Fighting fire with fire - forest fire - includes related articles

American Forests, July-August, 1995 by Herbert E. McLean

That national forest has now logged two of the nation's most compelling examples of how prescribed burns can effectively thwart later wildfires. A similar dramatic event on the Boise occurred several years ago at Tiger Creek, where a crowning wildfire stopped dead in its tracks upon reaching an earlier prescribed burn (see "The Boise Quickstep," American Forests, January/February 1993).

* Wenatchee National Forest, Washington: Assistant fire-management officer Michelle Ellis reports that previous prescribed burns helped to protect a number of homes from last summer's devastating Tyee Creek incident, a lightning-caused blaze that burned 140,000 acres east of the Cascades.

* Daniel Boone National Forest, Kentucky: Fire managers this year activated their Incident Command team, normally used for fire suppression, to conduct a major prescribed-fire effort for defueling purposes. At press time the team had completed most of the targeted 8,000 acres, the largest such burn in the forest's history.

Grandstand of the Sierras

The examples are convincing. But when you contrast them to total acreages under forest management - perhaps a million or more acres on a given national forest - you realize there's a lot more progress to be made.

"At our current [prescribed burning] pace, I feel we're treating about one-tenth the acres that were burned in 1900 through the natural process," says Dave Bunnell, who coordinates the Forest Service's prescribed-fire program from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. I personally feel that figure might be low.

Still, there's hope. California's Sierra Nevada mountains are probably the nation's first large eco-region where fire is being encouraged to regain its traditional role - that is, burning regularly in low-intensity mode rather than in intense conflagrations that create ash-black eco-disasters.

Like a huge grandstand reaching skyward, the Sierras rise gradually eastward from the state's Central Valley - first as nut-brown grassy foothills, then as chaparral and manzanita brushlands in wild canyons, then as sprawling mixed-conifer forestlands of true nobility. Then John Muir's 500-mile-long "range of light" attains pinnacle and peak status on the "back row" of the grandstand, leaves forests and their fuels behind, then plummets to the Nevada desert below.

The southern and central parts of the range are a great place to experiment with prescribed fire, because predictable westerly winds from the Pacific will eventually lead most forest fires to solid, fireproof granite - your ultimate firebreak, with few towns or ranches in harm's way.

Probing this wonderland with an eye toward prescribed fire can stir the soul of a fire-conversant observer:

* On Sequoia National Forest at the southern end of the range, Bob Rogers reports modest beginnings - 200 to 500 acres of "management-ignited" fire per year, with sights set on 30,000 acres, and special emphasis on the Kern Canyon, one of a series of "chimneys" that efficiently channel air rising from the bone-dry foothills during fire season. A prescribed fire set early in the '80s significantly slowed the 15,000-acre Pierce fire in the canyon several years later, Rogers reports.