fire had the potential to behave very differently from the fires that had historically shaped the landscape.

Our understanding of that relationship has changed over time, too, and you can see that change in what the Forest Service does today. Prescribed fire is one tool, mechanical treatment is another, and under the right conditions managers can sometimes allow naturally occurring fires to burn rather than immediately suppressing them. Large restoration efforts such as the Four Forest Restoration Initiative are attempting to address these issues across enormous areas of northern Arizona. None of this means the problem is solved, and I don't think it would be honest to suggest that it is. Prescribed fire is complicated, weather doesn't always cooperate, smoke affects communities, treatments have limitations, and there is still a tremendous amount of work to do. But I do think there is something worth recognizing in the change. We spent a long time trying to keep fire out of the forest, and now we're deliberately putting some of it back.

I understand that differently because I walked through one.

When you're reading about prescribed fire, it's easy for it to remain an abstract management concept. You hear about fuel reduction, forest resilience and restoring natural processes. All of those things are important, but they're very different from actually walking into a forest where the work has just been done. The person hiking that trail doesn't experience a prescribed burn as a management objective. They experience it as a place that smells strange, where some logs are still smoldering and where the silence is so complete that their own footsteps become the dominant sound.

And then they keep walking.

That's probably what I didn't understand in 2016: a burned landscape isn't a permanent landscape. What you see immediately after a fire isn't what you'll see a year later, and what you see a year later isn't what you'll see several years after that. The obvious signs of fire gradually become part of the forest rather than defining it.

I've seen that happen more recently. I'm currently camping in an area that went through a prescribed burn about three years ago. I had been here before the burn, and I was here afterward when the place was black-scarred. Today, if you weren't looking for evidence of the fire, you could easily miss it. There are still piles of ash where some of the logs I used to sit on once were, and there is black charring that climbed up the trunks of the trees that survived, but mostly it's just forest.

And that's the part that really sticks with me. When I'm hiking through this place now, I'm not generally thinking about prescribed fire. I'm more concerned with making sure my dogs don't stray too far. It's just forest. But that hike through Passage 42 changed the way I look at places like this. When I see burned logs scattered among mature trees now, I sometimes catch myself wondering, When the heck did that burn?

I never used to ask that question.

Now I do, because I know that what I'm looking at is evidence of something that happened at a particular moment in the life of that forest. Maybe it was a prescribed burn. Maybe it was lightning. Maybe it was an accidental fire. Maybe it was a wildfire that burned through under completely different conditions. I may never know, and I don't necessarily need to. I can still look at what burned, what survived and what has started to grow back. I can wonder what the place looked like immediately afterward and what it will look like twenty years from now.

I think that's what I took away from that strange day near Jacob Lake, although I certainly didn't know I was taking anything away from it at the time. Fire can destroy things. It can frighten us. It can also be a natural and necessary part of a forest, and sometimes the people responsible for managing that forest have to deliberately put fire on the ground to restore something that has been missing for a very long time. Those things aren't necessarily contradictory.

For a backpacker, maybe the useful thing is simply to stop and look.

If you walk into a burned landscape, you may never know exactly what happened there. You may not know when it burned or why. But instead of seeing only what is gone, look at what remains. Look at the ash, the charred trunks, the places where the fire burned hot and the places where it didn't. Look at whatever is beginning to return.

You're not necessarily looking at a ruined forest.

You're looking at a forest that has been through something.

And you're seeing it at one particular moment in a much longer story.

Back in 2016, I didn't have any of those thoughts. I was just walking through a very strange forest, listening to my footsteps, smelling something that wasn't quite campfire and wasn't quite anything I could identify, and discovering that tree roots can burn in ways I'd never imagined.

Mostly, I remember thinking:

Whoa.