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

The bottom line to me is that the tree huggers are the reason we are where we are with western fires. As several have mentioned we are way behind now in forest management, maybe too far to recover before we cool the planet. (sarcasm). I've mentioned here before that I have seen a full prescription burn in place, with drip torches lit and ready and have a burn called of because one of what seemed like a couple hundred parameters were predicted to be out of alignment just minutes before lighting off.
In the last 30 years, I'm sure new methods and techniques would have been developed to make prescription burns more efficiently and we wouldn't have the fire load we have now.

When the Miwok Indian tribes finished hunting an area of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer, they would light the area on fire before migrating to the valley for the winter.

Even they understood prescription burning and its benefits.
The fires are a combination of issues. Excess fuel being the largest problem by far.

Our management "experts" should ask our native American Indians how they managed the forests before the white man showed up. I can tell you one thing they didn't do was try to put out fires caused by lightning because they didn't want to piss off the great Spirit. In 2004 I visited Donnor Pass in northern California. There as no snow on the ground, it very hot/dry and the pine trees were so close together you couldn't hardly find a place to stand where you couldn't touch 2 trees at once.

Natives burnt areas, so they would have a food source the following year! They understood fire as a tool, for survival. From the mountains to the swamps, fire was used! When the settlers showed they used fire as a tool to clear land! It is still happening around the world! In California, Oregon , Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, man forgot ( ignored ) how to use this tool, for the good of man and nature! And no I don't think we should burn all the rain forests. But the worlds largest rain forest in on fire now in the northwest!

This has been an informative thread, thanks Jake and all who contributed.


mike r

I thought the Amazon was the worlds largest rain forest.

I disagree. As a former forester that worked in Oregon and the midwest, the problem is that we keep thinking the forests need to be left alone. That's Muir's preservationist theory which we utilize for designated wilderness areas, the Pinchot theory of conservation is much more practical. It basically says man is on the earth and that we have affected the earth and we should do the best we can to work in harmony with the earth/forests - to which I agree. We hike, hunt, fish, camp, drive, explore, mine, harvest, destroy, plant, burn forests. We AFFECT the health of the forest, and therefore we need to manage them. We put out fires that would have centuries ago burned millions of acres, we plant non-native species in our yards, we clear cut swaths of land for subdivisions, we build reservoirs where there was no water, we protect an owl at the cost of thinning a wood lot, we are great at altering the landscape- altering forests. Hugging the trees for the sake of protecting them is like relying on eastern medicine when you have severe illness.

When I worked seasonally for the FS back in the late 80s and early 90s, I used to joke that the dope smoking hippies from the 60s and 70s had grown up and were writing forest management plans based on visions from one of their bad acid trips. I'm not so sure I wasn't close to the truth on that.

I didn't make any friends when I told a couple of forest managers I thought Smokey Bear had done more to destroy our forests than all the loggers combined since this country was settled. You would have thought I had blasphemed their god. I suppose in a way I had.

For over 100 years we have so aggressively fought fire that now the standing, dead, insect killed timber and fuel loading on the forest floor is so great that when we do have a lightning strike, the resulting fire burns with a far greater intensity than it would have normally. Instead of sweeping through and burning some grass and brush, killing insects and germinating ponderosa pine, it burns everything.

I know here in Northern Arizona, which has the largest Ponderosa pine forest in the world, fire used to be part of the pine forest ecology. Ponderosa pine developed over millennia and fire was somewhat necessary. Forest experts (Wally Covington) said that a healthy and in its natural environment that a Ponderosa pine forest has 100 trees per acre. Currently, the ponderosa forest has closer to 1,100 tress per acre. These trees are now stunted and have no economic value. And removing these tress is very expensive, there is not near enough funding, and of course socially and environmentally, it can’t be done.

Of course people are now living in these forests. Towns, roads, rail lines, electric transmission lines, and such now are scattered all across this vast ponderosa forest. The forest is simply overgrown.

Man has suppressed fire (thanks Smokey Bear) to the point that when we do get a fire, it’s almost not stoppable. And when it happens (which it will at some point), it causes severe damage to the entire forest, watershed, and environment far more catastrophic to everything involved then if a fire had happened when the forest was only 100 trees per acre.

I suspect this same situation is happening everywhere in the west.

Look at California, Oregon, and Washington. The population of those States is what - 40 million people? And fire has been removed from the ecology equation. Logging has all but stopped, undergrowth and chaparral is fully loaded, and there is no way to clear it out.

It’s essentially like a yard that some person doesn’t mow or maintain.

But there is a consequence when nature gets out of balance.

I think the biggest issue that leads to a lot of the catastrophic fires is the lack of access. For example , here in Colorado we get a fire started by either lightning, or human caused. The Fire is in a wilderness area, their is zero access to the fire by road, it smolders and burns in the thick canopy of pines which are also littered with dead beetle kill. With a fire like that there is zero options in dealing with it, maybe some helo Bambi ops but retardant is pretty ineffective in the dense canopy as it never makes it to the fire itself, and you aren’t going to put foot soldiers in front of it without vehicles and water supplies as that will lead to fatalities. Then all of a sudden after days and weeks of doing nothing you get the perfect weather event and suddenly the fire burns for 10 miles in 24 hours and everyone is in panic mode. You can’t stop or extinguish these fires if you can’t get to them or in front of them.

Nope look it up.

Yeah, I was right.
Largest Rain Forest

the other issue no one has brought up is the smoke from prescribed burns.

at night smoke goes downhill, to people's houses who are not worried about forest fires.

In our area that would be Verde Valley, Camp Verde, Cottonwood, Sedona.

they are the low spot, and have three national forests surrounding them. Even if the forests burn every 3rd week, you have continuous smoke in the Valley. Filled with retired people, sometimes people who moved to Arizona for the clear air.

They know how to bitch....

That huge fire in Yellowstone in '88 burned millions of beetle killed trees. Being in a Nat. park, they just let it burn at first but then it went wild, beyond their ability to stop it until snowfall. It turned out to be possibly the best thing that's happened to the park in a long time. It cleared out thousands of acres of dead wood and brought back some great grazing for deer and elk.

exactly! remember the thread about firewood? How many times do you have to handle a piece of firewood before you burn it? As commercial fuel that costs a lot of money. and your plant has to be near water and transmission lines, so you generally have to bring the trees to the plant. cut them down chip them, load them into chip van drive to plant unload chip van build surge pile load from surge pile into feed stream......

Natural Gas? open the valve. NG is so cheap right now lots of places flare it off.

find a place where a gas line and a powerline cross and build a power plant.

This is one of the best informative thread, I have read here in a long time Thanks very much.

Fire in the West has been there since the last ice age. Catastrophic fires have been there since the last ice age.

The great Fire of 1910 burnt 3 million acres in basically two days in August, from Washington up into BC, across most of the Northern Idaho wilderness into Montana. Human fire suppression had nothing to do with it.

Lots of western higher elevation forests will always burn, like the lodge pole pine fires in Yellowstone in the ‘80’s. That’s what that species does, it’s it’s natural life cycle.

Can we cut our way out of it? Theoretically, yes, but only by cutting uneconomical tracts as well as economical tracts, and turning the west into a tree farm.

Biomass is not a solution, not at foreseeable energy prices. Not economical.

My favorite suggestion has been for years is for every elk hunter to hang a drip torch out the window of the truck on their way out on the last day of the season. The only way to reduce the catastrophic fires is to have bunch of very low intensity fires, which means late in the season, with snow around the corner to put it back,out.

Nope look up rain forests of the northwest! Then you will have the answer! There are more than one type rain forest!

https://www.treehugger.com/facts-about-north-americas-temperate-rain-forests-4869747#:~:text=The%20Pacific%20Northwest%20temperate%20rainforests%2C%20which%20range%20from,what%20is%20the%20world%27s%20largest%20temperate%20rainforest%20ecoregion. This might help! The treefugger thing I apologize for!

Some really really really interesting comments on this thread.

I've said it on other threads recently, and nothing has changed since then.

Maintenance of forests, thinning. brush removal, allowing development in areas that are fire prone, etc etc etc are all part of the issue.

The real issue, from my 50+ years of living around these things is.................................MONEY.

No one wants to pay for any of the solutions, out of their pockets that is. As long as the other guy is using his money, fine. But don't make me lose money, or pay more taxes, or stop me from developing in a fire zone, and so on and so on.

Thinning help in some areas for sure. But, the logging companies prefer not to do it, they want merchantable timber and don't want to waste their time (money) cutting and removing pecker poles.

Grazing helps in some areas, as long as the rancher gets to put as many cows as he determines is good for the land, which is not necessarily agreeing with a range specialist and wildlife biologist for leaving enough graze for other species (it cuts into the rancher's profit, there's that money thing again)

I've yet to see anyone, anywhere want to remove chaparral unless paid by someone and that someone is the taxpayer, and those folks (me included) don't want to pay anymore than we already are. There's basically little to no commercial use for the majority of chaparral species, so there's no incentive for removal, thinning, or even periodic burning other than fire protection. And as some folks here have alluded to, remove the native chaparral species and non natives like cheat, medusa head, and other worse fire problems move in.

Private landowner, ranch, timber company, is done with a few hundred acres in some low profit area of the woods. Want's to split it into 1, 5, 10, 20 acre lots or so and goes to the County Board and asks for a new zoning classification from ag/forestry. County Supervisors are Insurance Agents, Hardware Store owners, Lumber yard folks, Real Estate brokers, lawyers etc. Of course, bringing in business to the county is a great idea, right? And of course, they want their rancher, landowner, timber company friend to make money on his new development and bring in more consumers to the county, right? (money) The developer says "I can't make a profit if you require me to put a 40' wide firebreak around the WHOLE development, that wipes out the equivalent of x number of acres of land I could use for lots (money issue once more) . So the development goes in with folks' fences right up against the forest boundary and now you have more folks exposed to fire danger every year.

The "owl" didn't stop the company I worked for from making a huge profit every year I worked there. Last I checked they're still in business, and there's still owls on their lands. https://www.greendiamond.com/responsible-forestry/california/

The "owl" and the forests it lives in could be managed on a similar basis on other forests too, if folks wanted to spend the money to do it. (it might mean changing some harvest methods and leaving certain places uncut which = money.........again)

No doubt in my mind the feral horse folks, the save the trees folks, the save the squirrel folks, the sage grouse folks, the pine marten, fisher, wolverine, wolf, butterfly, etc folks and their suits are a BIG problem, and again money rears its ugly head. The folks involved in these things, some of them at least, have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Lawyers for their groups make no money if they don't have cases to pursue in court.

y'all let me know when you figure out a workable solution to these forest/wildland fires.....................I've been waiting to see on since the Laguna Fire in the early 70's and few more since then.............well, maybe a few more than a few.