Brian Head • This past summer, a year after 72,000 acres of high-elevation woodlands burned around southwestern Utah’s Markagunt Plateau, residents of the nearby resort town of Brian Head noticed something strange: Tiny white cottony puffs drifted through the air and piled up on the ground like a downy blanket.
“It looked like cottonwood [seed], but we are at 9,000 feet. We don’t have cottonwoods here,” said Mike Saemisch, a Brian Head resident who has been documenting the fire’s aftermath as a “citizen scientist.”
The mysterious material, which even longtime residents had never seen before, turned out to be seeds exploding off thousands of aspen trees that survived the 2017 fire.