ATOP LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest — This summit face was the coldest part of the mountain, shaded in thick old-growth forest. But nearly two years ago — after a roasting-hot run of dry summer weather — a lightning strike set the mountain on fire.
The Lookout fire burned three-quarters of this unique place, one of the nation’s premier research forests, southeast of Eugene, Ore. Now what’s unfolding in the aftermath could inform the future of other forests burned as wildfire becomes fiercer and more frequent with climate change.
The fire did at least $800,000 in damage, burning up tags, wiring, sensors and other scientific instruments, while firefighting equipment tore up roads. Federal funds and insurance only partly cover the damage Andrews administrators are still assessing. Many researchers, including graduate students, also had their work upended when their study sites burned.
But the fire also ignited a whole new research agenda. Because there is such a wealth of long-term data collected in this research forest founded in 1948, scientists have a unique baseline from which to understand what it means when a forest burns — and starts over. Already, there are surprising discoveries.
There is new and greater diversity, and a bigger population of birds in the forest than before the fire, as species never recorded here before cruise into burned areas.
Towering totems of charred old-growth trees and blackened snags are revealing secrets and surprises about how fire behaves. There are changes in the chemistry of soils and streams, shifts in daily maximum air temperatures where the fire burned hottest, creating a newly open canopy. Sediment in streams, shifts in aquatic species — salamander populations crashed — and so much more to understand.
“We have grown in appreciation for fire, there is a balance of fearing and respecting it,” said Brooke Penaluna, the lead scientist at the Andrews.
She helped with the evacuation, packing up the library, and even the stuffed spotted owls that decorated the administrative office — now unpacked from storage and put back in the library with all the books — but who knows for how long? “I think our new normal is living alongside fire,” Penaluna said, “and researching alongside fire.”
Change is always the rule in nature. Fire has underscored that.
“People say, ‘Oh the forest was lost.’ It’s not lost. It’s changed,” said Mark Harmon, a forest decomposition expert and professor emeritus at Oregon State University. Half of his research plots at the Andrews burned. The experiment may now be more exciting than ever. There is so much to be learned, Harmon said, “as long as you throw out everything you think you knew about fire.”
Into the blast zone
Forest fires don’t burn evenly; they are always a mix of severely, moderately and lightly burned areas. At the Andrews, most of the forest was lightly or moderately burned. But some areas burned so hot that every tree died, and all the organic matter on the ground was roasted, down to the mineral soil. That’s where half of Harmon’s research plots were.
Walking the ground recently, the sun beat down where before it was shaded by old-growth trees. Harmon carried metal stakes to remark his plots, replacing the fiberglass ones that melted to just the glass fibers, piled like white fur.
There were ghost logs, where only the metal marker tags were left, the shape of the log left by the ash. Other logs had formed hoodoos, parabolas and arches; black sculptures made by the fire that consumed the punky decomposing wood, but left charred remains of the sounder heartwood. Burned to its elemental lignin, some logs had the cubic textured backs of alligators. Others were glassy as obsidian, and some had the molten slump of a marshmallow too long on the stick.
It was an eerily beautiful landscape, full of surprises challenging almost everything people think they know about fire. For one, that trees burn down, or forests burn up. They do not.
Most of the trees here were the same height and girth they were before the fire and still standing. Their trunks were black, their twigs still attached too, just dead, and gleaming silver against the black char. Why?
The trees were alive and full of water, so when the fire came, Harmon explained, the twigs and branches sizzled and steamed but did not burn off. “Even the most severe fire killed all the trees, but did not combust even the smallest twigs.”
In all, less than 10 to 15% of the forest’s carbon combusted, even where the fire killed all the trees, he noted.
“The fire reorganizes things,” Harmon said.
His work now will be to understand how the fire behaved and the trees were burned, depending on the species, the structure of the stand, and their condition at the time of the fire. In death, as in life, nothing about this forest is simple.
New terrain, new life
In nature there are not good or bad things, just change, a resetting of communities of animals and plants as they respond to environmental conditions. So Matt Betts, an ornithologist and lead principal investigator of the Long Term Ecological Research program funded by the National Science Foundation at the H.J. Andrews, was not surprised — but definitely delighted — when he saw something blue flash in the charred black snags on Lookout Mountain.
“Mountain bluebird!” said Betts, identifying a bird never recorded here, but now taking advantage of this open area. This is a species that specializes in so-called early seral habitat: the first stage of life in a forest after a disturbance, whether by fire, wind, logging or other force that opens the ground to the sky.
LEFT: Matt Betts from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest hikes towards Lookout Mountain. RIGHT: A Mountain Bluebird seen on Lookout Mountain. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)
LEFT: Matt Betts from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest hikes towards Lookout Mountain. RIGHT: A Mountain Bluebird seen on Lookout… (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)
Its wings were sapphire, its breast a soft, creamy buff. The bird, about the size of a sparrow, was going about its day, unaware of its role documenting the start of a new world.
It will take time and more research to see what is really going on. But Betts and his collaborators have a few ideas they are pursuing.
Migratory birds are site faithful, and they flew back here from Brazil, Central America, Mexico and other wintering grounds to discover the place they always nest transformed. What happened next is interesting. “It seems to us they just didn’t come back and say, ‘Oh my territory is wrecked, I’m leaving,’ ” Betts said.
The numbers of hermit warblers, western tanagers and other long-distance migrants did not drop, and overall, there are increases.
“They pack in to the remaining patches,” Betts said. The hypothesis is that birds, being mobile, are making a number of decisions. They are acting on personal information — their knowledge of the terrain to which they return as they always have. But they also are acting on social information. Birds displaced by fires elsewhere are moving in to settle where others of their kind already are. Whether they will stay, only time will tell. It will depend on whether the habitat is suitable for them.
Birds also use vegetation cues.
When you are a woodpecker, you are looking for dead wood. So Betts was not surprised to hear the percussive announcement of one of the most reliable colonists of burned areas: the black-backed woodpecker.
Repetitive flights to one snag in particular caught his eye: It was a nest, drilled into a burned tree, with young being fed by both parents.
It wasn’t just the birds livening things up. Green plants were burgeoning through the char in the soil. Dog tooth violet was blooming amid the stumps of trees felled by firefighters. Bracken fern was bursting up through the bulldozer tracks where crews cut a fireline. Blackened, charred, roasted, burned, broken, cut, stumped, bulldozered, battered. Yes. The forest was all of these things.
But also healing, greening, changing, recolonizing, rewilding.
Fire moss gleamed in a golden coat. Hairy woodpeckers, northern flickers and olive-sided flycatchers and yellow-rumped warblers were all carrying on. Meadows that had been shrinking as trees moved in were reopened too, a boon for pollinators already busy in the creamy blossoms of avalanche lilies.
Ladybugs patrolled the new leaves and a plethora of deer tracks and a big scat pile from a bear showed some mammalian appreciation for all the fresh growth to be had in these woods, as red flowering currant, pink trillium and more stretched toward the sun. “The fire has opened the way for these herbaceous flowering species,” Betts said, passing a blackened vine maple burgeoning with buds. “In a few more years, it will be hard to walk through here.”
This is the normal process of succession, with a fire leaving a lot of dead trees standing, followed by a green up of shrubs and finally trees, that eventually shade out some of the understory, until the whole cycle starts over with a new disturbance. Species come and go as the structure and food sources they require change.
Turning up the heat
The Lookout fire is regarded to be within the range of normal events at the Andrews. But climate change and its hotter, drier summers played a role. “This fire was going to burn, but climate change loaded the dice; it made it more likely, and more severe,” Betts said.
Some of the losses are hard to take. So much old growth has already been lost to logging in the Northwest — about 90% — that to lose more in this fire hurt, Betts said. And some species, such as hemlock and red cedar, are having a hard time persisting in the hotter, drier, changing climate. Will there ever again in the burned areas be old-growth majesty of their kind?
This being a research forest, at least one investigator could not resist probing how other researchers were processing the fire, emotionally. Michael Paul Nelson is a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy at Oregon State University.
So he and a collaborator, Claire Rapp, conducted more than 40 interviews to probe the idea of naturalness, and how that influenced the way people reacted to the fire. In their 2025 paper, they reported that to the degree people felt the fire was a natural event, they were excited to get on with their research. They had moved on emotionally from the burn. For those who saw it as a human-influenced event linked to climate change, there was, and is, a recalcitrant grief.
So it goes, as forests burn and the climate warms, Nelson said in an interview. But no one should be surprised at the events unfolding, as forest management practices, and environmental and social changes we have wrought — including removing Indigenous management of these forests — write their results on the land.
“We live in a time of harvest,” Nelson said. “What we need to do now, is plant new seeds.”
