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What Captain Jack Spahr didn’t know was that there was a hundred-and-fifty-foot hump in the terrain masked by the heat of the fire’s core. Also, he was originally from Massachusetts and simply didn’t think about the fact that Douglas fir trees could grow to three hundred feet, over thirty stories. Back home, a tall tree topped out at five stories.
Climbing the rocky knob, the fire had slowed and intensified. The wildfire’s typical core temperature of fourteen hundred degrees rose. The inferno concentrated as it climbed up the knob and began cooking a “King of the Forest” Douglas fir that had first fought for this perch before Columbus was born.
At over two thousand degrees, a tree doesn’t burn.
The interior superheated faster than the bark and outer layers of pitchy wood could carbon
