Don’t stop or shop, until you drop
A few years ago, I was in a helicopter over the Klamath Mountains during a fire assignment. The other guy with me, aside from the pilot, was a fire manager that viewed forests through the lens of trees being strictly an extractive commodity. He looked at the mosaic of recent burn scars across the mountainous landscape, and declared that it looked “terrible.” As I gazed out, I saw a patchwork of uneven-aged timber stands, interspersed with open meadows, reflecting the smaller areas where the crowns had been completely consumed. Many of the drainages retained their mature timber, often where a fire was backing at night, or under a smoke inversion (as happens often in steep terrain, eliminating the utility of expensive firefighting aircraft). I saw the landscape through the lens of fire ecology and fire regimes. It looked a lot like the Illilouette Valley in Yosemite National Park, where lightning-caused fires were often left to burn, demonstrating how past fires limit the spread of subsequent fires, a self-limiting effect. I also knew that in wilderness and roadless areas, no form of logging will ever occur. Logging serves only as a crude surrogate for the natural process of fire, taking the most fire-resistant forest component – the oldest, most merchantable trees – and leaving flammable slash and young plantations. Certainly, outside of protected areas, commercial logging continues to provide important revenue.
Logging timber within the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation provides over ninety percent of all discretionary income for the Tribe, that is revenue that is not earmarked for other purposes (e.g. roads, education, health care, etc.) At this moment, there are some 1200 wildland firefighters assigned to the Red Salmon Complex on grounds sacred to both the Hoopa and Karuk Indian Tribes. The area is remote, beautiful and sparsely inhabited by those descended from the original Hoopa, Karuk and Yurok people. The population is spread out in small communities along the Klamath, Salmon and Trinity Rivers. They and the eclectic blend of non-native inhabitants live in spectacular isolation. That isolation presents certain challenges, but if you stay there, it’s because it’s your ancestral land, or because you seek that isolation, along with the beauty and privacy it provides.
Much will be written about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and how it decimated under-served communities, like those where black, indigenous, and people of color are found. It’s no wonder that the Hoopa threw up roadblocks at the edge of their sovereign territory in a hard lock-down early in the pandemic. There was only one COVID case on the Hoopa Reservation back in April. In the last two weeks of July, they had a smaller fire that brought an incident management team into town, along with a bunch of firefighters from outside the Reservation. It was called the Milepost 21 Fire and it brought a few hundred firefighters into the Hoopa Valley. Suddenly, by August 4th there were six active COVID cases reported, and two days later the Hoopa Office of Emergency Services reported active cases at twenty-three. The Hoopa Tribal Chairmen has released that the COVID-19 cases were traced back to “a family trip outside the county,” though fears remain of non-residents bringing the virus to the Reservation. A flurry of firefighters going into local stores without face masks sparked terse unwelcoming handwritten signs springing up. Now it’s official policy endorsed by the incident management team and U.S. Forest Service. Don’t stop and shop.
Given the reprehensible treatment the Native people of the region experienced at the hands of the U.S. Forest Service throughout the 20th Century, it’s not surprising the big show of outsider Federal force is not entirely welcome. Poor tactics, including backfires that destroy old-growth heritage trees and excessive retardant that kills fish and degrades watersheds, have made locals wary. Now with the COVID crisis, the usual “Thank you, firefighters” sentiment is muted. Some businesses worry about the impact to much-needed economic activity. Like a firefighter unwilling to admit to illness that might take his or her entire module out of action, many local businesses are forced by economic insecurity to risk viral exposure for revenue.
Like foreign countries that don’t want Americans in their country because of the mishandling of the COVID epidemic, the Federal firefighting forces bring unwanted fire practices to these river canyons, as well as the virus. Ironically, the Federal response, always prone toward full suppression, is being supercharged by the COVID epidemic. At this time, crews are working mostly an indirect attack strategy, using the same sacred ridgelines and rock formations that serve as spiritual sites to the area’s indigenous peoples, to box the fire in tight. Concerns about the combined effect of smoke and COVID on local residents are a real concern, and the Red Cap Creek drainage has not burned since the 1930’s, ensuring generous smoke production. But how much retardant is being applied to bare rock? And how healthy is it to have hundreds of firefighters in spike camps all over pristine habitat? They’re eating cold food delivered by helicopter, or worse, MREs, dealing with accumulated trash, bear problems, lack of hygiene and sanitation, all while attempting to isolate in their “pods.” In fact, how well are “pods” working out for major league baseball? One USFS source reports that nine people on a twenty-person Federal firefighting tested positive for COVID coming off the Hog Fire. FUSEE has already reported on crew shortages with CalFire due to COVID outbreaks in Conservation Camps.
The Red Salmon Complex consists of the Red Fire and the Salmon Fire, both started by lightning as the Milepost 21 Fire was winding down on July 26th.
Sparse fuels burning on the Salmon Fire on July 28th (U.S. Forest Service)
Another view of the Salmon Fire cleaning up dead and down fuel from a 2009 fire. (U.S. Forest Service)
Closed canopy with heavier fuels on the Red Fire in the Red Cap Creek drainage showing largely good fire effects. (U.S. Forest Service)
The Salmon Fire, on the Ukonom District of the Six Rivers National Forest, is reburning inside a fire footprint from 2009. Firefighters will likely reopen many of the same control lines and tie into natural features that were used eleven years ago with success. In the Red Cap Creek drainage, the Red Fire is burning in old timber with lots of understory fuel inside the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area. Firefighters started by opening up old firelines on the same strategic ridgeline used in the Red Cap Fire of 1938, the Hog Fire of 1977, the Megram Fire of 1999, and the Butler Fire of 2013 (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Fire history around the Red Salmon Complex. The 1999 Megram FIre is in light green, while 2009 fires are in darker green. Trinity Alps Wilderness is in red. 1938 Red Cap Fire and 1977 Hog Fire not shown.
Oddly, a proposed project that attempted to proactively treat these strategic ridgelines has been stuck in acrimony and planning for nearly a decade. Only proposed on the Shasta-Trinity NF with no interest shown by the Six Rivers NF, the project proposes using prescribed fire to mimic the combination of natural and anthropogenic fire that helped limit fire extent before European settlement in the rugged Klamath Mountains.
In recent years, the Karuk and Yurok Tribes, in particular, have been at the forefront restoring traditional practices using fire for food security, climate adaptation, and to prevent catastrophic fires from impacting homes by burning. They have sponsored events like the Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges, coordinated in conjunction with the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network and sponsored by the Nature Conservancy. The Tribes and organizations like the Mid-Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC) have increased their local fire management capacity and have done more to promote prescribed burning locally than the resident Six Rivers National Forest. Pile burning is no surrogate for broadcast burning. With COVID the USFS in California ceased all prescribed fire projects, while the Karuk and MKWC conducted a burn this spring. One Karuk official quipped, “With the money spent on retardant alone in the Trinity Alps over the past decade, we could fund a Tribal Prescribed Fire Training Center into perpetuity.”
Back on the Red Fire, firefighters are working their way down sub-ridges toward the crux, pinching the fire off low in the Red Cap Creek drainage, attempting to keep the fire inside the wilderness boundary. The latest fire update states, “Permission has been given to use one blade wide dozer lines in the wilderness.” There is no mention of constructing dozer line through wilderness in the current approved Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) Decision signed by the District Ranger on August 1st. What are the values at risk warranting such an intrusion into the wilderness? Aside from smoke impacts, which are simply an annual occurrence in this country, and overblown concerns about timber values, there is no reason not to let the Red Fire fill in a larger piece of the Klamath Mountain fire mosaic. Fire effects have been good with mostly flanking and backing fire, accompanied by isolated torching. Current conditions are near average, with spring rains and a recent cooling trend, as shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2 Energy Release Component (ERC) at average line (grey) for the Klamath Mountains with a month and a half, before fall weather moderate conditions. ERC is a measure of seasonal drought.
All that being said, we continue to defer risk to future generations, suppressing fire when we can, endangering firefighters and the community, alike, when other courses of action are available. Congratulations to contemporary fire managers for using the landscape features in much the same way as Indigenous Peoples did for fire control, and not trying direct attack. But it remains to be seen if packing the backcountry with firefighters in their “pods,” using the latest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) firing platform, supported by bulldozers in a Wilderness Area, is the best option. Perhaps exercising patience and letting the infamous Klamath River marine layer oscillation and smoke inversions do what they’ve always done over time time – put the fire out – might be more appropriate in the time of COVID. Why not use the secondary or contingency lines identified in today’s planning map, rather than punching dozer line through the wilderness along Horse Trail and Packsaddle Ridges?
Proposed dozer line through the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area. August 8th Planning Map (U.S. Forest Service)
More firefighters are on order and will be coming into this remote, naturally isolated area. Let’s hope COVID doesn’t get a foothold in the new fire camp slated to be placed in Orleans, or one of the spike camps. FUSEE has already shown that resource objectives can coexist with protection objectives, as was the case on the Bighorn Fire outside of Tucson earlier this year. While many want to hear that we are returning to the disastrous “10:00 AM Policy” that attempted to exclude all fire from fire-dependent ecosystems, we are never going back. Like many other things in American society, there is no going back to the way things were before the pandemic, if and when the COVID pandemic subsides. Fire in the Trinity Alps is not “going away” like Trump’s predictions on COVID. We are going to have to learn to live with it, as the Karuk, Yurok and Hoopa have for untold generations.
August 11 Update: The Red fire has crossed Red Cap Creek and run up to Packsaddle RIdge. A new WFDSS planning document was approved late last night, but it still does not discuss the proposed opening of the dozer line through wilderness used in the 1999 Megram Fire. It’s unclear if this line in the sand is to protect timber values on the Hoopa Reservation, or simply to prevent the necessity of going into unified command with the Hoopa Tribe. The estimated final cost for this event is now set at $20 to $90 million tax dollars. Imagine the fuel reduction and prescribed burning that could occur around the homes threatened on the lower slopes with that kind of money! Planning documents say that “COVID [has had]a significant impact on current strategy.” It seems only the distribution of firefighters has changed, with many more in spike camps, rather than in a base camp. The usual reliance on brute overwhelming force, as close to the edge of the fire as possible with millions of gallons of retardant used, remains the go-to strategy, as always.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Jessica Conrad, FUSEE Board Member, for clarification on the source of the Hoopa COVID cluster of cases.
