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.

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.

Oh, I wonder who managed the forests before there was "man"?

Seems they've been around a few years and "managed" to survive until we got here?

I forgot about that in my little rant.

So





The "don't burn in my backyard, or up the hill from me " folks have a lot of input in local government. And health issues associated with smoke too.

Cutting uneconomical tracts? Now, wouldn't that mean someone has to pay to have it done or lose.............money......... doing it?

That seems to be something someone in another post was mentioning too...................could we be thinking along the same lines at times?

It always seems to come back to money.

Developing forest land is different in each state. LCDC as much as it sucks, stops farm land and forest land, from falling victim to the scenario you described!
Land use development areas were set, good or bad during the 70's in Oregon!

Seems to work "mostly"

Until one can get a friend on whatever zoning/land use commission one needs to sway.

But without zoning commissions of some sort, most regular folks would be screwed at some time or another.

Agreed, but the swaying has to go through local and state boards. Therefore making it available, to the rich and large corporations, that have the $. Just like the rest of the world!

I've been the range specialist, or more properly "Range Conservationist." I was effectively a paralegal, and administrative judges made the resource decisions. Unfortunately it always seemed that the common sense thing to do was the first possibility discarded for one special interest or another.



Sadly, all true. People who "feel" this way or that are given voice through funding, lawyers get rich, and natural resources suffer.



I'm just a lowly Range Management major who only got to ply the "trade" for a brief time, but my observations tell me that it's all much like a dammed up river. A certain amount of water has to be allowed to flow. You can close the gates and impound ALL the water for a while, but all that water is going to go downstream eventually and nothing is going to stop it. It's my opinion that excessive fire suppression is proving to be a very bad thing.

Yep. I'm in agreement with that excessive fire suppression statement as another poster or three have mentioned.

It's not all that hard to find pics from the old days, before the "put them all out" programs started and see what the landscape mosaic looked like.

Not a range guy, I was on the aquatic end of things and experienced similar circumstances to yours. Not only the "common sense" thing being discarded, but actual proof of damaging methods and processes being left in place for reasons the "higher ups" know. That had a good deal to do with me leaving a favorite job and taking a job with less security which actually led to a way lower grade job with much more OT to make up for the salary shortfall.............and I got 4 months off a year!

Another fire was discovered late afternoon yesterday in the Trinity Alps wilderness about 18 miles south of me, well it really took off this afternoon, as they will, neighbors scanner indicates it is jumping retardant wet lines dropped throughout today. It's only about 4 miles inside the wilderness boundary, several hand crews are walking in to help the crews already there..but it may be too little too late...we'll see. I sure wish they would issue a temporary rule allowing the hand crews to use chainsaws, maybe even let a Chinook or Sikorsky Sky Crane fly in a little dozer. But common sense has no place in this...look how the Feds fought the guy who converted the 747 for retardant drops. At least CalFire had the sense to sign him up...the Feds tried to hire him two weeks ago, but he was locked in the Calif contract. I'll bet he was grinning when the Feds called him.

Something not brought up here which is important. North American forests have been intensely managed by humans since the Indians crossed the land bridge. Someone mentioned how the Miwok would torch at the end of hunting season. Yep, lots of tribes did that. They'd torch when migrating out of an area, partly for feed but also to deny the area to their enemies until later on. Some tribes would torch other tribes on raids, that was rare but did happen. Also, they'd torch in contested areas to break ambush cover.
They also recognized the effect of fire on food crops they desired, on hunting visibility, etc etc etc. In the West, this held sway until about 1800, when Lewis and Clark came along and it so happens, smallpox had come the other way from British traders. That killed a huge percentage of northwestern and coastal Indians, some say up to 90 percent. So -- THAT vacated what until that point was a hugely human-managed, human-artifact ecosystem. Everywhere you look there would be vegetative communities burnt, burnt and burnt again, and some, not burnt by humans because it wasn't worth the results. THOSE are places where long duration thick forests grew with long-cycle fire events.
But the takeaway is that North America's ecosystems were massively managed through induced, set fires, just about any place it made sense to Indians.
What happened in the West is, the 50 year gap after the Indian die offs and before substantial white settlement left an attractive environment (to humans, made by humans) that was mistakenly thought of as pristine.
Okay -- you notice it's been said it's about 50 years since forest management has been stupid, and it has taken that long for things to really turn into he//? Yay, now you understand the latency of the effects of induced fire, in that the landscape still showed the results of induced Indian fire when the white eyes finally built railroads and were able to settle the regions away from navigable water!!
But the situation remains a lot the same. As I said, the Indians burnt where it made sense, and it made sense in a lot of places. But they didn't burn (actually, MANAGE) where there was no payoff for them. Modern society has the same issue today. Where does it make sense to manage? What's the payoff? What is a rational approach?
Some here are saying, burn burn burn. No, we can't do that. Too much fuel. Too little time. But guess what? Just about every Indian reservation, where I've talked to a good number of tribal foresters, does everything. They burn. Too thick to burn? Log first, then burn. Burn first, then salvage log (messier, usually it's because of an unplanned "natural" fire). Where it pays to grow trees to log, they grow trees to log. But they also plan how to defend the places they don't want to lose by a bad burn.
People need to realize the landscapes we have here are human artifacts and have been for 10,000 years, the only difference is the methods used and the motives driving those methods.

Logging swaths of forest helps prevent crown fire jumping.
But like wind farms off Martha's Vinyard (where zero and the Kennedy's hang out) its not as pretty to look at..

Populations will be managed either by man or by nature. Makes no difference if the population is plant or animal. Man was given dominion over his environment so he could manage it, utilize its resources and sustain it. This discussion has been about forests. Man has developed many tools to manage forests which include logging, re-planting, insect control, controlled burns, thinning and other tools some of you can probably name. Nature manages by extremes and its tools are severe including disease, starvation, fire, erosion and other forms of devastation. Decades ago the powers to be decided to let nature take it's course by curtailing logging and creating wilderness areas among other things. Now we are seeing the results of manging by emotion rather than common sense.

Much of the west is ecologically designed to burn. Just like the Yellowstone fire, we suppress that and the under-load becomes enormous. A fire that under normal conditions might ground burn and not kill trees now gets into the tops and burns there.

100% correct.

Well said Mtn10mm.

I can look to my own property to see where 100 years of fire suppression has changed the forest. We started doing some thinning recently of Ponderosa pine and Grand Fir. Ponderosa in some parts of out property had over 1200 trees per acre. Way too many and they would burn like crazy, if they ever caught fire. 150-200 P-pines per acre is more like it for our area.

Right now, Ponderosa isn't worth logging for the bigger marketable-sized timber. $100 per 1000 for P-pine and its going to cost you about $200 to have a logger come in and cut/haul the marketable sized trees to the mill. So while we wait for the price to get better, we are going to thin the dog-hair thick stuff, open things up a bit and get some spacing where trees can actually grow. If we were to ever have a fire some spacing might save our bigger trees. Ponderosa have evolved to handled low burning grass fires.

I was cutting some thickets of Grand Fir last year and 50 year-old trees were 4-5" in diameter. The same age tree in an opened/thinned area was 18" in diameter.

Keep in mind this is private ground where access is very good. On National Forest ground, forest work could be almost impossible to do and financially not worth it.

Just as it is with wild game management, invasive species management, range management, any any other type of natural resource... Emotions and politics should have NO place in them.

Giving "everyone a voice", and falling slave to lawsuits has messed things up to the point we are today.

It's sickening actually.

I haven’t read through all of the replies but typically where the problem comes in is with groups that think that they’re “environmentalists” the truth is they’re almost always metropolitan types the same type that won’t eat meat because they love wildlife but have zero knowledge about wildlife or the outdoors other than what they think they know. They’ll sue frivolous or not to tie up the state and federal government from selling timber to private logging companies.

Here in Michigan we have a lot of state forest that is past prime for most wildlife and a healthy balanced forest but tied up in court battles the federal land is just about always worse.

They typically hate clear cutting. The things is back before white man settled America fires would rage and burn down huge chunks of forest which then opens it to sunlight and allows new growth forest. New growth forest supports FAR more biodiversity as thick brush and edge habitat creating shelter, low browse food, better snow and wind block ect. Eventually the new growth ages burns and regenerates as the life cycle of a balanced healthy forest. Since we can’t let forest fires just burn and wipe out towns. So absent clear cutting we’re left with old forest great for squirrels and a handful of critters but poor habitat for most and a fire magnet. Go try and burn down a young popular or alder stand (first succession) forest its to green to burn well unless caught in an already raging inferno. Compare that to an old late succession oak or pine stand full of dead trees, Partially dead trees and logs, that will burn like tinder.

I can’t understand there thinking. Somehow they don’t realize that clear cutting trees is a sustainable resource and that new ones grow back. It generates income, promotes biodiversity, replicates the natural environment, and reduces fires.

It really doesn't matter to me how they go it up north or out west. In middle Georgia I use fire as a management tool, it's cheap, easy and you can pick the time and place. I burn our place on a 3 year rotation schedule because I manage for wildlife first, cattle second and timber last. The forest service issues burn permits when the wind and humidity won't usually cause problems, but they don't want you to burn at night and that's the best time if you have a lot of fuel and don't want to damage your trees. Most timber companies around here don't burn because they plant fast growing pine trees instead of fire, bug and drought resistant pine trees. It won't be long before we'll have another major fire in south Georgia.

I have been a Forester for north of 50 years, and have worked in the timber/sawmill industry throughout North America. Our federal forests cannot be made fire proof, but can be managed economically over large landscapes to mitigate damaging fire behavior. However, it is not going to happen. Oh-as a result of the recent fires we might play around the edges on some federal lands, but the intensive forest management that was envisioned by Teddy and Gifford will likely not happen in our lifetime. When the Congress eliminates the “Equal Access to Justice Act”and takes the paydays away from the environmental litigants, you’ll know that once again we are becoming serious about forest management on our federal lands. CP.

Biomass is the only real way to get rid of small logs. Large timberlands, near home are decking the small logs, and chipping them. Opening the ground to sun light, and growing bitterbrush, and other browse!

X2 from a forester in the Northeast. You hit the nail on the head.

I believe you've hit the nail on the head, RR
And have agreed for quite some time !

The forest can manage itself, it’s just a little relentless in its execution.


Does global warming come from forest fires or vice versa?

Climate alarmists never seem to include sun spots in their calculation.

That's because they only occur at night.

True this^^^
I'm no forester, but I have an extensive collection of books and photos showing this county from 1890's up thru the railroad logging days of the 1930's and mining photos. Timber was very big, very sparse with very little understory. If a dummy like me can see this, why can't our policy makers figure it out?
By the way, I am under an evac warning right now..unsure whether to fire up the D-7 and make a couple more laps around the house...or just load up the guns and valuables, hook up the travel trailer and get ready to go.

Run a couple more with the D7. If you have some trees, push them over away from the house. The ones you don't like first.

Yeah, if you have the time flintlocke, it makes sense to clear some more.

Just saw pics of my brother's friend's place down in that Valley Fire I posted about 2 weeks or so ago. My bro was out there yesterday for a visit. Said 39 of the guy's 40 acres are "toast", guy lost some old cars, 3 tractors, outbuildings, etc. House and the acre around it was saved because it was basically bare dirt there. Brother said some of the guy's cars that were parked on granite boulders or on patches of bare decomposed granite made it through with some damage but not burnt up. Anything that had some oak leaves and duff nearby is gone. Sad to say, as the guy had goats, cleared brush, and limbed up the oaks around the place. Seems a lot of the oaks survived, as they are "designed" to do when there's not a lot of brush around them.

Hope your evac order gets cancelled and that we get some rain sometime within September. Tis not a good fire season for sure.