Fire as the Essential Tool: Remembering to Celebrate Success

Asking a welder to do without heat or power would be unthinkable, despite the fact that a small percentage of welding operations cause destructive fires. This is, however, precisely what a growing number of timber industry lackeys and out-of-touch environmentalists would propose for wildland firefighters: take the drip torch from their hands.  “Too dangerous, too scary,” we are told by those with little or no practical prescribed fire experience, hooked only on their outrage-inducing social media news feed.  The use of fire is one of the quintessential human tools that allowed early humans to shape their environment, cook their food, and some speculate this allowed for smaller jaws, a larger brain, and time in the evening around the hearth fire to develop language and art.   

Fast forward to today, where the irony lies in there being “too much combustion” in the bellies of our machines and “not enough open burning”, according to fire historian Stephen Pyne.  As a society, we are increasingly traumatized from impacts of the climate catastrophe, but we seek to place blame rather than celebrate and build on success.  The artificial intelligence powering the information we see promotes topics and stories that fill us with outrage, and to what end?  Is it to motivate us to enact meaningful change? No, it’s done merely to encourage engagement with the platform…to keep your eyeballs on the screen rife with advertisements.  We are so used to this cycle of outrage that the early stories coming from Yosemite’s Washburn Fire began to fit a pattern: another early beginning to California’s fire season and an expanding drought, another outrage. Early criticism toward the park centered on whether the suppression response was sufficiently robust. Between the escaped prescribed burns in New Mexico and conspiracy theories about government not sufficiently “fighting” Forest fires, public response was poised to be negative, then something different happened. The National Park Service had been doing the right thing all along - burning as much as possible, relying on best science risk analysis. But some still question the efficacy of prescribed fire.

The water year got off to a promising start with heavy October rains followed by December storms that built an early season snowpack 160 percent of average across the Sierras by the end of 2021. Unfortunately, as noted by Governor Newsom in his March 28 drought emergency executive order, the new year began with “the driest January and February in recorded history for the watersheds that provide much of California’s water supply.” As a result, the heavy dead and down fuel loading in Yosemite’s dry, Ponderosa pine dominant mixed conifer was reaching record-breaking dryness by the first of July.  When the human-caused Washburn Fire was discovered near the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias on July 7th the pump was primed for the usual climate outrage news coverage. “Giant Sequoias Threatened by Fire,” scream the headlines.  Working our passion for charismatic megaflora as well as megafauna (think polar bears) we are triggered yet again, but rather than outrage and despair, perhaps we should engage a different neural pathway, that of hope and encouragement.  We are told that positive reinforcement yields far better outcomes in changing behavior that negative punishment.  Sadly, government failure, as in the case of this spring’s escaped prescribed fires in New Mexico, is big news, while government success of any kind is relegated to the back pages. No outrage, no engagement.  More’s the pity, since there is plenty to celebrate in the Washburn Fire.

In the 1960’s and 70’s Dr. Harry Biswell did groundbreaking research in Yosemite with a young graduate student, Jan van Wagtendonk, who would later become Yosemite’s Fire Ecologist.  Jan recently passed away, and his ecologist friend, Dave Parsons, gave this on-air tribute. All of us who worked in Yosemite with Jan were lucky to have had the opportunity to discuss the ecology of fire in the High Sierra with him. Pine forests in dry climates absolutely must have fire to reduce the buildup of fuels that might otherwise decompose in a wetter environment, and giant sequoia’s need not just any fire to reproduce, but a fire hot enough to heat the serotinous cones high above in the canopy, so seeds are released from the cones.  There is no doubt that some of the recent Sierra Nevada megafires (mega in size only in the context of recent history during the failed experiment of fire exclusion) have caused the death of some giant sequoias, but it was a prescribed burn thought to have been too hot in 1977 that ultimately showed the giant sequoia’s resiliency toward fire.  Before the Redwood Canyon Prescribed Fire, giant sequoia regeneration was very rare and poorly understood.  This hot fire produced a beautiful carpet of young giant sequoia seedlings, never before seen.  So while we use the increasingly destructive wildfires to push awareness of a climate out of balance, we should be careful not to stoke our hundred-year war on fire to serve as a proxy for the justifiable war against big oil.  While some large giant sequoias will doubtless be killed, especially in groves that have seen no thinning and no prescribed burning, researchers are likely going to be surprised at the sizable cohort of new sequoias that will result from the death of their elders.

Looking at the Washburn Fire, there have been dozens of iterations of prescribed burning, thinning, and pile burning around the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias and the nearby community of Wawona.  In addition, the park has since the 1970’s had a program of allowing some lightning-caused fires to burn.  Both the human community of homes and infrastructure that comprise Wawona and the natural community of giant sequoias have benefited from a single program of work – return fire to the extent possible to fire-dependent and fire-adapted landscapes.  Even the nine-hole Wawona Golf Course serves as part of a network of prescribed burn units, wildfire footprints, roads, trails and other natural barriers that have protected the Mariposa Grove and Wawona from the devastation meted out by recent wildfires.

Map showing the new Oak Fire well outside of Yosemite threatening far more homes and infrastrcuture then the Washburn Fire, but being constrained to the east by the Ferguson Fire. The last active flank on the Washburn Fire was heading toward the Sierra Crest to the east, threatening nothing.

Wawona has been threatened by three large wildfires since 2017 - the Railroad Fire to the south that just grazed the gateway community of Oakhurst, the Ferguson Fire of 2018 that killed two firefighters (a CalFire dozer operator and a National Park Service Hotshot), and the Creek Fire which stands currently as the fifth largest wildfire in contemporary California history. Surprisingly nobody was killed on the Creek Fire, but here at the Spotfire Blog we blogged about the frenzied evacuation of over 200 people by National Guard helicopter from where they were trapped in America’s Black Tuesday.

In the image above you can see why Yosemite is such a favorable place to work with fire near the Sierra Crest where forest is interspersed with large expanses of non-flammable granite. Matters are made more difficult in the mid-elevation mixed conifer where fuels are more continuous, especially if it hasn’t burned in a long time. The five-year-old South Fork wildfire footprint is holding the northern advance of the Washburn Fire. A few spot fires have been generated north of the South Fork of the Merced River, but none have amounted to much and were easily extinguished in the light fuels. Nature will attempt to reestablish a mosaic of interlocking wildfires on the landscape as Dr. Ingalsbee & I discussed last year on Jefferson Public Radio’s The Jefferson Exchange. We saw that that play out on the Washburn Fire, where the past decision to not fully suppress a wildfire entirely (South Fork 2017) provided firefighters today a safe, easy barrier to a larger or potentially more destructive subsequent fire. With the ongoing nearby Oak Fire, firefighters are using the 2018 Ferguson Fire scar as a barrier to check the fire’s forward progression. Let’s take a closer look to see how prescribed burning also helped firefighters battling Yosemite’s Washburn Fire.

The Washburn Fire is located adjacent to both the community of Wawona to the WNW and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the south.

Pink and blue hues are mechanical fuel treatments that could range from a simple thinning from below of ladder fuels and small diameter regeneration, as in around the community of Wawona, to a full blown commercial timber sale, as on the Sierra National Forest south of the Washburn Fire. More orange hues represent prescribed fire alone as shown in the Mariposa Grove and around the community of Wawona.

Looking more closely at fuel treatments since the year 2000 in the south part of Yosemite, it is clear that the core of the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias has been more than just saved from the “ravages” of wildfire. The grove itself, having been burned multiple times, was used as an anchor point by firefighters as they began the job of encircling the Washburn Fire. Roadside thinning and pile burning allowed the Washburn Fire to back uneventfully down to the Wawona Road where it descends from the South Entrance to the Golf Course, and the fire’s escape below the Wawona Road was made less likely by prescribed burning done there. The only remaining active portion of the Washburn Fire is now the east flank where the fire is being herded into the high country. Similar benefits were realized during the 2018 Ferguson Fire, when Wawona was threatened from the west. Prescribed burns and fuel treatments like the roadside thinning along the Wawona Road were used to halt the Ferguson Fire’s spread, protecting homes and property in both Wawona and Yosemite West. The same themes played out in the 2011 Rim Fire when prescribed burning and roadside thinning protected facilities around Crane Flat and the Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias.

Despite fire having done so much obvious good in Yosemite, the counter-narrative that all fire is bad and must be suppressed still reigns supreme. There is a mistaken belief that crews, engines, air tankers and the like should never be tied up on a fire that is being “allowed” to burn freely. The thinking goes that these firefighters might be needed elsewhere in the state where lives and property are threatened right now, and that allowing a fire to burn, no matter the future benefit to community protection, is preventing firefighters from their manifest destiny as “heroes” and “saviors.” Sadly, being overly accustomed to accolades and praise, firefighters, themselves often find themselves in agreement. Using fire proactively may provoke a public unhappy over smoke, and if there is no incentive to use fire as a tool, many wildland firefighters, exhausted from extended seasons and increasing fire behavior, simply say why bother? No hazard pay, less overtime, more physical exertion - they all contribute to the suppression default. There is rarely criticism of a fire excluded. In this case, with the recent outbreak of the Oak Fire that threatened many structures in the Triangle Road area, the availability of resources to be quickly reassigned from the Washburn Fire to the Oak Fire was helpful. Once the crews on the Washburn Fire finished anchoring to the Mariposa Grove burning and used the South Fork Fire footprint from 2017 to help flank the fire, it was heading into the high country threatening nothing. Nonetheless, crews on the Washburn Fire successfully held the fire’s eastward spread at Iron Creek, where thousands of gallons of fire retardant were dropped adjacent to this waterway and the adjacent South Fork of the Merced, both designated as Aerial Fire Retardant Hydrographic Avoidance Areas in the 2011 Record of Decision for the Nationwide Aerial Application of Fire Retardant on National Forest System Land EIS.

A free-burning fire doing good on the land remains an anathema to suppression-dominated organizations like CalFire and the U.S. Forest Service. For them, despite the proven benefit to both human and natural communities, a greater existential threat comes from the mounting conspiracy theory making the rounds these days that the Federal government doesn’t fight wildfires anymore. To a growing number of undiscerning consumers of internet content, it isn’t climate change that is responsible for the increasing ferocity of wildfires—it’s the government intentionally trying to run rural residents off the land, and only wholesale commercial logging is the answer to the wildfire dilemma. Or for a more creative flourish there is the space-based Jewish laser theory of wildfire propagation.

Randy Moore, the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, is running scared by these fanatics, many of whom are retired foresters and firefighters from the Agency’s go-go years of wholesale liquidation logging of old-growth trees. Ignorantly attributing causality to their efforts during a period of relative wildfire calm (caused more by the last cool climate period of the 1950s to late 1980s than by logging), groups like the National Wildfire Institute are attempting to take the driptorch out of the hands of firefighters by demanding that all wildfires be suppressed with no indirect line construction and no large-scale burnouts, returning us to the failed “10 am policy.”

On the other side of the spectrum, small but very vocal number of environmentalists are doing the legwork of arch-conservative Grover Norquist to “reduce it [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Some now conflate land management agencies’ efforts to increase prescribed burning with efforts to engage in commercial timber extraction. Coming from decades of institutionalized confrontation over logging and a deep mistrust of land management agencies’ willingness or competence to do the right thing for people and the land, efforts to forestall prescribed burning only serve libertarian goals to make government seem ineffective, justifying subsequent efforts at privatization and market exploitation (think timber companies earning carbon credits for planting tree farms that ultimately increase wildfire danger). It can be both true that old-growth trees left in place are the best way to sequester carbon, and that some large “merchantable” trees that grew because of fire exclusion and are now creating ladder fuels up into the canopies of giant sequoias and should be cut for the sole purpose of protecting giant Sequoia groves. This is a classic tradeoff, but given a choice, a giant sequoia stores more carbon, is more fire-resilient, and holds more cultural value to people than a large white fir underneath a sequoia’s shade.

It’s not like efforts to increase the pace and scale of prescribed burning are something new under the sun. The whole point of the changes in Federal wildland fire policy in the late 90’s was all about doing that. And what happened? Prescribed fire acres in Yosemite peaked in the late 90’s in terms of number of prescribed fires and acres burned annually, despite a forward looking Fire Management Plan EIS from 2004 that directed the park to burn 20,000 acres annually through a combination of wildfire and prescribed fire acres. While wildfires managed over the long term have continued to contribute to this target, the lack of incentives and the increasing fatigue of firefighters from extended seasons fighting increasingly stubborn blazes has taken its toll on prescribed fire accomplishments. The 2004 EIS had a prescribed fire schedule that, if adhered to, would have treated the area now burned by the Washburn Fire back in 2006. During my tenure at Yosemite, as we steadily fell behind in our prescribed fire targets, I revised the multi-year fuel treatment schedule in 2008, pushing the same burn unit along the park’s southern boundary out to 2013-14. Nearly a decade later, with dead and down fuel loads reaching and exceeding a hundred tons per acre, only now is the unit being burned in a wildfire - completing another inevitable piece in the puzzle, though not through intention, but rather reaction.

Where is the outrage for this shortfall in planned burning? Believe me, for a USFS employee, not reaching a timber harvest target will always draw more attention from management than not meeting a prescribed fire target. Critics would argue that one can’t burn and meet live tree retention objectives with that kind of fuel loading. We can and we did do that kind of burning in Yosemite. It takes patience and a willingness to face blistering criticism leveled by those inconvenienced by smoke or believing simplistically that a tree burned is a tree wasted. As always, it is not a matter of if, but when, and the climate emergency is starting to inexorably close the burn window, as the Forest Service learned in New Mexico this spring. The lesson should not be to take away the torch, further alienating humanity from a crucial natural process, but to redouble our efforts to reintroduce fire, live and work with fire, and harden our homes and communities for the fires to come.