What Comes Back First — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Look at the burned ground as we pass through it, because the recovery has an order to it and it's genuinely hopeful.
First, within weeks, grass and fireweed. Fire releases a flush of nutrients and removes the shade, and the opportunists move in immediately. In the first summers after a big burn these slopes can be carpeted in wildflowers in a way they never were under closed forest.
Then aspen, and this is the spectacular part. Aspen roots survive underground when the trunks burn, and the loss of the canopy triggers them to send up shoots — thousands per acre. So a hillside that was dark conifer before a fire can come back as a shimmering white-and-gold aspen forest afterward. Some of the best autumn colour in Arizona is now growing in burn scars.
Conifers come last and slowest. Ponderosa seed doesn't travel far, so in the middle of a huge severe burn there may be no seed source for miles, and those areas can stay brush and grass for a very long time — possibly permanently, if the climate has shifted underneath them.
So when you look at a burn: green fuzz and white trunks means the system is doing what it does. Grey sticks and bare dirt over a whole horizon is the part we should worry about.