By Amy Alonzo — Visiting Brown’s Creek Trail in South Reno is a bit like Dorothy returning to Kansas from Oz, when the vibrant palette of the world suddenly shifts to monotone.
The trailhead, south of Mount Rose Highway, looks as it has for years — a gravel pullout with a kiosk surrounded by towering pines — as does the first half mile or so of trail. But then, the forest turns brown, its brush burned and its trees charred. Further along, the landscape is a sheet of gray.
Brown’s Creek was one of the areas devastated by the 2024 Davis Fire that burned nearly 6,000 acres and caused more than $9 million in property damage in south Reno.
After months of investigation, officials announced Thursday that the blaze was caused by an improperly doused campfire. Campfires are not allowed at the day use area of Davis Creek Park, where the fire originated.
The day was also windy with low humidity, and the National Weather Service had issued a red flag warning urging caution around activities that could start a fire.
The trail’s destruction is the loss of an incredibly scenic recreation area. The roughly 5-mile-long lollipop-shaped trail crosses Brown’s Creek, which flows year-round.
A vista area once offered hikers a peek through towering pine trees toward Washoe Valley. Before it burned, the trail wound near an aspen grove that rustled in summer breezes and signaled to hikers the approach of fall with its yellowing leaves.
Now, the aspen trees are skeletons, as are many of the surrounding pines. The most heavily burned portion of the trail, formerly a manzanita-covered slope, is now a barren hillside dotted by spindly stems. From the vista point, hikers are greeted with a charred hillside.
The trail, and the hiking experience it offers, isn’t what it once was. Instead, it offers something different — a unique and intimate opportunity for Northern Nevada hikers to witness the destruction of, and regrowth, following a wildfire.
‘Nature wins’
Much of the Davis Fire burned in what the U.S. Forest Service calls a “mosaic pattern” — pockets of severe burning interspersed with patches of light and moderate burning.
In very low to low burn severity areas, soil quality deteriorates and the overstory experiences some canopy damage, but the areas can often quickly bounce back.
In moderately burned areas, almost all groundcover and brush is burned, trees are dead and fallen, and the tree canopy is mostly gone.
And in areas that have experienced high-severity burns, soil is damaged, unable to absorb water, its minerals and nutrients burned away. The tree canopy is completely consumed.
The post-fire Brown’s Creek Trail offers hikers the chance to see those varying levels of severity up close.
Those different levels of fire damage also determine what returns and when, said Kendal Young, natural resource planning staff officer for the Humboldt Toiyabe National Forest.
“The best fires are those fires that have these different mosaics of burn severity — that gives us the greatest diversity when it starts coming back,” Young said.
Even though the Brown’s Creek area burned less than a year ago, there are signs of life along the trail — native grasses, wildflowers and seedlings emerging from the dirt and ash, and groups such as the Sugar Pine Foundation have hosted replanting efforts on private land that burned in the fire. The Forest Service will be doing work as well, Young said, but that process is slower due to necessary environmental reviews.
Regrowth hinges not just on burn severity, but factors such as drought, erosion and heavy storms, said James Steed, resource program manager at the Nevada Division of Forestry.
But with the right conditions — something Steed called “that Goldilocks area” — significant understory growth at Brown’s Creek could return in 15 years, and dominant conifer trees another 15 years after.
“On a long enough timeline, nature wins,” Steeds said. “It’s a complex system — there’s so much going on. Fire is such a blessing and such a curse.”
— This story is used with permission of The Nevada Independent. Go here for updates to this and other Nevada Independent stories.
