Sierra ‘oasis’ surrounded by Creek Fire burn has a message: We all failed the forest
A creaking tree stopped the Terzian family in their tracks on a recent spring day while surveying wildfire and wind damage at Minarets Pack Station in Sierra National Forest.
Tracy and Mikki Terzian and their 13-year-old daughter, Hannah, fell silent as if on cue when they heard the creak to peer cautiously up – listening, waiting, wondering if this would be the moment the dead tree would fall.
It’s a drill that’s commonplace now in the forest filled with hundreds of thousands of trees killed by the 2020 Creek Fire and preceding years of drought and bark beetle infestations. Thousands of others that managed to survive those events were uprooted and blown over by destructive winds earlier this year.
A large ponderosa pine tree toppled by those winds crushed a small storage building on the Terzians’ 20-acre property. Others blocked roads leading to their remote pack station in the wilderness and caused havoc in their private campground. The Creek Fire before them burned wooden corrals for the mules and horses, melted water pipes, caused smoke damage, and came close to destroying their entire business.
They feel fortunate to have fared so well. Several neighbors had all their buildings destroyed, including a closed mine and several cow camps, the Terzians said, along with some cattle there. At least 855 structures burned in the Creek Fire, most of them homes. Businesses included rural general stores – Cressman’s near Shaver Lake, and Wagner’s at Mammoth Pool Reservoir. A member of the family that owns Wagner’s was among a convoy of cowboys with horse trailers that showed up to evacuate the Terzians’ startled stock during the Creek Fire although he was a stranger and his store burned the night before.
That kind of brazen generosity saved countless lives as the Creek Fire quickly became the single largest wildfire in California’s history.
The Terzians are in a unique and difficult position now as they reopen their pack station to guests for the first time since the Creek Fire in a dramatically altered forest. For one thing, they said a couple bridges along one route to their station, Beasore Road, are still impassable.
Tracy will lead a couple pack trips next week for the first time this year into nearby Ansel Adams Wilderness, where Tracy was told high-elevation lake destinations didn’t burn. A couple main trails to them recently reopened, he said, but several others remain closed due to damage. He worries they’ll get overgrown and forgotten about.
Tracy was in the Ansel Adams Wilderness with guests when the Creek Fire ignited at the start of Labor Day weekend. He guided the group and pack mules down a trail to safety as wildfire neared.
Mikki and Hannah were at the pack station then and evacuated “in the nick of time.” Leaving there without Tracy was the hardest thing Mikki said she’s ever had to do.
She calls the Minarets Pack Station they returned to in late May an “oasis” surrounded by a burnt forest. It’s an oasis her family is eager to do more to protect. The Terzians said they can cut some dead trees with a permit, and those under 10 inches in diameter without one, but the scale of the work needed and restrictions in place have at times left them feeling overwhelmed.
Their pack station operates under a Forest Service permit and sits on 20 acres at the edge of Miller’s Meadow. The meadow remains a vibrant green, but many trees around it are dead.
The Terzians want to fell more trees there, but land near meadows have additional protections for water and wildlife that prohibit much of the work they’d like to do.
“So, what do we do?” Tracy said. “Do we just sit and take it? Or we vacate it? That’s not our way. We respond to challenges.”
Minarets Pack Station after California’s largest wildfire
Mikki describes herself as a “fire-phobe” now. She said officials told her they could pile some dead vegetation for the Forest Service to burn this winter, but having it around for that long makes her nervous.
“In the meantime, it’s fuel.”
She’s hopeful someone will let them borrow a wood chipper. The Terzians were also looking for volunteers to help rebuild their corrals, and are working on some electrical lines tied to solar panels.
Mikki is thankful for what was done to save the pack station, but routinely gets upset about the current state of Sierra National Forest and its future.
It’s easy to understand why while driving to their pack station.
Much of the 52 miles stretching above North Fork to their pack station burned in the Creek Fire. The devastation can feel endless on that winding road, still called the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway. Blackened sticks that were trees punctuate views of vast arid mountainsides in every direction, none more overwhelmingly altered than at Mile High Vista above Mammoth Pool.
A car charred in the Creek Fire and subsequently covered in graffiti still sits deserted along this long, lonesome road. Around another turn, a new sign that reads, “Be extra careful with fire,” seems superfluous.
The cause of the Creek Fire remains under investigation 10 months after it ignited.
Yet even in this heartbreaking landscape where the scale of destruction is enormous, some hopeful signs are sprouting fresh from the earth. Wildflowers of every color are blooming from the ash, and ferns still grow beside creeks. A pair of hawks and a raven soared above the few motorists who passed through here on June 11.
Another bright spot: A “bear friend” of the Terzians – affectionately called “Bear Bear” and “Bruno” by Mikki – survived the fire. He recently greeted the Terzians upon their return to the pack station at Miller’s Meadow.
“It is my favorite thing, to come here on our first day every season, and my bear is here,” Mikki said.
There’s an image of two black bears printed on a decorative flag hanging off the main pack station building that further proclaims Mikki’s love for the iconic animal.
Bear Bear normally shares the premises with around 30 stock, most of them mules. The majority have already returned to the pack station, transported from the Terzians’ other home in Big Valley in Lassen County.
“They are my number one employees,” Mikki said. “They are family, they are reliable, they are amazing. They all have a different personality.”
Some of those personalities: Dixie, a retired race mule; Grasshopper, famous for hopping out of the corral to visit his girlfriend, a cow; and Cupcake, a “blondie” and “diva.”
Hannah loves to ride them on adventures into the wilderness. She also enjoys hanging out at the pack station.
“It’s very relaxing, too,” Hannah said. “You hear the birds and the wind goes by and it’s very peaceful.”
The Terzians bought the pack station in 2017. They’re not sure when it was built, but were told the main building, what they call the lodge, was already old in the 1960s.
Tracy owned two other pack stations in the Sierra before it, and also worked at Minarets Pack Station in the late 1980s. He retired from Sanger High School in Fresno County as its athletic director.
There have been many wildfires in the region since they bought the pack station five years ago, but only one aside from the Creek Fire stands out in their memory as being a serious concern, the 2018 Lions Fire.
They always thought a much worse fire would come someday.
“We all knew that this thing was going to burn. It was a topic of conversation,” Tracy said. “It was the question of not if it was going to burn, it was when it was going to burn.”
The Creek Fire came within several hundred feet of the pack station. The Terzians aren’t sure how the corrals burned. Floating embers could have ignited them. They’re extremely grateful to firefighters who saved their buildings, including a bunkhouse and several smaller structures.
It’s about a two-hour ride with the mules from the pack station to get through the “burn stuff,” then another hour or two to High Sierra lakes in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. Some of their favorites include Cora, Lillian, Lady, Vandenberg and Staniford lakes. They also venture into Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. Tracy said he doesn’t expect to reach branches of the San Joaquin River this year because of trail closures.
Despite the aftermath of the Creek Fire, Tracy said this year is looking good in terms of pack trip reservations. Most trips are dropping off hikers in the wilderness and returning to get them days later.
Mikki said people being able to ride through the burned forest is a “good education.”
“They need to see it,” she said, “because they need to understand that management, again, is key. It doesn’t mean go in and take out all the trees, clear cut. It doesn’t mean wipe it out to where it’s not natural. It means what the Forest Service already does do along the trails by taking out hazard trees so that hikers are safe, packers are safe. It’s important to manage.”
‘We failed’ to protect Sierra National Forest
Mikki said a Pacific fisher used to live down the road but she hasn’t seen it since before the Creek Fire. The Southern Sierra Nevada population of this tree-dwelling mammal in the weasel family became a federally endangered species shortly before the Creek Fire ignited. It’s now at the heart of a lawsuit filed earlier this year by several groups aiming to halt logging projects in the forest so the fisher can be better studied and protected. Mikki disapproves of the lawsuit: “Stop tying our Forest Service’s hands.”
“We must carry out selection cuts to keep our forest healthy,” she wrote in a message last week to Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, who also opposes the lawsuit.
Tracy sees plenty of blame to go around when he looks at the blackened forest that surrounds Minarets Pack Station.
“I look at this and feel like I’ve failed,” Tracy said. “Or, California has failed. Or the Forest Service has failed. Or the environmentalists have failed. All the separate factions have failed. ... Whatever their interests are, whether its four-wheel drive vehicles, packers, backpackers, people that fish, people that hunt. All the users collectively together have failed, and they will not acknowledge it. It’s easier to say somebody else did it, or you can put it off on climate change, whatever. I mean honestly, we failed.”
Tracy said those not close to the forest have already put the Creek Fire destruction out of their mind.
“People do that with natural disasters,” he said. “They do that with mass killings. They do that with any tragedy that hits them that’s not immediately close to them. It’s a natural thing. And yet, there are some things that happen that affect other people, whether they realize it or not.”
He sees the burning of the forest as one of those things.
In describing the forest’s importance for millions of people, Tracy talked about how he rarely visits the ocean or the desert, but he’s still “happy knowing that it’s there,” open to the public, and “being protected.”
“The same thing goes for the forest,” he said. “It is public land that your taxes support.”
His daughter, Hannah, said she wants people to get this message: “Just be more responsible when you enter the forest.”
As the 13-year-old walked through her backyard filled with downed and standing dead trees, she added, “This is what happens when you don’t think.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2021 at 11:55 AM.
