Diario de kurtsteinbach

Somewhere in the not too distant past, there was a huge forest fire that consumed most of this island. There are old growth firs that still bear the char deep in the fissured corky bark. When building my orchard and doing any kind of excavation, I frequently run into charcoal, sometimes a foot or so deep down. Finding it so deep isn't especially surprising, since the entire area of some 80 acres was logged in the 1960's, slash stacked in great piles that were never lit, and the land bladed smooth to create cattle pasture. Much soil was moved around in the process. There are still snags and downed logs that show deep charring; those that haven't rotted are buried in the peat, or they are cedar. Some of the old cedar fence posts are charred along just one side, suggesting the rancher split the fire-felled logs for the fence line.

Yesterday while performing an annual ritual of digging a foot or two of peat accumulation out an area of pond, I found scorched clay. This is interesting, because it tells me the pond level was low enough for the heat of the forest fire to partially "fire" the soil - in the potters sense of the word. Pond levels fluctuate with rainfall, which means in Washington, with the seasons. It hadn't considered this before, but because fires need dry fuel, and our annual fire danger season is generally August through September, I think I can now safely assume the fire occurred when the ponds were seasonally low, or around this time of year. I'm still in the dark what year this great fire occurred. I have sent an inquiry off to the county historical society to request any information they might have on record.