By Dave Daley, Butte County Rancher & CCA Immediate Past President:

It is almost midnight. We have been pushing hard for 18-20 hours every day since the Bear Fire tore through our mountain cattle range on September 8th, and there is so much swirling in my head I can’t sleep anyway. The fire destroyed our cattle range, our cattle, and even worse our family legacy. Someone asked my daughter if I had lost our family home. She told them “No, that would be replaceable. This is not!” I would gladly sleep in my truck for the rest of my life to have our mountains back.

I am enveloped by overwhelming sadness and grief, and then anger. I’m angry at everyone, and no one. Grieving for things lost that will never be the same. I wake myself weeping almost soundlessly. And, it is hard to stop.

I cry for the forest, the trees and streams, and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition, you try not to wretch. You only pray death was swift. A fawn and small calf side by side as if hoping to protect one another. Worse, in searing memory, cows with their hooves, udder and even legs burned off who had to be euthanized. A doe laying in the ashes with three fawns, not all hers I bet. And you are glad they can stand and move, even with a limp, because you really cannot imagine any more death today. Euthanasia is not pleasant, but sometimes it’s the only option. But you don’t want more suffering. How many horrible choices have faced us in the past three days?

More at:

https://calcattlemen.org/2020/09/23...p;utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=legacy

No words...

No words...

For those of you who believe all Californians are only what you see in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Damn....

Heartbreaking. I'd read this article a few days ago on the Friends of Lake Madrone facebook page. Luckily, our family cabin survived the fire but many of our neighbor's homes burned to the ground.

I know the country he's describing. I've deer hunted up in the area. Rugged with steep canyons and not many roads. Not easy to fight a fire up there, especially when the winds kick up like they did. Damned shame.

Difficult and painful to read. No man or animal should have to experience a fire like this. memtb

Share it far and wide.

Just damn!

Sobering to say the least. Man that's terrible.

East of I 5 California is conservative. Too bad the metro areas control the government of the state. I often hear talk or Red States and Blue States, but the truth is that if a state has more people in urban areas, it will likely vote blue. If it has more folks in rural areas, it will vote Red.

Very sad situation for that rancher, and for everyone else who lost everything they'd worked hard for all their lives. Hard to imagine something like that happening. My prayers go out to them.

Patience.... Chit happens in fire ecosystems. It is hard on those there at the time, but long term means little. Succession in ecosystems means at any one time some are winning and some are losing.

The earth abides. Such incidents are heartbreaking when it happens to you and yours, but the grasses and fireweed will begin recovery with the first significant moisture within the year.(if that doesn't wash away the topsoil). The forest, of course, will take longer, but on the flip side, there will be some outstanding elk habitat (I almost said hunting- but this is CA) for several decades. If wolves, cats, bears don't eat them all.

I hope those folks can withstand the economic hit until Nature puts it right for them again.

Exactly the same situation on the other coast, in NY. A beautiful place with a spectacular outdoors and populated by salt of the earth people.....all under the thumb of that filthy city.

As a farmer and cattleman we learn to deal with losses incurred every day such as broken equipment, the death of cattle, and lost or destroyed crops. I can not fathom the loss of it all in one day. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those that have.

That would be heartbreaking.

I can feel his frustration and pain.

Cattlemen care for their stock much more than people realize.

Damn Fats,

I did not need to see that this morning.

Hard not to feel for the family and ranch workers, not to mention those animals.

Take care up there Geno. This fire season ain't over yet.

The fire here in 91 burned many, many cattle.

Horses, sheep...you name it.

A porcupine with his quills all burned off looks just like a beaver.

Sort of a not so fun fact.....

There was a nice chill in the air this morning, even though it has been cooler. I think it might have been humidity related, up to 67F and still 39% RH (some folks don't understand, that's relatively high for this time of day. ) There have been clouds the last few days, but no rain and more importantly NO LIGHTNING.

Thanks for the concern, it's not over yet, the wind blew 21 mph yesterday, 27 MPH high for the month so far, and 18MPH right now and building.

But, I think we can see the end of fire season coming. Hopefully.

It’s easy to talk about wild fires On the macro level as beneficial, and natural, and inevitable. And that’s all well and good, but on the micro level, at the individual, the family, the animal level, it’s an unimaginable horror.

My heart breaks.

I hope some of you folks read the linked article the gentleman wrote. It's very informative.



Interesting wording there "filled with lobbyists, consultants and regulators who wouldn’t know a sugar pine from a fir" and very true.



I tend to agree with the author except for a relatively minor thing. Mr Daley says they've failed miserably in the past 50 years............I personally say more like 100 years, and guess what folks, we've have a number of "right" leaning administrations in the last 50 years, and a lot of these megafires happen in states that aren't "California".


There's a lot more there folks, a really interesting perspective from the folks that live and work there.

That is sad.

That is sad.

I had a lot to say on this when I posted. Since I have no experience as a Farmer, Rancher or Forest/Wild lands management. Figured I just STFU and let you folks that live/lived this life have the stage.

For what its worth It appears the Trump administration is trying. Whatever that means.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/7317...king-to-overhaul-forest-management-rules

I hope he is well insured.

FatCity,

as a hunter and fisher, no doubt you've seen what's going on out there in the course of your lifetime. I'm pretty sure anyone of a certain age has seen what suppressing ALL fires has done to the landscape.

And I've mentioned more than once on this forum, seems like every fire season, that a big part of the issue is MONEY and who's going to pay for the changes necessary.

From your link, (my bold) :



Commercial logging will help, as it can provide some funding as long as BLM, USFS, or State Forests, get a fair price for the stumpage. But a big big big part is the understory and chaparral type brush providing fuels to get these fires going. No one wants to eat the cost of dealing with that. The agencies don't have the budgets to do it themselves, there's no commercial value in it, and as pointed out in Mr Daley's story, the ranchers and foresters can't set fires on the way out as was done in the past.

More roads might provide a bit of help, but that's not a panacea either. More roads work for fire suppression and that's apparently not what's needed.

Daley's story also noted something known in the west here for a good number of years, over twenty in just my experience. He mentioned streams and springs flowing again after the fire removed the plant life that was sucking them dry. I'm looking out my window at an army of junipers less than 10' tall marching into the sagebrush/grassland where I live. And I wonder how much more water would be available to our well during a drought year if BLM had the funding to remove them and restore this area to pre-juniper encroachment grassland? And if the spring up the hill would still be flowing? And maybe some water in the creek here in the valley. The little reservoir down the road is about dry.

So Fats, if you have something to say, say it friend. Last I checked this is a relatively open forum....... sort of.

My hunting area. Sad time.
Opening day for d-3 is tomorrow.......
Fuc kin sucks.

I have been saying it for years. It was only a matter of time.
Management has been nonexistent.
Just a sad time up here and I feel for those that lost loved ones, property etc......

My child hood friend had his parents cabin burn down. I spent many days there with him.
Very somber feeling.

Hunting was getting me excited last month and now I’m not even packed up, guns are collecting dust.

I may venture out tomorrow morning but I just don’t have the drive to now.👎🏻

Thanks Geno. Still for you and many others this is your wheelhouse.

1970's 9th grade science teacher Mr. Dereschuck, WWII Marine hero of Sugar Loaf Hill battle Okinawa, taught me how California's flora and fauna were born and evolved out of fire. As well as how our disruption of that process would lead to major problems in my lifetime.

Good luck fester. Won't be heading out till end of Oct.

Thanks Fat.👍🏻
Same to you.

We have a friend who lost a bunch of cattle the same way in range fire in central BC twenty-some years ago. It was a tough time for him. We grew up part of a logging family; in a time when Smokey the bear was a symbol of the western woods, to us. We grew up thinking that protecting the resource, for the benefit of the companies and the people who worked for them, was the best thing to do. It wasn't until much later that we came to be told differently and, even then, varying opinions were controversial. It is sad to see the legacy of our generation's misguided actions. It would have been easy to reduce the hazard we see today.
Even today, the creation of an agency like the CCC, where people who have been negatively impacted by the covid response could EARN money and work for the country, rather than just accepting free money to stay home, could do some good for the country and for the people. When young men were no longer being drafted to go to 'nam, they could have been drafted to help manage western forests. My thinking may be a little simplistic but it's mine! GD

Taken after the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise and Magalia.

very sad deal........

couldn't imagine it

Very sad. The plus several hundred thousand acre fires that came through West Texas years ago took a lot of cattle and the lives of a cowgirl and cowboy trying to save their cattle.

It moved fast through the tallgrass prairies and other fires hit the mountains around Alpine.

Obama refused Red voting Texas the use of military aircraft to drop water and fire retardant in the mountains.

May he rot in hell along with his proponents.

Obama refused the state disaster declaration requested by Rick Perry as well. No disaster funds.

Bet CA gets some this time.

It would take a biologist to really say how it will turn out, but the Bear Fire (actually the August Complex) is in geography and climate that may not recover in a hundred years. Forested green slopes enhance precipitation, actually gather it from the Pacific weather fronts that roll onshore in the winter, been that way for 500 years or more, going by growth rings. Once a catastrophic fire of this nature happens, first comes grass closely followed by brush. They do not suck the moisture out of the onshore weather fronts. Total rainfall goes down sharply, soil temperatures go up, killing conifer seedlings. The brush and grasses are even more prone to burn in an endless cycle of brush and fire and well below average precip. The big counties to the south of the August Complex are Mendocino and Lake, predictors of what will happen, they were well timbered in the 1920's and then the fire/brush cycle began, now they are hot dry brush covered mountains, good to neither man nor beast, waiting to explode about every ten years. The annual late fall arson of the Indians and cattlemen kept the forest, grasslands and streams healthy...but the Forest Service had a better idea. And now we pay for that idea. 471,000 acres as of Sept 10th, and still counting.

That is a big watershed

Watch out for floods downstream........

Good luck guys. My brother and I hunt in/around Sawmill Tom Creek in D-3. Don't know what were gonna do this year. Had a real nice developed camp right near Sawmill Flat, I'm sure it's toast. I guess they've re-opened parts of Plumas Nat'l Forest but all fires are banned.


https://www.fs.usda.gov/plumas/

Interesting pic Morewood.

Shows how that fire burned in a bunch of stuff with no commercial value, that no one wants to pay to keep thinned or burned off regularly.

Hope that deer made it through, interesting rack it has.

For the folks that don't know what a western forest looks like, before and after "treatment", I took some pics today while looking for a grouse to sluice. No grouse, but I passed through some active treatment and older areas on the way in.

Untreated, maybe not logged or thinned in maybe 60-80 years going by the size of the big trees. Notice the seedlings to the left of the big tree in the center, and the smaller trees all around. Ladder fuels :



A treated area (logged and the small brush removed or burnt off)




Here's what they have left to deal with. Not sure what their plans are. The company I used to work for could make lumber out of better than half the trees left in that pile. Maybe they''ll bring up a delimbing machine and salvage some of that. Maybe it's going to the chipper for pulp? Maybe it's just a burn pile for when the snow flies?



Now, like the cattleman that wrote that story says, all the blame is not on CA, the "left", or the Feds as one can see. This is Cali, on USFS land. But, I'm willing to bet hoops were jumped through by the employees to get that sale/treatment pushed through.

If we hadn't, as a society, come up with the Smokey Bear method of forestry so many years ago, our forests out here would look a lot like the treated area in the pic above. Those remaining trees will now most likely exhibit a growth spurt, be better able to tolerate drought and bug infestations, and be way more fire resistant than the untreated areas. But who's willing to pay for it?

Wow...........

In some spots I’ve seen over growth/ dead fall about 10’ tall.

I

Last hunting season, I entered the hunted the canyons it the Rim fire's boundary for the first time since it burned. (2014)
Amazing that some of the mountains still look like the face of the moon. Fire was so hot it scorched all the seeds and micronutrients out of the ground.
Fires that big and hot are caused by us humans. Not nature.
It was sad.

fester,

there's a lot of dead stuff and build up around where I was today, 6-8 miles up the hill from the treated areas.

This area was actually not too bad considering. I was trying to get a picture that showed the angle of the slope, I'd have picked a different spot if I was trying to get the deadwood laying there.



some dead stuff needs to be there to rot into the ground, provide food for fungus and insects necessary for forest health and such, but too much is just fuel for a hotter fire the next go round.

I'll probably stay close to home this year and head up Hwy 4 around Ebbets Pass maybe hit the Highlands lake area in D5 to some of my Dads old stomping grounds with his hunting buddies. Haven't been since the Late 80s.

Good pictorial Geno.

I will head up the hill. Probably hwy49