Recently my wife and I camped in the frozen ash of the Illinois River Trailhead, near ground zero of the 499,968-acre Biscuit Fire, the nation's largest wildfire of the 2002 summer - and the largest in Oregon for a century.

Janell was not wild about the idea. The Pacific Northwest's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, had run a three-part feature on Biscuit, billing it as the "Monster Fire." Word was that this devastating inferno had engulfed most of Southwest Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest, including every square inch of the vast, remote Kalmiopsis Wilderness. But as the author of half a dozen Oregon outdoor guidebooks, I needed to see first hand what changes the fire had wrought, and the Forest Service had finally opened roads into the fire zone. Janell reluctantly agreed to join me.

No life stirred in the moonless night as we drove through black woods down the long dirt road. At the primitive trailhead camp, ash puffed with each footstep as we set up the tent in the glare of the car's headlights. The black limbs of burned bushes groped from the shadows. We crawled deep into our sleeping bags and slept as if dead. We awoke to a crisp dawn in a strange new world. Yes, the fire had swept through this area, burning nearly everything at ground level. But the tops of the taller trees were still green. And large areas nearby had not burned at all - especially along creeks and in valleys.

For the next three days, as we explored the Kalmiopsis Wilderness from different trailheads, we discovered that this "Monster Fire" was not the vengeful destroyer we had feared. Often as not, the blaze had tidied up the woods with the care of a fastidious park maintenance crew, neatly pruning the lower branches of old-growth trees and clearing away the underbrush of manzanita and poison oak.

Our hike along the Illinois River Trail showed how well adapted to fire these sparse, dry southern forests are. Even in the few areas where the forest was dense enough to burn hot, turning trees into black snags, wreaths of green were already sprouting around the tree bases. At first glance, it looked as if a tree planting crew had been at work on the slopes. Just months after the fire, most of the burned deciduous trees were already regrowing from their roots - canyon live oak, tanoak, white oak, and madrone. Although the burned pine trees in these areas cannot regrow from the roots, their cones are adapted to open after a fire and reseed automatically the next spring. Even Darlingtonia, the insect-eating pitcher plant of the area's hillside bogs, was coming back strong. Dozens of little green shoots rose from the scorched remnants of older plants, like miniature green baseball bats emerging from the ooze.

One surprise for me was that the fire had burned the ground itself - or at least the moss and duff that covers the steep hillsides of this canyonland. Without that ground cover, rocks had slid down onto many of the trails.

Everyone knows that rolling stones gather no moss, but it's less obvious that moss keeps stones from rolling.

Another oddity were the holes we found snaking through burned ground. It looked as if a giant had repeatedly poked his hand into the ashy dirt, leaving ten-foot tubes were the fingers had been. Eventually we realized these holes must be the casts of ancient stumps and roots. After the fire swept through, the dry wood had smoldered underground for months, gradually turning to ash. We found proof for that theory the next day, when we hiked to Babyfoot Lake. The Kalmiopsis Wilderness does not have many lakes. One of the largest, Babyfoot Lake, would be rated as a large pond elsewhere. Here in the Klamath Mountains of Southwest Oregon, it's a major attraction. Because the lake is such a special oasis, surrounded by old-growth trees, I worried that the Biscuit Fire may have left it desolate. The hike into Babyfoot Lake was not encouraging. For a mile the trail traverses one of the blackest, bleakest forests inside the Wilderness boundary. At an elevation of 4000 feet, this area had a dense stand of big, even-aged Douglas firs. The fire had ripped through the crowns, leaving black spires. Since the blaze, the burned stubs of beargrass plants had put out the area's only fresh leaves, and had been nibbled back by hungry deer.

At the lake itself, moisture from the cool water had preserved a ring of green around the shore. Babyfoot Lake had been the calm eye of a firestorm. That afternoon I climbed to a viewpoint on a cliff high above the lake. From there I could see the bigger picture. Yes, the lakeshore was a small green ring in a patch of blackened forest. But beyond stretched ridge after ridge --- forty miles-where the Biscuit Fire had merely burned out the underbrush, leaving virtually all the large trees intact. Janell and I are fond of the Kalmiopsis, having backpacked through its wilds on adventurous trips since the 1970s. We came away from our recent visit reassured that our old friend was as wild and beautiful as ever.