Holiday Farm Fire’s scar: Healing people, their forests still at risk

Editor’s note: Five years ago, residents began returning after the Holiday Farm Fire tore through the McKenzie River valley in September 2020, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving lasting scars — on the land, the community and their lives.This is another story in a series of Lookout Eugene-Springfield stories examining the fire and its aftermath.

The haze from the summer fires finally lifted in Blue River on a late September morning. Katherine K’iya Wilson poured water over a sprouting white oak growing in a burn scar. 

Wilson stood between scorched conifers — the same kind of trees whose whispers turned into a frightening howl when easterly winds blew down the mountainous canyon five years ago. 

“They were telling us to leave,” she said. 

Then branches tore off and flew toward the 100-year-old cabin she and her husband called home, nearly shattering the windows. Still in their pajamas and slippers, they climbed into their Suburban and drove toward Eugene on Highway 126. On the way out, Wilson watched 13 fire trucks speed by in the opposite direction in the tornado-like weather.  

She had grown up around forests and wildfire, her father working summers with the U.S. Forest Service in southern Oregon. That’s why, as she fled, she sensed what would become the 173,000-acre Holiday Farm Fire.

“I knew there was a problem farther up,” she said. “And I also knew that I would never be able to live there again, because I learned in fire lookouts that there’s mudslides.”

Scientists and restoration managers share concerns about landslides and flooding in the community, where residents still smell the devastation around them.

In this landscape, everything and everyone is connected. 

Trees that survived the fire continue to die, because they are rooted in soil stripped of nutrients and the ability to hold water. When rains return, that scorched ground washes away, threatening the hard-won progress — socially and ecologically — already made during a recovery process that has at times seemed impossible.

Meanwhile, droves of residents still live year-round in recreational vehicles, waiting for government support to rebuild while navigating post-traumatic stress and grief. 

“Before the people can heal, the land has to heal, and the river has to heal,” Wilson said.

‘Window of vulnerability’

Josh Roering doesn’t like to drive on Highway 126 when it’s raining. 

Roering is a University of Oregon geomorphologist who has studied how hillsides change in extreme conditions. And with the Holiday Farm Fire, the land within the burn’s perimeter is in what he calls a “window of vulnerability.”

It’s a period that comes four to 10 years after a large disturbance to forests, like a wildfire. Over this time, tree roots can lose as much as 90% of their strength.

Without living roots to hold it in place, soil and loose rock on steep slopes can slide downhill during rainstorms, because the water makes the ground heavier and more slippery.

“This makes your landscape much more susceptible to landslides,” Roering said. 

“We’ve been fortunate there hasn’t been some of the massive storms,” he said, pointing to a historic flood nearly three decades ago that came from four days of unusually heavy rain in the region. “If a 1996 type of storm had come through in the last year or two, we might be having a very different discussion right now.”

Roering and his students, working with state agencies, have mapped debris flows and documented what storms may trigger them.

The Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries is expected to publish a report in the coming weeks outlining the risks for people living in burned areas and what can be done about them, with the goal of informing emergency management and helping homeowners plan before another disaster hits.

Trees boiling to death 

Meanwhile, hundreds of skeletal trees still stand bare without their leafy canopy. More are still dying. 

Professor Andrés Holz at Portland State University has watched them through satellite images. He has seen fire-injured trees, weakened by heat, later succumbing to drought. 

“The heat is such that it’s almost like a tea kettle, but the water boils inside of the tree and destroys the tissues,” Holz said, offering one example of how trees die in extreme heat and fires.

Even as the region tries to return to a fire-adapted forest — ones that naturally withstand and regenerate after frequent, low-intensity burns — trees cannot generally withstand the severity of a blaze like the Holiday Farm Fire.

“No tree is really adapted to survive these kinds of fires,” he said.

Forests in the McKenzie River corridor may continue to experience delayed mortality for the next five to 10 years. According to Holz’s research group, areas with few or no nearby seed sources for new trees to grow has increased dramatically, particularly patches hit the hardest.

Nearly 8,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land within the Holiday Farm Fire perimeter lost trees. At an estimated 50 to 100 trees per acre, more than 400,000 have been lost or could be.

In response, environmental coordinators with the Forest Service have planted seeds by hand. 

In the Willamette National Forest, about 6,000 acres have been seeded or planted, with another 2,000 acres planned in the next year. They are hoping for a regenerated forest by 2030. 

In a healthy cycle, trees don’t die all at once but in waves, sustaining the broader ecosystem. 

When they fall, downed logs return nutrients to the forest floor and provide habitat for wildlife. Also, as they wash into creeks and rivers, they break the force of rushing water from unstable slopes, reducing the risk of floods in low-lying areas.

Refilling the ‘bathtub’ 

Everything was black when Lara Colley first came back home to Vida after she evacuated from the Holiday Farm Fire. While displaced, she took Oregon State University classes online from a friend’s bedroom, studying natural resources management. 

Over the last few years, she has put her textbook knowledge of habitat restoration to work as the need unfolded around her.

Most recently, she’s worked as a project manager at the McKenzie Watershed Council, working on a collaborative effort to give new life to Quartz Creek, a tributary of the McKenzie River. In building a new life, she leaned into the disruption, a roughness that had come to define both people and the landscape.

Roughness also is a principle in floodplain management, where logs, boulders or vegetation are added to guide the current gradually instead of letting it rush through and flood. 

“The roughness is just what catches everything, slows everything down,” said Colley, while standing in the creek, dry and dammed as construction workers put down natural obstructions in late August. 

“It gives a surface for fish to feed on algae,” she said. “It gives a place for vegetation to catch and hold and grow. You’ll get nice little willow thickets growing out of these log jams over time.” 

Through this work, Colley and a team of experts from Eugene Water & Electric Board, McKenzie River Trust, and the U.S. Forest Service reset and flatten 1.8 miles of the creek to what it was hundreds of years ago. 

They wrapped up the project in September, but at first glance the creek may not look like much. Now, nature needs to run its course as the fall rain arrives. 

“Think about it like a bathtub filling up,” Colley said. “Quartz Creek is a really big bathtub. So that’s going to take a year to fill up that bathtub fully.”

It’s what Colley calls a recharge, a hydrological term that is also fitting for people waiting for replenishment of their own.

Making meaning of disruption 

A year ago, Wilson planted a bucket of acorns. Sixteen small oak trees pushed up through the soil in planters. She placed them outside the old Forest Service building that now houses the McKenzie Crossing and Native Welcoming Center in Blue River.  

With support from McKenzie Community Partners, the center focuses on honoring precolonial history, holding space for conversations. Those discussions include recognizing how Indigenous people stewarded the McKenzie River landscape for thousands of years, along a trail that later became Highway 126.

Wilson, who has familial relations with Wallowa Band of Nez Perce, began working on the center after the Holiday Farm Fire as part of her own healing and to extend it to others searching for the same. She and the community are exhausted from the long slog of rebuilding, with some preparing to enter a sixth winter in trailers or other temporary housing.

“It’s just been drawn out so long, so little support, and so be it,” Wilson said. “There’s nothing we can do about it except to do something meaningful to help people, to help their spirits.”

Last November, she coordinated a regrowth ceremony led by Dietrich Peters, an elder of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Wilson, Peters and nearly 30 people gathered to bless the inch-tall treelings. People cried as they gathered around, some taking planters back to where they now call home. 

White oaks, with their thick bark that helps them survive fire, once grew in droves across southwestern Oregon savannas before thinning out in the wake of timber industry activity.

Wilson no longer lives among her neighbors or the forests where she raised a family in the McKenzie River valley, just as she suspected when the fire forced her out. Still, she visits the center when she has extra gas money, asking friends to water the young oaks when she cannot.

On that late September morning, she made it there herself, taking a deep breath before heading back to her new place in Walterville. Driving Highway 126 again, she pulled off on a side road to touch the old-growth firs and Western hemlocks, whispering to them:

“You have to be pretty darn strong to survive that.”