I suppose, technically, the road was still closed:

The "Road Closed" signs and cones spanning the road being the first clues. But cones can be moved...

And, technically, the fire was still burning:

But only in a few, smoky places. Overall, it was out.

The damage was done. The danger was gone. Other than maybe stepping into a hole of ashes that used to be the heart of a living tree.

This wasn't like the fires we lit, some less than a mile away. In fact, we had hoped to burn parts of this very spot in a couple years or so.

But our fires would have been in spring. Or late fall. It would have meandered over the hills, leaving patches of unburned shrubs and trees almost as large as the black itself. Seed stock for the desired recovery. And the burned areas themselves would still sprout from the roots, and untouched seeds in the soil, because we would have burned when it was cool, and have been done in a day.

This is all black. Or at least 95%. It burned in the dry heat of summer, barely slowing down at night, for over a week. In a few places you can see where it raced across the landscape, just charring the grasses, and may recover quickly. Maybe a quarter or a third of the pines will survive, as ponderosas have evolved to do with fire.

But for most of the 3,000+ acres, the fire was hot and slow. And cooked deep into the soil. Entire trees are seared into ash, leaving only white stripes in the black.

The Grove is gone.

Yes, some of the big old ponderosas of The Grove will survive. Unless the beetles survived, too. But all the small trees and tall shrubs that formed a ring around the hidden clearing are dead and gone.

It'll be decades before the clearing is hidden again.

And Pituophis's home?

Blackened, too.

Signs of the battle are still present. Splotches of the landscape that are uniformly orange instead of black.

Slurry. Hard to tell if the aerial drops did any good.

Early in the day, I find a doe and her fawn, standing numbly in the black.

The fawn is fine, trying to play in this strange new world. But the mother is lost, unable to find food where it is supposed to be. Unsure of where to run and hide.

Hours later, they were still right there.

It will be worse when snow falls.