This week on Arizona illustrated a special presentation of this year's Emmy winning episode, Understanding the Big Horn Fire.

We'll explore the interaction between wildfire and wildlife.

A company scientist with the post burn area to better understand the fire's impact and will journey to the Chiricahua mountains to see how vegetation there has changed since a massive wildfire in 2011 and what that might mean for the Santa Catalina.

Welcome to Arizona illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara.

This year, the Rocky Mountain Southwest chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognized Arizona illustrated with an Emmy Award for the Best Magazine Program.

The winning episode focused on an event that captivated southern Arizonans.

Here's a look back at that program.

Understanding the Bighorn Fire.

On the evening of June fifth, Lightning struck Big Horn Mountain in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.

The Bighorn Fire had begun to burn over the next 48 days.

The fire raged the entire mountain range, burning down into Pima Finger Rock Espero and Upper Sabino canyons at times threatening homes and forcing people to evacuate around Oro Valley and the Catalina foothills.

It continued to grow and spread, burning just below and then around Mount Lemmon, then into the grasslands in the foothills north and east of the range through the efforts of nearly 1000 personnel, thousands of gallons of fire retardant water and a little rainfall.

The fire was declared 100% contained on July 23rd, 2020, having burned nearly 120,000 acres.

As we watched the Bighorn Fire burn through the Catalina Mountains, it's only natural that our first concerns would be for the firefighters safety and for the life and property of those who live near the blaze.

But what about the creatures who inhabit the mountains themselves Here is wildlife and the bighorn.

Fire is an incredibly important part of the Web of life in southern Arizona and natural biological cycles, and it definitely has a role and we need to let it get back to playing that role.

But when fires happen these days, they happen in the context of forests that have already been seriously damaged by human impacts over the years and a lot of different types of impacts.

But probably the biggest one is fire suppression.

So for decades, for actually a century now, we have not let fires play their normal role on the mountain.

And therefore, when they happen today, they happen differently.

Rarely is wildlife overrun by wildfire.

Their fleet of foot enough to get out of the way or in cases of smaller creatures burrow underground and these animals for generations are adapted to these fires?

Yes.

Maybe they're not where we would expect them to be.

You know, you never know because there's wildlife and they do what they want to do, sometimes reentering burned areas when it's still smoldering.

A Goulds turkey.

And we observed doing that very thing, and it's 155,000 acre mountain range.

There's still plenty of territory out there for them and they're going to use it.

The Catalina's are a typical Sky Island mountain range, they rise up very steeply from the desert floor and the arid grasslands that are around the base and up to the top .

You go all the way to spruce for conifer forest, and that means that every step of the way you have a different set of plants and animals that call it home.

The biodiversity of our scale and mountain ranges in southern Arizona is globally recognized, and they have been recommended as a huge priority for protection from a global biodiversity perspective.

The initial burning took place in the bighorn sheep management area, and most of that bighorn sheep management area burned.

We're cautiously optimistic.

The big horns will make better use of that area and perhaps expand their territory.

It will be cleared of dense vegetation.

There will be new growth coming up, and it will be perfect for that sprouting prickly pear, for example, as a favor.

It's like a bighorn sheep salad bar after a fire.

The way they defend themselves is through their keen eyesight, which if a predator is concealed by a brush they can't really use and then their ability to climb rapidly over rough terrain.

For sure, it's going to help them deal with plants and other and other ungulates, I should add a white tailed dee at higher elevations.

Mule deer at lower elevations will also reap the benefit of that cleared up habitat.

And that new growth?

The Sonoran Desert is renowned for its diversity of bees and other insects.

We also have many mammals, kouyate and ringtail and foxes and coyotes and black bears and bobcats and other predators.

And we also have a lot of reptiles and lizards and snakes and huge monsters.

And, you know, some species that are on fun anywhere else.

You know, and I think we should be proud of that.

It's something that we should care for and protect.

When you look at the interaction of fire with endangered species, you really have to look through a different lens, and Mexican spotted owl is one of them.

And so we have what are called protected activity centers, where those owls are known to do their business either nest or hunt.

So they rely on a certain combination of vegetation, plant species and water availability and a certain topography or forest structure.

You know, we need to be nimble to respond to these threats and give these species the best chance that we can to survive.

We also take a look at desert tortoise habitat.

We don't worry about desert tortoises being overrun by fire They burrow underground.

But what are they going to eat when they come out of that burrow?

Everything around them is going to be burned and they're going to have to travel a long way to get there.

We had a case a few years ago with a Monument fire for Chiricahua leopard frogs, which are threatened species.

They were in a pond and we could look above them and see a major burned area.

We got in there.

We pulled all the frogs out, sent them up to Glendale Community College for a while.

The very next day, a slide came in and silted in the entire pond that they had been inhabiting would kill them all.

That's why we took almost 900 endangered Gila chub out of the West branch of Sabino Creek and farmed them out to the UofA International Wildlife Museum and the Desert Museum for safekeeping.

When the monsoon passes, when all that silting action is over we'll put them back in.

We hardly had any monsoon at all.

So there wasn't really a big problem with a lot of erosion and a lot of soil being lost as a result.

Now that could still happen at any time, you know?

I mean, it only takes one really big storm to have that kind of impact.

So in one way, maybe that was a good thing.

But in another way, it just makes it that much more difficult for the habitat to recover, for those seats to germinate and for the vegetation to come back Water is more scarce.

Food is more scarce for the time being.

And that is a challenge to many species.

Now that said, the Bighorn Fire in particular, burn pretty well for the most part, there were a couple of really bad days with high winds, but for the most part it burned in a mosaic.

It did not burn really severely.

And I think you'll see the mountain bouncing back pretty well.

It's not going to look like it used to look tomorrow, but a year or two, it's going to be good.

In most cases, wildfire is a natural process that improves the overall healt of the mountain range over time.

Lightning started this fire, as it did long before man inhabited Tucson.

There were fires in the Catalina, some of these other mountain ranges.

And these animals for generations, they've survived.

The general consensus is by the end of this century, half the species on this planet could be gone.

And to me, that's very alarming, even from a perspective of self-interest.

I am a species on this planet, Homo sapiens.

I still rely on that mountain for clean water and clean air.

You know, just like all the animals do, we got to get serious about protecting these places and the web of life that supports all of us , including Homo sapiens.

Immediately after the Bighorn Fire was contained, many southern Arizonans were anxious to get back up into the mountains, maybe none more so than UofA scientist, Don Falk and Laura Marshall, who were eager to survey the damage after the burn.

The Bighorn Fire is still burning in the Catalina Mountains, 11,500 acres have been burned so far.

That's what I was sitting down here in Tucson, watching the evening news and watching the progression of the fire on the web.

It began to get closer and closer to places I know and love really well, such as the high elevation forests.

And I began thinking, Oh my gosh, I hope it's not going to get in there.

Please don't burn there.

Please don't burn that forest down.

There's a really interesting dynamic being a person who lives in the forest and a scientist who studies it.

one part of you wants to say, I love this forest.

I never wanted to change.

And the other part of you looks at the forest that's changing and say, Wow, that's interesting.

I wonder why that happened that way.

And when a big fire happens, you're really kind of poised on the head of a pin about which of those is going to be dominant because it's so interesting and yet can also be so devastating.

After a wildfire, that's our time to get out and do research, we try to prepare for that moment by having study plots out in the mountains before fires happen, and so we have the unique opportunity to be able to return to those.

And look at how things have changed not only in the short term the first few months, but to track over many, many years how the forest recovers following a big fire.

I'd say at the first look, driving up the road doesn't look too bad until you get up to the Loma Linda area and can look down the north slopes of the mountain that burned very hot.

It's a little little devastating to just come around the mountain and see just burnt sticks as far as you can see.

We're seeing bigger, larger fires, many places in the southwest.

This could be a bellwether for what's going to be happening in the next couple of decades in other areas.

So we live in what's called the Sky Island bio-region.

The Sky Islands are a network of more than 60 mountain ranges from northern Mexico, up to the Colorado Plateau.

And people often refer to them as islands because they're islands of forests surrounded by lower desert or grassland.

And what that means is that each island could be a unique biological location, much like islands in the ocean.

This is part of what makes the Sky Islands such a unique resource.

You can go from the low desert all the way to basically a spruce forest that feels like you're in Canada and just a matter of an hour.

I just love being out there and just having a great view all the way down to the different ecosystems out to the desert.

Our fieldwork often begins with the Geographic Positioning System, a GPS, because we're trying to get back to a particular location on the ground, and so we'll navigate to that point and here under the live feed there on the edge, this could definitely work pretty good.

What we do is study the plants and animals on the ground, the soil.

It's a lot of hands and knees work very, very detailed, trying to look at every plant, looking at whether trees are regenerating, whether there are seedlings, whether they're over story, trees were damaged or not, whether they are going to bounce back.

We use tapes to measure the diameter of trees or sometimes use increment cores to extract a course from the tree to look at their growth.

Now that looks good.

So tree rings can tell you all kinds of things about a forest, the past climate.

You can match up the ring patterns to figure out exactly what Ring goes with what you're using that you can match patterns back in, back in time, basically for as long as you can find remnant woods still present on the mountains.

The changes that are happening now are happening very quickly compared to change in the past.

So now we're seeing major changes burning entire mountain ranges, large severe fires in a matter of years, two decades.

So basically, things are moving too fast for the forest to keep up and a lot of places.

2020, we're seeing fires all over the West, and basically, I think in the future, dendrochronologist will definitely know that's a 2020 ring.

You can tell there's a fire scar.

The really big, important question in post-fire research right now are what are called post-fire trajectories, that is what direction is this site going to go?

Is it going to go back to being a forest with the same species and similar process from what it was?

Or is it going to go off in a different direction?

There's no question that the contemporary fires we're seeing appear to be very, very different in kind from the historical fires.

And the big concern here is not that this was a big fire per se, but that it was a big fire with a lot of areas of very, very high severity effects.

And that, we believe, is the legacy of a century of keeping fire out of the forests.

So the fuels have accumulated and laid on top of that, the unmistakable signature of climate change.

So what are you working on over there?

Teacher and great.

So an important question now in everybody's mind is is that a permanent transition?

Is that gone past a tipping point?

So it's now going to be a different kind of ecosystem, not a forest?

Or is it just a slow bending of the curve back to becoming forest?

And this is why we need this historical background to understand the bighorn fire that happened in the Catalina's I have to say that the research we do really increases my appreciation for the complexity and resilience of these forests.

We'll go up and study a plot and we'll find trees that have survived.

This somehow managed to make it through, and they're green on top and they're growing.

And we'll often think, how did this happen?

Because this is supposed to be in the middle of a high severity patch?

And yet here's life.

The poet Gary Snyder once said science walks in beauty, and in a sense, we can't see wildfires, as always, a catastrophe or a tragedy or something terrible.

In fact, that's a big part of wildfire that is about renewal and it's about resilience and it's about adaptability.

And that's actually a really positive lesson because it means that many things that we're seeing that look like they've gotten stuck or damaged or lost irretrievably perhaps aren't that way at all.

And maybe somebody will come along 50 or 100 years from now and look at our notes and understand that this was just the process of recovery at its very beginning.

This is just the first few steps and eventually the process of nature healing itself.

This is not the first major wildfire in southern Arizona Sky Islands, and it won't be the last.

So what can past fires tell us about the Bighorn and the lasting impact of fires in the future?

Perhaps there are lessons to learn from the Chiricahuas.

The Tour College has a fiery history pretty similar to most of southern Arizona, and that is with a period of repression fires in the early 1900s all the way up until at least the eighties.

We had a period of dryness and drought, and that drought resulted in the Horseshoe two fire in 2011, which burned almost the entire mountain range about 200,000 acres.

There's not been a similar fire since.

In some parts of this mountain range, nine years would be a reasonable time for it to come back and burn again.

I'm Jim Malusa, a research scientist with the School of Natural Resources and the Environment in the University of Arizona.

I'm here with my wife, geologist Sonia Norman of the Desert Museum.

And together we're going to look at the recovery from the Horseshoe two fire.

OK, we're very close.

And now comes the fun part, the when we take a look at the picture, it's like there's there's that tree.

And this one I'm a consider myself a plant ecologist and vegetation mapping is one of my specialties, and that is why things live here and that over there.

And as part of that work, I also do repeat photography to see how vegetation changes through time.

I can see that ridge this one.

This is the closer one.

Repeat photography is a great way to to keep your finger on the pulse of ecosystem changes, mainly because it's so understandable and easy to see with pictures.

Everyone can just look at it and say, Oh, the pines are all being replaced by oaks and and so it's a visual, informative way of seeing what's going on in our world.

It's more than just taking a picture.

We're going to try to get an idea of the relative ground cover of the different species out here.

Here's last year's.

You can see Sonia with the I have written here a struggling Q-U-E-M, that's quercus MEI, And it looks like that one has died.

As well as a young man.

I was lucky enough to have parents who let me let me wander, and that was a big part of of exploring the world.

Right was I was actually released into it.

And so when I got my first backpack as a 16 year old, I said, I want to go overnight in the mountains.

They said, have a good time and mom drove me up Sabino Canyon back when you can drive up Sabino Canyon, scrape the side of the station wagon on the bridges, the skinny bridges and just let me loose.

To some hikes that I've done since I lived here so long as a particular on the ring cards I've been taking every year since 74, and it's like 45, 46 years of making the same hike.

And I remember when changes happened early on in those those trips in my in my life when I was a mere ten or 20 and it'd be a landslide or fire and things would fall down and I'd be distraught.

Actually, I would go going, Oh God, I've lost my favorite place, but I didn't lose it.

It just turned into something else.

And I think every loss is an opportunity for for another species.

Of course, we hate the sea change that we can blame on ourselves and say that we made it hotter.

From the repeat photography that we've done in tthe Chiricahua so far, it's apparent that the ecosystems that the lower level of it, for example, the pine oak ecosystem, the they're susceptible to losing particular species that need cooler conditions, cooler conditions or wetter conditions.

And so our primary concern with the Bighorn Fire would be losing forested areas and having them turn into the scrubland just because it's now a bit warmer and drier.

And if that does occur, the things at the very tippy top are going to be pushed off into oblivion.

And that would include the cork bark fir, which is a species that is in the Catalina's.

And the Penlan is.

And that's the only two places that it's found in the Coronado National Forest.

All right, so we're we're going to go next.

We're going to go up the mountains a little bit higher up the road toward Marquette Park and visit pine ecosystems.

You ready?

Well, when I first got here, I was pretty disappointed to see the Chihuahua and Pynes, who are my kind of hero of this ecosystem that come back so strongly.

Now they're all brown.

And at first I thought, maybe they're that they're dead or they're almost dead.

But it ends up after we've measured ten of these trees that they actually did grow.

They managed to grow 20 centimeters over the last two years, and but it's cleared of anyone that gets up close to one of these trees or they're stressed out the and so everything's going to rely on probably the next year rain the and so if we get a late season hurricane, that would help October rain in here.

And but one more dry summer.

And so that could be the end of this pine forest.

Humans like trees and especially in a hot place, they want to sit under a tree and they don't want to sit under a bush.

And so we have a natural tendency to lament the loss of a forest, whether or not you would call that a natural change.

The forest burns and it comes back as as oak scrub depends on your definition of natural.

You know, humans are part of nature and we always change the world around us.

And and so people need to decide what we want our world to look like and an actor to help that happen.

Back in August, AZPM the southern Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Arizona Daily Star began to collaborate to present favorite places, a series of personal narratives written and narrated by local architects about a favorite building place or space in southern Arizona.

Now, the Arizona illustrated team had already begun work on this Bighorn Fire special, so it was either serendipity or with the fire in mind that local architect Michael Narvik chose his favorite place out lemon.

As I started thinking about my favorite place, I kept coming back to a location that has provided fond memories for me from my childhood and now as a parent.

My favorite place is Mount Lemmon.

As you begin to drive at the base of the mountain, you're surrounded in the foothills by saguaros, toyas, creosote bushes and other typical Sonoran Desert vegetation.

As you begin to climb in elevation, the saguaros and the desert plants are replaced by high desert grasses and shrubs and even some smaller evergreen bushes.

The climb gets higher and you reach a place where the plants seem to be overtaken by rock outcroppings known as Hooter's.

Once you make the switch back to the Hutus and numerous visitors, you begin in the forest areas with cottonwoods, oaks and aspens.

As you reach six to 7000 feet, you start to come into the ponderosa pines and oaks that will be your surroundings for the remainder of the trip up the peak.

In the summer, when the valley is in the middle of triple digits, you can drive up Mount Lemon for a quick escape and have at least a 20 degree temperature swing.

Mount Lemmon also provides winter activities such as sledding, skiing and snowboarding.

At the peak of Mount Lemmon, said Ski Valley affording you the opportunity in the winter to play in the snow during the day and come home for dinner at night.

Astronomy is another benefit that the Mount provides, many astronomers will travel to the mountain for stargazing to get away from the city lights.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Summer Haven, Summer Haven is a small town near the top of Mount Lemmon.

I remember visiting as a child and walking through the town, made up small shops and private wood cabins as far as you could see.

We would travel the mountain just to have dinner or lunch in Summer Haven and get a cookie and ice cream at the cookie cabin.

Now, miraculously, due to the skill and bravery of the firefighters during the recent Bighorn Fire, they were actually able to completely save Summer Haven and Ski Valley.

I've been through many fires on Mount Lemon in my time here.

And one thing that always happens is that new life will come from the ashes.

Thank you for joining us for this special Emmy Award winning presentation.

I'm Tom McNamara.

I'll see you next week for an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.