Life in a Burn Scar

Dawn breaks with a piercing mechanical whine from the ridge above my house in the Plumas forest. The screech intensifies to ear-splitting squeal, then back to screech. Someone is feeding small trees and brush into a pickup-size chipper, spewing chunks and splinters onto a hillside where they are less likely to carry a blaze. I relax. This sound signifies safety.

In the five years since the Dixie Fire raced up the Feather River Canyon, some 80 miles northwest of Lake Tahoe, all of us who live within its charred swath have become used to these raucous intrusions. If they startle the white-headed woodpeckers from our backyard feeders, the deer from their quiet browse, we accept the short-term disturbance for the long-term protection.

On August 4, 2021, flames roared down the ridge above Greenville, my adopted hometown. The fire needed less than 30 minutes to destroy downtown and 362 houses. By then 21 homes in and around Indian Falls had been obliterated. The Canyon Dam area lost 55 houses and Warner Valley 66 seasonal cabins in the days that followed. Nearly a million acres of forest burned.

The fire awakened us from our gentle life amid the trees to the precarious reality. Empty lots and towering dead pines now remind us of the destructive potential and omnipresence of fire in our forest environment, and our own limited ability to control it. Yet the raw, evolving nature of this place is what has drawn me to stay. I am preoccupied by the question facing disaster survivors everywhere: How do we live more compatibly with the places we love?

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A summer drive through Greenville reveals both progress and disappointment. New houses—as many as 50—are scattered along downtown streets lined with leggy young redbud, cedar, and oak trees. Baskets of petunias hang from porches. Lavender, yarrow, and echinacea bloom along tidy yards. Between them are empty lots—four, five, 10 for every new house. Beyond these yawning spaces are hillsides, some now bare, some still stubbled with standing dead trees whose black peeling bark gives them a zebra look.

Many people fled, never to return. Of the roughly 1,000 residents in pre-fire Greenville, maybe half or fewer remain. Some are living in houses rebuilt after a two-year wade through safety and environmental regulations. Soon after the fire, heroic business owners refurbished the only grocery store and rebuilt a gas station mini-mart, burger joint, and coffee shop. Since that post-fire adrenaline rush, the process has become more deliberate. Greenville has the rare opportunity to plan its own future. Talk of an off-the-grid town gets shot down at public meetings, but getting rid of PG&E? That resonates. Thinking ahead is a lot to ask of a Gold Rush town that grew up around the next rich lode, the next lumber mill, but disasters can transform thinking along with the landscape. An enterprise using forest thinnings to construct cross-laminated timber is in the works near Greenville, and The Plumas Sun rose out of the post-fire news desert.

On a bustling lot across from the post office, the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians is building a medical complex. The tribe is going beyond what was lost in the fire, planning to add pharmacy and wellness services to medical and dental clinics, and will employ around 50 people. 

One of the joys of watching Greenville rebuild is witnessing the Maidu, so marginalized in the past, emerge as entrepreneurs. They were the first to call the Dixie Fire an opportunity and have already rebuilt a youth education center as they guide us toward recovery. “We know what our purpose is,” says Trina Cunningham, a Maidu leader not affiliated with the Rancheria. “We’re just doing what needs to be done: taking care of our community.” 

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Today, Plumas County enjoys an astonishingly widespread public understanding of how fire has evolved with these Sierra Nevada forests and the role it has to play to keep them resilient. Few people may have witnessed the suite of species that emerge while trees are still smoking—heat-sensing black fire beetles, black-backed woodpeckers, olive-sided flycatchers. But almost everyone has seen firsthand how fire creeping along the ground cleanses forests of decadent debris, reducing the chance that flames will climb through branches and kindle the forest crowns.

Burning has become a community activity. Spring brings frenetic backyard raking, with neighbors working together to burn piles of leaves, pine needles, and brush. My own neighborhood is one of at least 29 Firewise Communities in Plumas County, joining a national program designed to reduce the risk of wildfire across property lines. The Plumas Underburn Cooperative, formed after the 2018 Camp Fire burned Paradise, helps landowners introduce fire to their backyards. Ryan Bauer, who spent 18 years as a U.S. Forest Service fuels manager and now works with a nonprofit adapting communities to fire, encounters property owners at community meetings who extol the importance of following mechanical thinning with prescribed fire.

“It’s pretty encouraging,” he says. “I’ll love it when the Forest Service says those same things and actually does it.”

These beneficial burns are creating pockets of safety one neighborhood at a time, but the pace is painfully slow. Pile burns and underburns on private land across the county by the Plumas County Fire Safe Council and the Plumas Underburn Cooperative totaled around 235 acres in 2025. The Forest Service, which manages 70 percent of the county’s acreage, burned 7,524 acres in 2024—more than double the five-year average before the Dixie Fire—but only 2,122 acres last year, according to agency reports. 

Forest Service officials have a grand plan to reduce the forest fuels on 285,000 acres by chipping, thinning, masticating, logging, then returning fire to the entire area. They call it the Plumas Community Protection project. Shocked by Dixie’s ferocity, they added the Plumas National Forest to a plan designating 45 million acres, mostly in the West, as a high-risk “fireshed” and awarded it an unprecedented $274 million to help the acres that did not burn become a forest that could withstand the next megafire.

Despite a major agencywide reorganization, work is progressing. Forest areas given names like Thin Lizzy, Grasshopper, and Delleker T are scheduled for commercial logging in the next year, in plots ranging from several hundred to several thousand acres. Most are near communities and designed to protect unburned areas of the forest, says Ivy Kostick, forester for the National Forest Foundation, which is overseeing some of the work for the Forest Service. While progress has seemed sluggish since the plan was announced in 2023, behind-the-scenes planning and contracting should soon result in a burst of on-the-ground work—“bigger than anything I’ve seen before. The next two years are going to be pretty epic,” Kostick says.

Whether that makes forests more resilient remains a question. Jake Blaufuss, a Quincy-based forester for American Forest Resource Council, believes there’s momentum to return stands of pine and fir to the spacing and density that can weather most fires. Bauer is more skeptical. The work planned for the unburned section of the Plumas Forest will make those stands more resilient to drought and insects, he says, but he is worried about the treasured old trees—the ones three people can encircle and not quite touch hands. Unless thinning and logging is followed by underburning, it is less than 60 percent effective at protecting communities and forests, he says. “I’m worried that we’re going to see those giants fade away,” Bauer says.

Hovering over life in the footprint of the Dixie Fire are the changes climate scientists say contributed to this and other megafires. Warmer and drier conditions primed these forests to burn, taking my town and others with them. It is pure hubris to think even our most valiant efforts here will reverse the global trend we have all contributed to since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

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The most gut-wrenching landscape for me is along State Route 36, on the way toward Lassen Volcanic National Park. For five full miles the north side of the road offers no green trees from highway to horizon save an occasional cluster of conifers. Charred pines silhouette the skyline like specters. Deer, bears, even skunks seem to have abandoned the once-lush woods. I know people who have driven a 100-mile detour to avoid this landscape.

I am drawn to it like a gruesome itch I seem compelled to scratch. At the top of a rise, where the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road, Collins Pine Co. set aside 40 acres here in the 1940s to show how the forest was when the forty-niners arrived. The Dixie Fire ravaged this old-growth grove. With each of my visits a few more trees have toppled, thrusting four-foot-diameter trunks one on top of another like gigantic pick-up sticks.

And with each visit the whitethorn, Ceanothus cordulatus, has grown taller; its half-inch thorns seem ever sharper. Pity the bare calves of the hikers who pass through! I take small comfort in knowing that ceanothus fixes nitrogen from the air, enriching the soil. A native drought-tolerant survivor, whitethorn is choking the diverse seedlings that should grow in the nutrient-rich, sunlit spaces that fire creates. The Park 40 old-growth forest is poised to become chaparral.

This is the face of type conversion, the bland term scientists use to describe one ecosystem that evolved over millennia rolling over to a new one, better suited to changing conditions. In the Anthropocene, fire has morphed from a tool that nurtures these Sierra conifer forests to one so intense it fosters their destruction. 

Suddenly a haunting bugle draws my attention away from the whitethorn. A trio of sandhill cranes is flying low toward the wetlands of Lake Almanor—Pleistocene survivors crossing a burned-out forest on the cusp of epochal change. This burst of ancient birdsong upends what seemed inevitable a moment ago. 

I drive home mulling the pace of change. Greenville is regrowing too slowly for many but far faster than the forests that surround it. Witnessing how they evolve is what keeps me here. I round a corner to face Lassen Peak beyond the fire-killed landscape, majestic and reassuring, bathed in an orange sunset. Not so fast, I mutter to the passing whitethorn.