Station Fire A Year And A Half Later
It has been eighteen months since the devastating fire that burned to over a third of the Angeles National Forest and now that one of the main roads is now open I decided to drive up and see first hand how how the forest is recovering. I had intended to go to one of my favorite spots, the Chilao Campground area that is at the transition between the lower altitude chaparral and the higher elevation pine forest. I never made it up there because I kept stopping because of something interesting.
A couple of miles farther up, I hiked out a few hundred yards from the road to Big Tujunga Creek. It was great the see a lot of water flowing indicating a good amount of winter show and rain.
Continuing my journey up the canyon I pulled over when saw a ridge of burned pine trees with the moon rising over them and thought there might be an interesting composition with those two elements. Within a few feet of leaving the road on foot, the ground was still black from the fire, but the forest is slowly coming back with a lot of new growth of the native manzanita, oak and numerous other flora. I made my way to a point where the ridge of burned pine trees was directly below the rising moon and a other burned out trees were in the foreground. I made the photo at the beginning of this post by purposely underexposed by about two stops so that the sky would darken to a deep blue and the trees would be in silhouette to give the photograph a lonely, spooky feeling.
