The human-caused but unintentional Peak Fire burned more than 12,000 acres in northern Sonora, Mexico, and southeastern Arizona from June 10 to June 17, 1988. The relation of the fire's severity to the occurrence of fire-damaged oak trees, or lack thereof, and the subsequent recovery of fire-damaged oak in 1996 indicate that the character of the oak resource in the burned area has been altered by the killing of trees, damaging of trees, and increasing the incidence of sprouting in instances where trees were shoot-killed. While sites burned with low fire severity might approach pre-fire stocking conditions sometime in the future, the high occurrence of root-killed oak on sites burned at higher fire severity suggests that the low stocking conditions observed eight years after the fire will probably persist on these sites.