Doing What (Be)Comes Natural: Cut, Pile, Burn
On some snowy February days, I drove from my cabin, crossed the Rio Grande Valley north of Santa Fe, and joined other firefighters at sunrise in an icy, snowy place in the Jemez Mountains. I’m used to working on fires in the spring, summer or fall, but here we were with layers of warm gear under our fireproof clothing, blowing into our hands and standing in the sun when it finally came up. Then we set out to burn piles of slash on a snowy slope, deep in the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
Why would we light fires in the snow?
When everyone had arrived, we drove up Sulfur Canyon, sliding in the packed snow. We went for miles until we came into an open meadow. The woods had piles of slash stacked all around. Finally, we got to a little pass overlooking Valle San Antonio where we got out, got our supplies and began hiking into the shadows of winter along abandoned logging roads. At last we stopped, looked up a steep slope populated with more piles of stacked slash and made a plan.
We would spread out on the east end of the slope, walk across, and light the piles with our drip torches. We would stagger ourselves, so the first workers didn’t cover the later workers with smoke. Off we went and for the next 6 hours we did just that.
Knee deep in snow, I worked from pile to pile, tripping on hidden rocks under the snow or slipping on logs similarly hidden. A big cloud of smoke rose in the cold winter day, arching to the south. I reminded myself it is far less smoke than an out-of-control wildfire would produce on this land in the height of summer. And fire smoke has been present in our region for hundreds of thousands of years.
Getting it Right
Like most of the Southwest, the western Jemez Mountains has changed as people have made unfortunate land management decisions over many decades. The US Forest Service and others didn’t mean to make poor decisions, they were doing the best they could under current thinking. And financial interests led people to do things like log big trees and suppress fires that they thought could ruin trees for logging. People wanted to make money by sending cattle and sheep into the woods to fatten up for market. But logging and livestock grazing had profound negative effects on forest health over the long run.
When I was out in the snowy woods with my firefighter friends, we were in an area where the National Park Service had hired a contractor to come in and cut out tens of thousands of small trees in the understory of a forest of Douglas fir, spruce, white pine and white fir. The cut smaller trees had been stacked up in tipi-shaped piles all over in the sloping forest about four meters apart. I had a drip torch in my hand, and I would walk through knee-deep snow from one pile to the next lighting them on fire. The piles would burn quickly because, despite the snow, they were dry. My fellow lighters were doing the same and by the end of the day we had burned hundreds of piles of thinning slash.
Land managers burn piles in the winter snow so the fire won’t spread between the piles. If it did, the whole area would heat up to a point where many of the remaining trees could be killed. The snow limits the temperature of the burn area.
On the edge of our “burn unit” I came to the place where the forest thinning had stopped. I could look into this un-thinned forest, but the forest was so thick that it was difficult to walk through much less see through. This is how nature had adjusted to compensate for logging that happened over this whole area about 30 years earlier. After the logging, people had prevented any natural fires that might have burned through and killed many of the smaller trees, thinning the woods naturally. The forest had gotten thick.
The NPS has treated thousands of acres in the Valles Caldera with this thinning and pile burning. The US Forest Service has treated large areas of their land outside of the Valles Caldera the same way with funds provided by Congress.
At the end of the day, I could look back on the forest we had pile-burned and it was an open forest of middle aged trees. Plenty of sawn wood lay on the forest floor still, some still smoldering. Later the NPS would come and burn the forest floor so it would be open to grass and wildflowers. Since the Caldera is protected from cattle grazing, the land will flourish as a diverse plant and animal community. Studies by Park Service biologists have found that mountain lions hunt in thinned areas just as they do un-thinned areas.
While I was trudging through the snow burning the piles, I thought about how heavy handed this thinning and burning seems. On the surface it looks like an extreme pressure on the forest. Lots of trees were killed by chainsaws then the forest was subjected to intense heat from burning. Yet over the next decades the forest will be much healthier because of this work. As the climate warms and dries, the remaining trees will have a much better chance of surviving.
Controversy
In fact, many people object to this work. They think the forest should be left “natural.” But what is a natural forest? People have done many things to severely alter these forests as mentioned above. Yes, the forest is compensating for those insults naturally. The problem is, if we leave it alone, thick forests likely will host a high severity forest fire at some point in the future because of the thickets of young trees that will carry fire into the tops of the bigger trees.
The natural state of these forests, before logging, grazing and fire suppression, was a mosaic of tree ages where frequent low intensity lightning fires recycled dead debris on the floor and killed many young trees. That is the natural state of these forests. If we don’t thin and burn the distorted forests of today, the likely outcome will be no forest at all after a high severity fire. If you don’t believe this, then visit the Cochiti Canyon area south of Bandelier or the east side of the Valle Grande where mid altitude mixed conifer forests were reduced to brush and grass by the Las Conchas fire.
Looking Ahead
The Valles Caldera has hundreds of acres of forests with piles ready to burn. The managers have more acres that need to be thinned then burned. Much of the public lands of the West are in the same situation, needing tens of millions of dollars’ worth of “fuel treatments” as climate change makes the probability of high-severity, forest-killing fire more likely. Congress probably won’t ever allocate the funding for this work at a relevant level and big fires will beat the crews to the forests in many places.
We need to be clear that not all forests in the West need the treatment that the forests in the Jemez Mountains and other Southwest forests need. Similar treatments work in many Sierra Nevada forests but northern Rocky Mountain forests have different fire ecology and need to be treated differently if at all. Coastal forests also differ substantially and need different or no fire treatments.
The Long Run
I remember walking through “wilderness” forests in the Jemez Mountains when I was very young. I loved the illusion of wilderness, when I was ignorant of the ecological issues I raise here. Today, sadly, when we hike in the woods of the Valles Caldera, a National Preserve, we often will encounter saw cuts from past logging or recent thinning. There is nothing “wilderness” about saw cuts everywhere. But I understand that it took decades to get the forest into the decadent condition that led to the thinning and burning, and it will take decades for it to readjust to the new condition when lightning fires can return without human interference and the saw cuts will eventually burn up and rot away.
People owe the forests and wildlife restoration. We owe the natural world the best of our knowledge to restore the land to a resilient state that will support the maximum populations of diverse plants and animals and give generations of people beautiful places to find solitude, beauty, knowledge, adventure, recreation and spiritual sustenance.
