WHEN GIANTS FELL - YACOLT BURN 1902

"WHEN GIANTS FELL - YACOLT BURN 1902"  (textured modeling paste, oil paint and gold leaf on canvas) represents the total devastation wrought by the Yacolt burn of 1902.  The fire that started in Bonneville burned for 10 days and cut a fifteen mile wide trail to Mt. St. Helens, 35 miles away.  Twelve billion board feet of timber was destroyed.  700,000 acres of trees burned over, $14,000,000.00 in property damage and 20-35 lives were lost to the fire. 

Mr. Parsons describes the fires aftermath;

"The forests that many thought would stand eternal were gone. The green that flowed from one mountain top to another was replaced with a smoking, black, bush burned mass of twisted, bent and broken trees.  Snags two hundred feet high, gray and ugly against the ashen ruins, lay on hill after hill.  This forest would never again see such giants as stood last week. They had stood throughout time, or so it seemed, and now they were sentinels of the dead, pointed to a smokey sky". Excerpt from "Across Rushing Waters - A History of the Washougal River and Cape Horn by Mark E. Parsons.