East Bay makes a good point. Fires have always been a part of the natural process in the wild. I have also been very encouraged by the new growth that has happened in the area since. I did not expect things to come back that quickly. The pinions, oaks and manzanita I think may not come back. I think these larger trees and the manzanita may have developed in the area during a wetter period. I've notice throughout the SanBernardino Mtns and the San Gabriel Mtns that the big stuff is not returning like a alot of the smaller bushes. Of course these big things take much longer to grow but they may not return if we have entered a drier long term period of time. I think this could be the case. For example you have islands in the desert like Mt. Charleston near Las Vegas and the Hualipai mtns south of Kingman that have groves of pines and some aspen on them. These trees are whats left of a much wetter time in these areas. This fire was made worse by the policy of the forestry for the past 40 years of putting out all fires as quickly as possible. Natural fires would burn areas more often but less intensely many times not killing the larger vegetation like trees because the ground cover was not as thick and the fire was not able to burn as hot or get into the trees. The willow fire had a lot of built up fuel which made it more devastating and these conditions have developed all over the western states and is recognized now to be a big problem that is not going to go away. Bigger and hotter fires will definitely happen in the future because of these earlier policy decisions. When we start messin with nature were bound to screw something up. Now were tinkering with the building blocks of genes and clones. The potential for trouble is tremendous. I think I'll just go have a long soak at OZ and forget about all this for a while :-)