Oregon Adventure Travel - We're Toast (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast (Cont.)

LET IT BURN?

Covington has mainly studied ponderosa pine forests. But ponderosas aren't the only trees in the western woods, and different forests require different solutions. Another common woodland is the lodgepole pine forest, which is what burned in Yellowstone National Park in the huge fires of 1988. In most cases, lodgepoles ought to be left alone, since they're genetically wired to be burned to the ground every 100 years or so. Fire kills the bugs that infest an old lodgepole forest, and it jump-starts new seedlings by melting the seeds from their cones.

That leaves the mixed-species hodgepodges that often contain some mix of pine, fir, and cedar—the sort of forest where the Biscuit Fire burned. Here, trying to figure out what to thin is extremely complicated. Plus there's just so much of it—millions of acres more than the ponderosa pine forests. In these forests, maybe, deliberate fire might help.

A few weeks after touring the Biscuit Fire, I traveled to Yosemite National Park, home to one of the most aggressive burn programs in the nation. The park's fire management officer is Tom Nichols, a soft-spoken 51-year-old who is responsible for fire policies in many western parks. He's a big believer in controlled burns and says he got tired of the excuses he kept hearing from park fire managers who promised they'd burn 5,000 acres in a year but only got around to a thousand.

"It was like being a Chicago Cubs fan," he told me. "Every year, they lose, and you get to the point you figure you could manage them better. So, two years ago, when the job here came open, I decided to take it and try for myself."

Nichols has created a version of the "pyrotechnician" team envisioned by Tim Ingalsbee. Along with his deputy, Dan Buckley, we drove to nearby Tuolumne Meadows, the site of their most ambitious project to date, a controlled burn called Gin Flat. Set in a forest thick with giant sugar pines and black oak, the burn was part of Nichols's goal to torch 5,000 to 8,000 acres a year. Months in the planning, the Gin Flat fire behaved beautifully, devouring a thick carpet of needles and big swaths of brush. Granted, some of the old sugar pines inside the fire perimeter will die—burning the unnaturally dense duff layer killed their roots—but, as Buckley told me while we walked across the site, "that's better than what would happen if a big wildfire came through here and took them all out." Not far from this site, in 1990, the A-Rock Fire did just that, sweeping over a stand of ponderosa pines and reducing it to ashes. That stand may not recover for centuries.

Still, Nichols and his crews have faced frustrations. The Gin Flat fire was supposed to burn 7,000 acres, but its smoke riled residents in nearby counties, whose complaints forced Nichols to stop the blaze at 3,500 acres. Then there's the biggest hurdle of all: Prescribed fire can't always be controlled. A prescribed burn set in May 2000 in New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument became the disastrous Cerro Grande Fire, causing $1 billion in property damage and scorching Los Alamos before weather and fire crews tamed it. That experience looms large in the risk calculus of any land manager.

"People are afraid to make another mistake like that," says Nichols. The Cerro Grande Fire, though, offered an excellent lesson in what not to do—there, a combination of flawed planning, windy conditions, and limited fire crews on hand led to major mishap. The Yosemite experience shows that fire can be set often and safely. But right now, Nichols says, he's barely scratching the surface. "If we can't break through the 1,000-acre barrier on a regular basis, then fire never will be a useful tool for managing the landscape," he says. "It'll just be good for fine-tuning 20- or 30-acre plots."

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