Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Question about Forest Management

A lot of accusations are being thrown around about the Western fires, from climate change to forest management. Considering the sheer scope of acreage involved, seems like keeping debris cleaned up would bankrupt a State.

Is the business demand for use of debris as a raw material such that State governments could allow select companies to come in for free and clear a significant amount out and use that for products? I assume that debris could be used for paper, beauty bark, fake logs etc.

I also imagine that clearing doesn't have to be comprehensive. That would be overwhelming and unrealistic. But specific areas or lines of land could be cleared as kind of a fire brake where the spread of fire would slow significantly so that it could be controlled more meaningfully.

I know very little about forest management so if people could correct me where I'm wrong or add their own expertise, it would be appreciated.

Clearing debris is not the issue. Building and maintaining fire breaks and roads, which serve as fire breaks has been severely curtailed due to environmental preservation advocates.

The issue is different depending on what forest you are talking about (fuel type) and local industry.

weather AND climate play a role also.

If you have 5 dry years in a row (climate) and you have 40 mph winds, you are going to have fires that will burn through a subdivision, where the houses are the fuel...

If there is no local industry to buy/use the material, the value goes down in a hurry if you have to haul it to industry.

a fire that jumps a state highway or an interstate is not going to be stopped by a "firebreak" out in the woods, no matter how much people like hunting them, or being paid to maintain them.

some fuel types can be "burned from below" (pondersosa pine) where when conditions are right a light fire can remove undergrowth without killing too many trees.

some fuel types are all or nothing (chapparal or lodgepole pine)

Nature will always do the cleanup of forest debris sooner or later. It has only become a huge problem now that we have a huge population living in the paths of nature's cleanup. There have always been western wildfires and there are environmental benefits to fire. The Black Hills bison herds have benefited from fire. They can't eat trees and neither can deer or antelope.

Terrain is too steep and it's too hot, poison oak, ticks, etc here for any kind of manual clearing to be practical. Some places anyhow.

As for firebreaks, I asked the same question and was reminded how the the fire jumped the Columbia River a few years ago. That's a mile of water! We're screwed.

Your thinking is right, but the sheer volume of land makes it impossible to maintain. Just in my county alone, the Klamath Natl Forest takes 1,700,000 acres..a large portion of which is roadless wilderness. Elevations range from 36 feet above sea level to over 14,000 feet. The furthest point east in this forest is only 200 miles from the coastline, so we got rain/snow, a relatively mild climate, and trees grow like weeds. They made great strides in the 80's, 90's by going into the forest and making biomass (woodchips) using good forestry practices. Well, guess what, climate loonies got legislation to shut down the biomass electricity gen plants...because you are not supposed to burn ANYTHING to make power. With modern boilers, the biomass plants fell between natural gas and coal...by no means perfect, zero emissions, but still darn good. And then, the real culprit was ignorance of a healthy fire and disease resistant forest ecosystem...of which natural fire was a huge factor. From the date of the creation of the Forest Service until today well over a hundred year span... the motto was, all fires must be put out. The net result, we now have the entire mountain west with a hundred year catastrophic fuel load...and that, coupled with a multi-year drought cycle, the perfect recipe for disaster.
My son is a private timberlands contract manager, and frankly, because of logging, thinning, re-planting , good road maintenance, in it for the long run as as are ranchers and farmers, private timberlands losses due to fire and disease are a tiny fraction of what is happening every summer on US land. Sad but true. The Forest Service is so crippled by bureaucracy, legal challenges, that they can't even sell the burned timber which is very valuable, in a timely manner to a hungry market, the burnt timber is rotten by the time they create a sale. Sad but true.

The fires are a result of a buildup of fuels over the last century or more. Fire is part of a natural ecosystem and fire will occur regardless of how we manage our natural resources. Land use plays a huge role in plant diversity and composition. In our case, grazing over the last couple of hundred years has produced a heavy advantage for woody species while grasses have been overgrazed. This is the natural progression of plant types after grazing has caused grasses and herbaceous ground overs to be replaced by woody trees and shrubs.

Grasses are the fine fuels that ignite and carry fires on a healthy ecosystem. By grazing lands and by preventing natural fires (think Smoky the bear and only you can prevent forest fires) we have caused an unnatural balance where woody species have been allowed to grow and become dense stands where grasslands used to flourish. As this occurs, we see less fire frequency, but greater fire intensity when things do burn. It is much more difficult to ignite woody trees or shrubs than it is to ignite a dry stand of native grass in the summer, but when a thick stand of trees or brush does ignite, there is a lot more fuel that can burn for much longer and much hotter. Fires become catastrophic when “ladder fuels” exist, enabling fires to reach the forest canopy. At that point, you almost have to just let the fire do what it’s going to do and try to stay out of its way.

The answer is more burning. Less grazing. More grass. And yes, sylviculture. We have an over-abundance of lumber here. Also, fuel is very cheap. Natural gas and fuel production has put using wood/biomass as a fuel on the back burner, so to speak. Forest stands can be managed for a number of reasons. Wildlife, recreation, lumber, soil stabilization, carbon sequestration... By and large, our forest go unmanaged and are mostly have high stand densities. Couple that with preventing fire and we have what we have today.

Southern Oregon is loaded with ladder fuels like live canyon oak, madrone, and manzanita. Super oily and flammable.

This is from a repost of my response to a similar question in another thread:

This article describes some of the challenges on fire management of the west side of the Cascades. Ignore the GW stuff. GW isn't going to make the forest drier, but it might extend the fire season.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/202...s-the-unprecedented-was-predictable.html

September has always been peak fire season around here and this is no exception.

This area is pretty much temperate rain forest. Most of our fall winter and spring are damp and large area are not largely frozen or snow covered most of the winter. This is perfect conditions for growing not only large trees but also under brush. If you log an area or it burns off, most of the brush will be back in a few years. This makes the kind of prescribed burns that are possible in other areas, impracticable here. You'd have to burn it every five to ten years.

Now while I said we're wet most of the year, our summers are usually very dry. We normally get very little rain from about mid-June to Mid- September. This year it's been very dry.

This set the conditions for fire. Historically we have had these types of conflagrations every 50 or so years in the state, with most areas seeing it burned every 200-300 years for the past 11000 years. The article mentions forests with all the same age trees. That's from the big fires.

When we get a dry east wind in a forest that's bone dry, it doesn't take much to set it off. The winds at Timberline Lodge were recorded a 80mph for most of last week.

What's different with the fires going on now is that there are so many. Some of them were cause by lightning fires that were smouldering. Some were power lines. One I know was a vehicle caused fire. One of the fires in Ashland was arson. The rest they're still investigating.

Personally given the history of fire in the area, I doubt there is much we can do about them. If you have a fires that are burning at 20-30mph you can't stop it.

Adding a link that describe the west side forests and acreages:

https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/rma/fia-topics/state-stats/Oregon/index.php

Idaho alone has over 50,000 square miles of public land, including forest, desert, etc. A good share is so steep that it's hard to climb, let alone keep cleaned up. In the sagebrush land, fires often cover 100 square miles or more. A major problem with fires in sagebrush is non-native cheat grass. It was accidently brought in from Asia 100 years ago and has spread all over the west. Cheat is an annual that grows dense and dries off in late June. It's HIGHLY flammable and fire doesn't hurt the seeds. It creates an inferno that's so hot that often the sage can't survive it. That leaves nothing but bare ground...and cheat seeds. So, the next spring, you have a green carpet of nothing but cheat. The cycle repeats itself annually.
Cattle will eat cheat grass when it's young and green. Once it dries off, nothing will eat it except a fire. Those who argue against cattle grazing are making a mistake because cattle can graze the cheat down and greatly reduce the fire hazard. Since cheat is non-native, you can't argue that prohibiting controlled grazing is good for the environment. There's nothing else that can reduce the amount of cheat.

Then there are the non-native wild horses. That's another story entirely.

This isn't a simple problem to address. Fuel in the forest, accumulated from years of hands off policies! Beatle kill areas not addressed in a timely manner. Roads closed and removed, hampering access! Steep terrain limiting access! Old burns that have over grown brush, along with trees that are bone dry. No fire breaks from logging activity! Put this together and you have a disaster, waiting to happen.

Problem is incorrect labeling of the problem.

The forest can manage itself.

The problem is societal management.

Only thing cheat grass is good for is feeding chukars.

Cheatgrass is one insidious invader. In addition to what RC says, it begins greening up earlier in the spring than many native species and depletes soul moisture before anything else can get going. Nasty stuff.

I'm a forester, but in the South, not the West. However, my understanding from what I've learned is that it's a combination of dry weather, lack of low-intensity fires to consume the fine fuels which are needed to sustain a fire at its beginning, and dense canopies which allow fires to carry through the crowns of the trees. More actively logging these areas, both clearcutting and thinning, would do much to break the fuel chain. Prescribed burning would help, although it is risky and I doubt it could be done on a scale to make a difference. (Obviously, none of this applies to the chaparall fires such as they get around LA.) More people living in and around these forests doesn't help. Many of those folks don't want trees cut and are scared of controlled burns. Activist judges and an increasingly tree-hugger mentality in the forestry agencies also prevents the actions which could reduce the intensity of some of these fires.

Pre-colonial times, the trees were all large and spaced widely apart; frequent, low-intensity fires kept the fuel from building up. Very much like the longleaf pine savannahs of the pre-colonial South. Maybe there is a Western forester on the board who can speak with more direct experience.

Why should the state pay for federal lands?

When I was a manager of building and grounds for the University of California Santa Cruz in the 70's up until I retired we used various methods to reduce the fire threat. Besides mowing, discing etc. two of the methods we used that were very effected were prescribed and persciption burning. The California Division or Forestry at that time would do the perscription burning in the upper campus grasslands and underbrush and the prescribed burning was contracted out to a private vendor. It was a great system yet it stopped with the CDF all of a sudden. One of the members whose name I would not let out told me when I asked what happened to our program that for funding reasons Sacramento decided they would get more funding fighting fires than preventing them. Where I now live in Lake County the area called Cow Mountain use to produce an annual harvest of 2000 bucks a year due to the pear farmers burning parts of it at the end of the deer season every year to promote new growth which kept the deer on the mountain instead of in the orchards. The same area now produces less than 100 bucks a year due to the thick and uneatable growth.

The National interagency Fire Center out of Boise Idaho would be a starting point for further education on the topic.

https://www.nifc.gov

There are also programs known as "Firewise"... that addresses the human element.

I started fighting forest fires in 1986 as a very very young man. The topic is incredibly complicated.

Bottomline, the vast majority of these fires become unmanageable and severe because of Decades of litigation by the tree huggers.

Wildfire is a very natural occurrence. In fact many trees cannot reproduce without fire coming through and burning the pitch wax off of the pine cones to release the new seeds.

Ignorant environmentalist have completely kneecapped forests against proper management. It really is that plain and simple.

Foresters absolutely understand how to best manage public lands.

The United States forest service is actually under the Department of Agriculture because trees are considered to be a crop. This concept totally Galls the tree huggers and they do everything they can to prevent logging roads and proper Timber management.

Never allow an environmentalist to tell you otherwise.

We used to hunt the Sawtooth Nat. Recreation area in so. Idaho extensively. These days elk tags are extremely hard to get and we haven't hunted there in years. Anyway, bark beetles have really hit some areas hard in there. We used to hunt an area that was particularly bad for beetles. Tens of thousands of trees died but the elk were there. Then one year, there was a terrific wind storm and thousands of the dead trees fell. Then underbrush started growing between the downed trees. Now you can't even walk through the area, let alone hunt it. It's only a matter of time before a lightning storm really cleans it up. When it goes, it'll be something to behold. At this point, fire is the only thing that can fix it.