Ferns, Burned Forest. Yosemite National Park, California. November 3, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

Spending a lot of time in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere, my point of view regarding wildfires has changed since I was younger. Leaving aside for a moment the possible human cost when a fire overruns homes and other structures, wildfires are a normal part of the forest ecology, and suppressing them has actually caused a number of problems. Once I started to think of wild fires as something part of the natural process and not as disasters I became interested in how I might photograph forests that had been burned.

For the most part I’ve been unsuccessful in creating such images, but I like this one. Many of my previous attempts have focused on the image of forests of burned tree trunks, sometimes with new growth starting below, or on the hillsides laid bare by fire, or on the new growth itself. This is a more intimate view of a fire zone than I’ve tried before – and I feel like it works even more in the larger versions of the image that are not posted here.