Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. So many of the trees were damaged my the extreme heat of the Silver Lakefire. They were still green for a few days after the fire, but turned brown within days or weeks. Rather than dwell on this section of trees individually, you can see from the very last photo in this post what the canyon looked like the day after the fire. (Click on photos to enlarge)
You may remember the tree above as being quite lush when some homeless took up residence for a few days beneath it, just over one year ago. In fact it was looking good the day after the fire despite the weeds burning right up to it (and all of the trees in this post).
Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. The Chinese Elm at the rocky outcropping at the start of the Canyon has also been a popular dumping ground for dishwashers and computers in the past. This enormous tree drops its leaves for winter and like almost all of the other trees is already showing signs of new growth. Dropping leaves is beneficial because it would help mulch the now denuded slopes in the burn area.
Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. The huge amount of water poured on the fire to keep it from spreading to homes is most likely benefiting the mature well established trees. Prior to the fire, many of those mature trees were looking really good despite the prolonged drought.
Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. This was a particularly densely overgrown part of Red Car Canyon we'll be revisiting in a future post. Suffice to say, in 26 years in the neighborhood, I'd never seen so much daylight here before. As usual, brush clearance had not yet happened prior to or since the fire.
Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. If you see trees growing into the power lines or power lines down, call 1-800-DIAL-DWP.
Photo: Red Car Property Neighbor, July 8, 2016. If you have trees that
look like they've had the life drained out of them, consult a certified
arborist. Established trees can recover from fire. This was not a
major fire thanks to the quick work of LAFD and their partner agencies,
LA County Fire and Glendale Fire.
Photo: Diane Edwardson, June 20, 2016. If you routinely walk the Red Car Property, you should be able to identify many of the trees in this week's posts and how things used to look, even just a month ago. The photo above was taken the morning after the fire. It shows how close the flames got to fences before being extinguished. The trees were still green and the huge volume of water had already washed a lot of the black soot off of the slopes. (And AT&T was already on the Red Car Property assessing the damage to their lines that run along the Red Car Property's property line in the middle the slope.)
