She remembers the huge Engelmann spruce and their dense, dark branches that filtered out the light along the banks of the little winding creek. She remembers the challenge of battling her way through the heavy brush that filled the narrow streambed. And she remembers the countless little pools that marked the creek's course down through the valley.
That's all changed now.
It burned so hot that even that strip of green down along both banks of Laird Creek was scorched. Under normal conditions, a riparian area like that surrounding a creek might have been spared.
Not so during the summer of 2000, when dozens of fires scorched an estimated 356,000 acres in the Bitterroot, leaving much of the narrow Laird Creek drainage in cinders.
Following the fires, no one was really sure how long it might take for the blackened drainage to begin to recover.
Five years later, most of the torched trees are still standing, albeit some better than others. It's not a safe place to take a stroll, especially when the wind whips through the drainage.
On the valley floor, an array of different grasses grows waist high. New shrubs and small deciduous trees have sprouted in spots no one remembers seeing them before. And Laird Creek is slowly starting to rebuild itself.
Wildey, a Bitterroot National Forest hydrologist, is often surprised at the speed of the recovery on creeks like Laird.
"It's been fun to check out these sites each year," she said. "Every year, it's like, 'Wow, it wasn't like this last summer.' It's very different with each passing year."
Where the creek once was filled with pools and woody debris, it's become one long riffle with an occasional bit of calm water behind a newly fallen tree. Each year, its banks host a few more sedges and grasses as it slowly begins to narrow.
"It's like the clock has been reset for Laird Creek," she said. "It's starting all over."
"I've just been amazed at the resiliency of the system," said Wildey. "We're seeing aspen coming up in places we didn't know there was aspen. It's shooting up all over the place."
Standing alongside one of the small tributaries to Laird Creek, Wildey points out the variety of shrubs and trees that have sprouted since the fire. She sees buckthorn, alder, thimbleberry, dogwood, raspberry and willow from this single vantage.
"We didn't see this kind of variety of the plants before the fire," she said.
The recovery of Laird Creek and other waterways throughout the 307,000 acres burned on the Bitterroot National Forest is credited to some quick action following the fires.
Firefighters felled trees across unstable slopes to slow erosion. They replaced culverts under roads, installed sediment traps along roadsides and spread straw over burned areas in an attempt to keep hillsides from washing down into the creek bed.
That restoration work has continued under provisions of the Bitterroot Burned Area Recovery Plan.
As of last September, the Forest Service had decommissioned 14.2 miles of old logging roads, improved 16 miles of stream for fish habitat, upgraded 95 miles of primary roadway and planted trees on a little more than 10,000 acres.
If people know where to look, Wildey said, they'd see a lot of that kind of work from the roadway along Laird Creek.
The Laird Creek road has been graveled, and larger culverts have been installed to both handle flooding and allow for the passage of fish, she said. There also have been a number of old roads decommissioned in the drainage.
"The Laird Creek drainage is heavily roaded from historic use," she said.
The 9.4-square-mile drainage has about 49 miles of roads and 65 stream crossings. Twelve miles of roads are slated to be decommissioned under current plans.
Those old roads can produce sediment that could make its way into the creek.
"We wanted to reduce that risk as well as we could," said Wildey. "We saw this as an opportunity to improve this area for the future. Initially, the talk was that the funds would be virtually unlimited to get that work accomplished."
But that didn't turn out to be the case.
Bitterroot Forest Supervisor Dave Bull said the forest lost about $19 million of the nearly $39 million that had been earmarked for fire restoration work in fiscal years 2001 and 2002 after the U.S. Forest Service needed additional funding to pay for large fires elsewhere in the nation in 2002.
Since then, the funding for fire restoration work on the Bitterroot National Forest has slowly been drying up.
Priorities have changed since those first allocations were made, Bull said. The Iraq war and Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened. New, and sometimes bigger, wildfires hit different parts of the West.
"It's just been an uphill battle since then," said Bull. "We got about $2 million in fiscal year 2004 and about $290,000 this year ... the national priority list has been redealt and we're not up that high anymore."
The original Bitterroot National Forest Burned Area Recovery plan identified work totaling upwards of $80 million for restoration, Bull said.
As of last September, the Forest Service had accomplished about
19 percent of the road upgrades identified in the plan, 31 percent of the work to decommission roads and about 44 percent of the culverts it planned to install to enhance fish passage.
The agency has sold about 77 percent of the salvage timber and treated 74 percent of just over 9,000 acres identified in the plan.
It's also accomplished 100 percent of its goals to improve 16 miles of stream for fish habitat and revegetate 4.5 miles of riparian areas.
Bull said the Bitterroot forest will continue to work on projects identified in the recovery plan, but people need to realize that the agency is restricted by its budget.
"We'll do what we can," he said. "We haven't forgotten about the promises we made in the record of decision, but it will take us longer to get all of this work done."
The challenges aren't going to go away.
Just across the road from the green grasses and ample shrubs along Laird Creek, a hillside is filled with knapweed and mullan.
"Where we had weeds before, we're probably going to see weeds return," said Wildey. "Where native vegetation has a chance to get started, it can out-compete the weeds."
Accomplishing projects like decommissioning roads can help slow the spread of weeds, she said. That also reduces long-term costs to the taxpayer. Maintaining roads is a costly proposition.
"That's a pretty good deal when we can decommission those roads that aren't needed on the forest transportation system," said Wildey.
Nature is doing a good job of taking care of itself.
For instance, the westslope cutthroat and bull trout - both native fish species - have faired pretty well since the fires swept through the forest. Their counterparts, the nonnative brook and brown trout, have not.
"The westslope and bull trout appear to be back at their prefire population levels," said Wildey. "Both have evolved with fire and are evidently able to survive much better than the nonnatives."
Natives also appear to be doing well on a nearby hillside where Cheri Hartless, a forester with the Bitterroot National Forest, is taking a look at some recently planted ponderosa pine seedlings.
A wet spring gave the young trees a boost and they show it.
"It's awesome to see them doing so well," Hartless said, "but take a look at that."
She's pointing to a young lodgepole pine standing several inches taller than the other new seedlings.
"That one is just living big," Hartless said, with a smile.
Reach reporter Perry Backus at 523-5259 or by e-mail at pbackus@missoulian.com.
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