Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Idaho's 2d largest active fire

Damn shame, but hopefully they can do some reseeding or such on the sage/grasslands to keep the cheat down to a mild roar.

If you folks get some mild rains soon, the forbs might start sprouting some before the hard freezes and maybe get a head start on the cheat and provide some food for the deer and elk.

Still no rain here, we had some clouds, no dry lightning that I heard of, so now another week of dry weather in the forecast. Maybe you folks a bit further North get some moisture to help out.

This is high desert. It's not uncommon to get no rain at all before we get snow and the snow often doesn't come until after mid- November. The problem is that we didn't get out normal spring rain. That's why the trees are so dry.

I don't know. The photos I've seen don't show and their maps just show the perimeter. I'm sure not going in to have a look. Some years ago there was a big burn about 100 miles north of here in heavier forest. The next year, Google Earth posted new photos of the are and you could see unburned green all over the place.

Here's an interesting photo of the center of the fire area from Google Earth. You can't tell when the photos were taken but the left side is summer and the right side appears to be spring when there are snowdrifts on the downwind side of all the ridges. This has all burned in the last few days I don't know what those white numbered boxes are.

LIke many fires in the west, this is another example of what happens when beetle killed stands of trees catch fire. They explode. Many of those pockets of trees are full of dead wood. It's a very popular firewood cutting area and the stands that are accessible get cleaned out but most of them can't be reached by vehicle. It's not a case of mis-management but rather one of accessibility.
A lot of it is lodgepole. That has a short life expectancy, maybe 150 years, and the majority of trees in a patch are roughly the same age. Lodgepole needs fire to germinate the seeds so after a fire, they all get germinated at the same time. The FS goes in and clearcuts a stand of mature lodgepoles and lets firewood cutters take it. Then they burn the slash which germinates the seeds to start over. In this area, their plan is to recycle each patch every 50 years. Younger trees are more resistant to beetles.

As a followup: the fire has been pretty much contained at about 90k acrers. It's still burning actively but mostly inside the perimeter. The area is full of dense stands of lodgepole and subalpine fire. Beetles have been busy and there are lots of areas of heavy downfall and standing dead trees. The fire's busy cleaning those up, a very good use of fire in the forest. Lodgepole needs fire to germinate the seeds so this will bring them back quickly. While firewood cutting is heavy in accessible areas, most of this is too steep for access and wood cutters can't get at it. They figure it'll take another 3 weeks for the interior fires to finish burning the deadfall. It's pretty hot in there. They'll start pulling out crews as soon as they're convinced that the perimeter is controlled which might be another week or two.

The fire crews did an outstanding job of protecting buildings. All that burned were some campground outhouses and foot bridges. One sad loss was a historic 4 holer outhouse. You could take the wife and 2 kids in there and have some quality family time.

This area is used by grazers and some livestock was lost. They got most of the stock out but 1 rancher missed some cattle and lost about 50 head. They're meeting now to discuss optional grazing lands. They figure it'll take 2 years before they can graze this area again.