KERNVILLE, Calif. — As flames leaped across the West this summer, so did the hyperbole. If fires weren't devastating, they were horrific or catastrophic. Colorado's governor at one point declared his state ablaze. Television sets blared the peril to California's groves of giant sequoias.
In August, President Bush tramped through the charred landscape of a fire that had raged across southern Oregon and Northern California and declared the sight a "crying shame."
But now that the smoke has cleared, the scene is not so grim. In the path of each of the major wildfires that captured national attention this year, large swaths of land emerged only lightly burned -- often better off for a much needed forest cleaning.
In Sequoia National Forest, where a fire burned for six weeks and threatened some of the most majestic trees on Earth, only about 8% of the 150,000 acres that burned was severely damaged, according to an analysis by the U.S. Forest Service.
While the most heavily burned timberland will take generations to fully heal, elsewhere new life is already poking through blackened earth. Bouquets of fresh green sprouts are rising from charred stumps.
"People go out there and the first response is, 'Oh, my God, it's horrible,' " said Terry Kaplan-Henry, a hydrologist who is leading emergency recovery work in the Sequoia forest. "It's coming back already. In three years, it probably will look great."
Roughly 6.7 million acres of drought-stressed wild lands burned this year in the continental United States and Alaska, less than in 2000 but enough to make it one of the five worst fire seasons in the last 40 years, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho.
More land may yet burn in places like Southern California, where the fire season will not end until the arrival of soaking rains.
Along with their size, the wildfires' locations drew attention. Big burns in Colorado licked the edges of Denver's suburbs, and tens of thousands of residents were evacuated from the edges of forests in Arizona. In California, flames crept within a mile of sequoias.
The television images of forest infernos spilled onto the political landscape as some Western lawmakers complained that the woods had grown into highly flammable thickets because of environmental regulations.
At the site of a 500,000-acre fire in southern Oregon, Bush lamented the consequences of "bad forest policy," and called for an emergency program to increase logging and thinning in federal forests.
