The best way to identify a Douglas fir — that ubiquitous American evergreen that, it turns out, is much more than a staple of the Christmas season — is to look at the cone. Not the “pine cone,” as it were, because the Doug (a friendly nickname), definitely is not a pine. Don’t even call it a “fir cone,” as the Douglas fir is not a true fir, either (too many chromosomes; cones that dangle from branches rather than levitating upward). “Cone” will do. Anyway, pick a cone off the forest floor and you’ll quickly notice its hallmark ornamentation: Each woody scale is overlaid with a tan, paper-like veneer that is shaped like a mouse’s tail and hind legs — as if the rodent were caught trying to scurry into the center of the cone.
I’m attempting to note little things like this while switchbacking through the forests of southern Oregon behind Rich Fairbanks, a quick-moving and even faster-talking Doug fir fan. A retired wildland firefighter and forester in his early 70s, Fairbanks has the approximate air of a Columbia Sportswear Santa. His beard is ash gray, eyes emerald blue, glasses wire-frame. He carries a walking stick and wears hiking boots and a plaid shirt. Less jolly, more just-keep-up.
“Have a fig at some point,” he says, snapping one from a branch.
Our boots crunch on the dusty trail as we make our way up the north-facing slope of a mountain on his 20-acre property.
“Yeah, that’s the Douglas fir,” he says without pause. “You have incense cedar and Baker cyprus and sugar pine and redbud. And you see this is a ponderosa pine?”
Fairbanks likes to list trees and tree factoids while you walk.
I have a hard time telling them apart.
I notice another possible Doug that has a constellation of cones at the very top of its branches — the “crown” of the tree, Fairbanks says — a few dozen feet above the ground. The cones catch my eye because they are so incredibly dense that they almost look like holiday decorations on a tree someone just started decorating. They’re clustered at the top against a rich backdrop of green.
“There’s a Doug fir,” Fairbanks says, looking at the same tree. “And look, it’s got a stress crop. Sometimes the tree will put out a whole bunch of cones all of a sudden.”
Why’s that?
“It knows it’s dying.”
His is a world not of “trees” or even “evergreens” and “conifers” but of individuals.
The conference room has evergreen-colored carpet and fluorescent lights.
Jena Volpe, a fire ecologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, clicks to the next slide of a PowerPoint, revealing an aerial hillside of Doug firs, not far from where Fairbanks lives. Nearly all the trees are in various states of decay. Some are blanched red. Others have lost their needles entirely — literal skeletons of their former selves. It looks almost like a fire’s come through.
“Gray-stage mortality,” Volpe calls this end state.
Seven government employees sit around a U-shaped conference table at the BLM’s office in Medford, Oregon. They’re here to try to explain to me a phenomenon dubbed “firmageddon.”
Another slide shows an entire valley that looks like this.
Thousands and thousands of trees.
Volpe focuses on the conditions that create the crisis. Red, orange and yellow charts show how this part of the West has been drying out at an alarming rate since about 2001 — with an unheard-of drought walloping the region starting in about 2012 and continuing to this day in October. A “heat dome” settled over much of Oregon in 2021, killing more than 100 people in Oregon, setting a 119-degree temperature record there, several hours north, and scorching the forests in these valleys down south.
“Some trees are just dying from the drought,” she says. And all of that, according to scientists, is linked to the climate crisis, which is making drought and heat more frequent and more intense.
Then comes the kicker: A native beetle, the flatheaded fir borer (“FHFB” on the slide), an insect so tiny it would fit on the tip of a pencil, attacks drought-stressed trees and kills them. The beetle enters the tree via little holes in the bark, lays eggs in the cambium — the critical growth layer just inside the tree’s bark — and then “girdles” the tree, essentially strangling and killing it.
Between 2015 and 2020, the flatheaded borer contributed to the deaths of more than 250,000 Douglas fir trees in this area — more than the four previous decades combined, according to a 2023 study published in the Journal of Forestry. The paper warns of a “decline spiral” for the tree as this native beetle takes advantage of intensifying drought conditions.
Doug firs may not last much longer here.
I realize these scientists have the ability to see into the future, in a sense. Laura Lowrey, a forest entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service, says Doug fir needles flashing red is one early sign of fir-borer infestation. Another dark omen: Clear globes of sap-like goo — “pitch jewels” — emerge in the bark, small enough that they’re hard to detect unless the light hits them just right, in which case they glisten like tinsel. The pitch is a defense mechanism — one that works if the tree is healthy and has enough water; it can be futile if the tree’s roots are pulling from dry ground. How eerie this must be, knowing a tree will die in two or three years.
“I don’t want to get too gruesome here, but honestly … it’s like when you have a human being that has cancer,” says Jesse Kiene, a fire management specialist at BLM. “You can see that color change. You can see the body type change, you can see the loss of muscle and you can see those things, right? … (It’s) the same thing as with a tree. You can see that tree just slowly wilt away.
“It’s a foregone conclusion of where it’s going to end up.”
“That’s rough, Jesse,” another researcher says.
Laughter ripples across the room.
It’s one of those awkward laughs that covers something true.
It’s almost impossible to imagine Doug firs having any trouble anywhere in the world. There are just so many, and something about their abundance makes them feel eternal.
David Douglas, a Scottish botanist and the eponym of the tree, once said it is “one of the most striking and truly graceful objects in nature.” Driving three hours south of Eugene, Oregon, where I live, to Rich Fairbanks’ land near the California border, it’s almost impossible to imagine Doug firs having any trouble anywhere in the world. There are just so many, and something about their abundance makes them feel eternal.
This particular morning, a “Twilight” mist hangs over the Willamette Valley, cloaking the ridgelines in fog. From afar, Doug firs look almost like they are one organism — a fuzzy blanket of green that covers the mountains, protecting them from harm. Up closer, you notice their spear-like tips — the branches that stretch skyward in youth before drooping like the wet arms of a scarecrow as the trees mature and settle into heights that, in Oregon, can top 300 feet (and can reach ages well over 300 years).
It’s not a tree to be underestimated. Doug is a dominant species of the West, able to survive in sopping-wet conditions in the Cascade Mountains — and in true desert, including in the cracks of dried-up lava flows in New Mexico, Stephen Arno and Carl E. Fiedler write in “Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree.” The authors refer to Doug as “nature’s all-purpose tree,” noting that it has “provided more wood than any other species for building the infrastructure of the American West,” and that it has the widest distribution of any conifer on the continent.
I recently moved to Oregon from Washington, D.C., and, until now, many of my Doug fir experiences involved micro-versions of these trees that had been snapped up from farms in infancy for December placement in my living room. Christmas lovers know Doug for the soft needles, which extend from its branches in a pattern that one scientist out here refers to as a “star.” Oregon grows and farms more Christmas trees than any other state, and Doug firs make up much of the lot.
Fairbanks, for his part, does little to sentimentalize the trees. In December, he puts a Noble fir in his home — not a Doug. After growing up outside New York City, 18-year-old Fairbanks uprooted himself and drove west across Canada. It was 1970, the year he fell in love with the forests of the West and decided to work toward protecting them. He studied forestry at a community college in Northern California (he would later earn a graduate degree in community and regional planning from the University of Oregon) and then joined a crew fighting wildfires.
Over time, however, he started to think that his role in fighting fires might be part of the problem. He’d always had a hunch that the Smokey-the-Bear policies of the 1970s — essentially mandating that any forest fire would be put out, and gaslighting Americans into believing that only they could prevent forest fires — were making massive fires more likely, not less. He watched forests that hadn’t burned in a century fill in so densely that they looked ready to combust. And he watched as fires increased in size and severity — taking old-growth Dougs and ponderosa pines with them. Things only became more dramatic as the climate continued to warm.
Now the forests are starting to behave in ways he never could have predicted.
His response? Roll up his sleeves. In the last few years, Fairbanks estimates he’s pulled out hundreds of dead Douglas firs from his little 20-acre property. In 2023, he says he hauled something like 50 pickup truckloads of Doug fir firewood to a nearby town, Ashland, to give it away.
Critically, the former wildland firefighter is also doing something many in the West consider anathema, but is increasingly becoming part of how scientists view a safer future for forests.
He’s setting fire to the land.
A retired wildland firefighter and forester in his early 70s, Fairbanks has the approximate air of a Columbia Sportswear Santa.
Dense columns of gray smoke billow from the forest. This is the Oregon Gulch Fire of 2014, as seen from an airplane. The gray chimneys converge in a massive, bomb-like cloud of white. A “pyrocumulus,” Jena Volpe calls it. It’s the kind of “mass fire” everyone here fears.
We load up into vehicles, me and the government scientists, to go see a patch of forest the BLM has tried to protect from this sort of thing — a prescription that involves setting low-intensity fires.
On the drive, I ask Lowrey, from the Forest Service, how far “firmageddon” could spread. It’s mostly concentrated for now in the Applegate Valley, she tells me, but there’s evidence it’s spreading north into other valleys, including the Willamette, where I live, affecting trees on particularly dry slopes.
We pull up to the patch of land that the BLM “treated” for mass fire prevention. On the way, dead and dying forests were so commonplace that they almost started to lose their shock value. The difference on this plot, which has an aspect that’s wetter and more favorable to Doug fir than many others nearby, is that the trees are still green and largely healthy. They’re also spaced out more than usual. If a typical forest out here is like an elevator crammed with people almost shoulder to shoulder — a result of logging and fire suppression — then this feels more like a Covid-era elevator. There’s enough space for you to extend your arms in both directions and not hit another Doug.
The agency follows up these tree-thinning efforts with controlled, low-grade fire. That’s meant to restore balance and prevent the mega-fires with flames tall enough to torch older trees, like Dougs.
Such “treatments” face opposition from all sides — from logging advocates, who would like to see more of the forest harvested for timber, and from environmentalists, who have sued to block some of BLM’s tree-thinning efforts, claiming its motives are commercial, not safety-related.
Recently, one of the BLM’s prescribed burn signs was defaced with the word “arson.”
Agency officials seem somewhat mystified. These forests are going to burn at some point, they say. Better that it’s controlled.
Rich Fairbanks is among the rare-but-vocal landowners who support fire management, even as he questions some of the federal government’s efforts. He collaborated with a regional Prescribed Burn Association — the first of its kind in the state — to burn an acre of land right by his home.
He wishes more landowners would realize that to protect the forest, it needs to burn occasionally.
“There’s some nice flowers that come up” after a fire, he says, “shooting stars.”
On our walk, I keep trying to ask Fairbanks big, philosophical questions about what’s happening to the Douglas fir — about his attachment to the forest and the sweat he puts into it.
Usually, he responds by pausing, looking into the distance — and then listing tree species for me.
Perhaps this stay-in-the-weeds focus is healthy. Fairbanks loves the forest. His house is decorated with drawings of plants, he dedicated his professional life to this stuff. Yet he’s able to accept that his little patch of the world is changing, and — unless he’s able to stop the use of fossil fuels and miraculously reverse the climate crisis — there’s not much he alone can do to halt firmageddon. Instead, he’ll manage as best he can.
And he can celebrate the forest — the Dougs but also the ponderosa pines, white oaks and sugar pines, the last of which is among his favorite trees. The sugar pine doesn’t have the art-deco cones of a Douglas fir, but its pine cones are impressive — as tall as a human head.
They stand up to fire quite well.
“Magnificent tree,” Fairbanks says.
Unlike Fairbanks, I move through the world with a fair amount of tree blindness. The holidays are when I touch the needles and read the tags. I envy his way of seeing. His is a world not of “trees” or even “evergreens” and “conifers” but of individuals. As an early forester, he cut into the trunks of Doug firs — the slices are called “cookies” — and stared back through hundreds of years of time, across years of drought and plenty.
Trees truly are magnificent when you stop to look closely enough. The least we can do is know their names.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.