Fighting Fires in the West

By Travis Purser 
Photos by Willy Cook

Even the largest fires start off as a tiny puff of smoke. A thunderstorm moves across a parched summer landscape, a bolt of lightning strikes. Duff—that mattress-thick layer of pine needles, dead bugs and animal bones—catches, but just barely. It smolders, a feeble circle of combustion.
For weeks, the slow kindle grows. A hot day hits. Humidity dips. A strong wind kicks up. So, too, a small flame. That’s when the lookout spots the smoke, and man does what first helped him to become civilized: He tries to control the fire.
First in are the smokejumpers with parachutes. Just two, with shovels and chainsaw, they drift down from the sky.

They might succeed. But if they don’t, the water bombers follow, the Hotshots with their yellow uniforms march in like rank-and-file soldiers, a command post buzzes to life with links to weather satellites and the National Interagency Fire Center—known as the Pentagon in the war against wildfire.

Still, the flames spread, while men and women risk their lives and spend millions of dollars trying to stop the destruction.

There is scenery, commercial timber, endangered species and homes to save. There are political careers at stake.

And, there’s the fire-fighting tradition—one that goes back 90 years—and a culture full of pride, bordering on hubris.

One Idaho smokejumper recounts a particularly difficult job in an Oregon wilderness area, when a parachute snagged in a 150-foot sub-alpine fir, a species that also burns easily and is difficult to extinguish.

“I hate sub-alpine fir,” he says. “They’re not used for any product. They’re just out there annoying me.”

After he escaped from the tree, which did not burn, his partner retrieved the parachute with a “Husqevarna climber,” meaning he used a chainsaw to cut the tree down.

Another smokejumper believes that by putting out fires she’s sometimes doing the forest more harm than good.

Sometimes, she wants to just let them burn, and, of course, she can’t do that.

She thinks about quitting.

But she loves the forest and everything else about the job, which on good days involves not too much more than a thrilling airlift into the country’s most beautiful and remote wilderness for a little camping.
“If I don’t do it,” she says, “somebody else will.”

The very term “wildfire” conjures up a wall of flame and chaos to people in faraway places who follow the news. They’ve become inured to Bambi and Smokey Bear, and to them, wildfire is bad, period. Fires are to be put out.

And so, the federal checkbook opens and money flows for what man does best—impose order. Eventually, through man’s suppression, there is less smoke on the landscape.

Now the ecology spins off balance. Without fire’s natural regenerative power, some plants thrive more than they should; others die. Animal populations that live off the plants wax and wane. Hunters complain. The lumber industry lobbies. Ecologists fret.

The new problems require more money.

Shrubs, dead limbs and rotting tree trunks build up to unnatural levels on the fire-free forest floor. Experts call them “hazardous fuels,” and when they do ignite, their fire rips with destruction like none before.

Humans continue their co-evolution with wildfire. We must control it. We cannot afford to not control it. The more we control it, the more problems we create.

The story is as full of irony as it is complex and disorganized.

Then they speak about wildfire control, some managers of the Sawtooth National Forest cautiously reveal their slightly bemused resignation to working in a flawed world, where the ultimate goal, the total manipulation and control of fire, is a pipe dream.

Don’t tell anyone who said this, one of them says, but once a forest fire reaches a certain size—as it did, say, in the 150,000-acre Rabbit fire of 1994 in the Boise National Forest—firefighters, helicopters and bombers do little except soothe the public. No one but Mother Nature controls a very large fire. Humans just get out of the way.

People like to watch, as they did last summer, when 300 acres burned on Warm Springs ridge within sight of Ketchum, bringing the traveling fire show to town.

Helicopters dropped hoses into nearby Penny Lake, and, like giant mosquitoes, sucked up water to douse the flames.

Twin-engine bombers elicited gasps of awe and cheers from onlookers when the daredevil pilots swooped down the ridge, engines roaring, cheating death, to drop their loads of vermilion retardant.

Fighting the fire had all the elements of war: marching soldiers, dive bombers, lives at stake, a front line, a necessary oversimplification of us versus the enemy, good and bad.

Rightly, the citizenry praised the firefighters for their bravery and hard work. It all happened near a town, after all, and the firefighters did extinguish the flames.

But how do you convince a population who has witnessed such a spectacle that intentionally setting a similar fire, and controlling it from the beginning, could actually be a good idea?

That’s a problem Bill Murphy, who is responsible for managing fires in 1.1 million acres of the Sawtooth National Forest, faces.

From 1997 until 2000, which was a bad year nationally for fires and changed the political climate, Murphy had enough public support to let half a dozen naturally occurring fires in the Sawtooth Wilderness burn, with supervision, he says. Altogether, the loosely herded fires covered about 2,000 acres.

One reason for “not going after” them, was to protect firefighters, he says. Sometimes, by fighting a blaze, “you’re endangering their lives, and for what? The fire’s not going anywhere. And fire’s good for the ecosystem.”

Another goal was to reduce so-called ladder fuels, which build up on the forest floor over decades. Ladder fuels are dangerous because they allow ground fires, which are usually beneficial, to climb into the canopies of large trees, burning them and killing them like a field of weeds.

Relatively frequent ground fires are good because they clear away ladder fuels before they build up, and they release seeds from pine cones so new trees can grow.

Murphy not only would like to allow some naturally occurring fires to burn.

“Now, we need to go out and start lighting,” he says.

An intentional, controlled fire looks very different from the kind of fire that happened on Warm Springs ridge, which began when a lawnmower unexpectedly combusted.

To set a fire, foresters carefully select a location and a date when humidity, temperature and wind conditions are good, usually in spring or fall.

Because fire burns upward, foresters begin at the top of a ridge, lighting strips and working their way down as each strip burns out. That way, they reduce the chance the fire will escape carefully defined boundaries.

City officials in Sun Valley are considering supporting the Forest Service to conduct the so-called prescribed burns around the border of the city as a preventative measure, Murphy says. But it is a politically charged idea that has not gotten past the discussion stage.

If it did, Murphy and his colleagues would face a complex procedure governed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Each intentionally set prescribed fire, no matter what size, could take years to plan, with reams of input from a justifiably nervous public.

Some prescribed fires have failed famously, as in 2000 when one in Los Alamos, New Mexico, burned out of control and destroyed 800 homes.

“How would you feel if I showed up in your backyard with a torch?” Murphy says.

This year, more than a half dozen federal and state agencies are considering beginning 23 research projects to learn more about the “social dimensions” of fire over the next five years.

The scope of the undertaking is dizzying.
The National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and several other organizations, including universities and tribal groups, will likely be involved. So will the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

They want to help the public with what the researchers call “usable knowledge.”

To do so, anthropologists, economists, geographers, psychologists, political scientists and sociologists together would examine everything from the culture of fire crew behavior to the regional economic impacts of wildfire.

Gary Machlis, the University of Idaho forestry professor who wrote a 256-page preliminary report on the project, thinks we can do a better job of managing fires.

The natural science of wildfire has come a long way since 1910, when the Pulaski, a half-hoe-half-ax fire-fighting tool, wasn’t yet invented.

That was the year 5 million acres burned across the western United States, much of it in northern Idaho. 

In 2000, after 90 years of concerted suppression and with the technological advancements of computers and satellites, the destruction was even greater: 8.4 million acres burned.

The amount of scorched earth diminished through the middle of the century, when it averaged less than a million acres each year, thanks to humans, but now it’s going back up again. Without fires, “hazardous fuels” have collected, and now they’re burning.

Clearly, the natural sciences alone are not doing the job. Machlis thinks that the social sciences, largely ignored so far, are the key to evening out the long-range fire cycle we’ve created.

The interactions of firefighters, government agencies, park visitors, property owners and the media, to name a few, need closer scrutiny, he says.

It might be just what humans need in their co-evolution with wildfire.

It just might help us stop having too much fire in some places and too little in others.

“I think over time, we’re still going to have large-acreage fires in the West,” says Murphy in his Ketchum office, while sketching graphs of the long-term ebb and flow of wildfire and the public sentiment that results, and then, ultimately, affects it.

“I imagine a balance will occur at some point,” he says. •

sidebar:

Tale of the Aspens

By Travis Purser 

Aspen trees are disappearing from the Sawtooth National Forest.

The hallmark trees with their hypnotic, trembling leaves grow vigorously after their roots and branches are damaged. They stagnate when left alone. Nature damages aspens, and stimulates their growth, with fire.

A hundred years ago, the trees covered 10 percent of the land in the Wood River Valley. But since then, with human fire suppression, aspen numbers have decreased to 1 percent.

The U.S. Forest Service has been studying this.
“It’s a real problem,” says Robin Garwood, a Sawtooth National Forest biologist.

Aspens are beautiful. But they also play an important role in helping to balance the ecosystem. Deer and elk eat the leaves and the branches, especially in winter when snow covers other forage. And, the trees create areas where grasses and shrubs take root, providing havens for small animals.

Aspens reproduce by growing new trees from their existing roots. But old trees in a crowded stand inhibit their own reproduction with a hormone that prevents growth. When trees are damaged, the flow of the hormone stops. New trees begin growing again.

In the summer of 1998, Forest Service workers drove tractors into the White Cloud Mountains and ripped through the roots of aspens to do what fire was no longer allowed to do. Since then, new growth has been minimal, a mild success.

The Forest Service also cut down whole trees to promote growth and is working on a plan to allow natural burning within controlled boundaries.
So, why not just let some fires rip so they can do their job?

“That’s a good question,” says Ed Cannady, spokesperson for the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

The answer, of course, is the legitimate need to protect humans and their homes, he says. But also “fire is a great rhetorical tool,” that conjures widespread fear, even when it happens in remote, unpopulated places.