The flames fade away. Firefighters extinguish the last embers. A final curl of smoke uncoils in the wind.
A wildfire in the California wilderness has come to an end, and what’s left behind is a blackened landscape of skeletal pines and leafless oaks, scorched meadows and ashen stumps where saplings once stood.
Then, slowly, life returns.
One year after a wind-whipped wildfire charged across a craggy mountainside above Lone Pine, California, flashes of new growth are emerging in this still-charred corner of the Inyo National Forest, a hiking, camping and fishing playground about 350 miles southeast of San Francisco.
Tiny clusters of white and purple wildflowers stand out against denuded pines, many stripped of bark in the fire.