What in the blazes?

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

Official says letting fires burn sometimes can have great benefits

HUNGRY HORSE - Two decades back, in the summer of 1983, the unthinkable happened deep in the heart of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Lightning struck, a tree burst into flame, a wildfire crept up a mountainside - and firefighters simply sat back, waiting and watching.

No hand crews, no helicopters, no smokejumpers. Eventually, left to roam where fuel and wind would take it, the fire burned across some 230 acres.
"It was a huge moment for people who had been taught for decades that all fires are bad and should be put out immediately," said Dale Luhman. "But it came as part of a professional recognition that sometimes fire is good, that it's a necessary and natural process in healthy forests."

Today, Luhman is resource assistant on the Forest Service's Spotted Bear Ranger District, located at the northern end of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex near the town of Hungry Horse.

In the years since that unthinkable event, he said, foresters have become even more convinced that wildfire should sometimes be allowed to burn.

Which is exactly why, when lightning hit Pagoda Mountain and Little Salmon Creek the night of July 19, there were, once again, no hand crews, no helicopters, no smokejumpers.

This time, the fire was joined by other fires, until more than a dozen separate starts spread into what would become known as the 88,334-acre Little Salmon Complex.

"It's an excellent complex of fires," said Steve Wirt, wilderness fire manager on the Spotted Bear District. "It's going to create a whole lot of different resource benefits."

The benefits, he said, are "quite extensive and complex, and it's very hard to list them all."

Most folk know about lodgepole pine and their serotinous cones that open only under the heat of wildfire. But Wirt points out that almost all Western landscapes are fire-adapted to some degree, from the soil beneath to the plants and animals above.

Western larch, for instance, hate the shade. They need a fire to create a clearing, Wirt said, and then they have about three to five years to take root before the window of opportunity is shaded over by competitors.

Most of the region's big stands of larch are more than 200 years old, he said, and many are between 400 and 800 years old. That means that when you look at the autumnal mosaic of green and gold - created by stands of evergreens and golden larch - you're really looking at the patchwork of a historic fire.

"It's like looking through time at a fire that happened hundreds of years ago," Wirt said.

But not everyone, of course, is happy with the Forest Service's policy of letting wilderness fires burn - a plan known as Wildland Fire Use in agency jargon.

When the Little Salmon Complex ran through the Bob Marshall this summer, it ran over outfitters' hunting grounds, as well as a few long-established outfitting camps. For people who make their money in the wilderness, a policy that allows the woods to burn can be unsettling at best.

"I can't tell you how much time we've been spending with the outfitters," said Deb Mucklow, district ranger on the Spotted Bear. "We've tried to minimize the impacts in every way possible."

That's meant allowing some wiggle room in the outfitting permits and keeping in daily contact with the 40 or so outfitters who operate in lands affected by the Little Salmon Complex.

"We really tried to keep as much of the forest open as possible," Mucklow said.

She and her staff helped outfitters get access the general public did not enjoy. She helped them find alternate routes, helped them get into the woods in time to set up fall hunting camps.

The outfitters themselves "really pulled together as a group, too," Mucklow said. Some lost business, with clients scared off by reports of fire and smoke. Those outfitters gave up their permitted camps to outfitters who still had clients but could not use their traditional camps.

"The Forest Service did a good job working with us," said Belinda Rich, whose husband is a Seeley Lake outfitter. "For a stressful event, it went pretty darn well."

The Rich family actually lost part of their traditional hunting grounds to the fires, she said, "and it almost took the whole camp."

But, she said, "we understand that allowing it to burn and get back into a normal fire process again is important."

Mick Cheff agrees. He's been outfitting for longer than he cares to recall, "and we got hit worse than anybody," he said. "We have two main camps, and we were burned out of both of them."

Still, he said, the Forest Service "did a great job working with us outfitters. It's been a real good partnership. I myself am actually in favor of the let-burn policy. This year, though, we got a little more than we'd hoped for."

Still, Cheff says, the outfitting community understands that the short-term loss could, in fact, be a long-term gain. The fires, he said, will open up more browse for deer and elk and moose, which are, of course, the outfitters' bread and butter.

"It's part of that complex connection of resource benefits," Wirt said.

Take red-stemmed ceanothus, for instance. The plant's seeds can lay dormant for 400 years or more, waiting for the heat (and subsequent freeze and thaw) that enables them to germinate.

New growth pops up only in the year after a fire. Then, the plants grow for a couple of decades, producing seeds that drop and lay dormant, waiting for another fire.

"It's the ice-cream plant for our browsers," Wirt said. "The deer, elk and moose just love it. It's a key plant on their winter range, and it really carries them through the long winters."

And so the fires that disrupt the outfitters spark the plants that sustain the big game that the outfitters rely upon.

Which may explain why the outfitters aren't screaming louder about the Wildland Fire Use program, even if they aren't entirely thrilled.

"Sure, some people will be impacted," Luhman said. "But you really can't overestimate the benefits of fire in Western forests. And if you can't allow natural processes in the wilderness, where can you?"

Which is not to say wilderness has become a hands-off, anything-goes inferno of unchecked wildfire. In fact, of the 50 or more starts sparked in the Bob this summer, only a dozen or so were classified as Wildland Fire Use fires. The others were snuffed or steered or otherwise managed by firefighters.

Within the 1.5 million-acre wilderness complex, about 90,000 acres burned, and within those 90,000 acres there remains a whole lot of green. Wirt figures that, on average, big Western wildfires usually burn hot across about 10 percent of their total acreage. Another 40 percent or 50 percent of the acres burns moderately, sweeping the underbrush out while leaving the mature trees. The remaining 30 percent or 40 percent is untouched.

"The Little Salmon created a beautiful fire mosaic," Wirt said. "From a modern land manager's view, it was very successful."

From yesterday's land manager's view, however, it was shocking.

Western wildfire policy has evolved through many years, Wirt said, beginning in the years directly following the big fires of 1910, when 3 million acres of Montana and Idaho went up in smoke.

Then came the "10 a.m." policy, when firefighters were expected to have a blaze in hand by midmorning following the evening lightning storm.

"I was fighting fire in those days," Wirt said. "You'd get a call in the middle of the night and take off, hiking into some remote wilderness."

It worked great, he said, until the 1970s, when land managers realized that all the wood they'd kept from burning had been stacking up for decades. They had missed, he said, at least two natural fire cycles, and the pile of fuel was growing.

"There was a recognition that we couldn't put all the fires out anymore," Wirt said. And, at the same time, "we were beginning to understand how to work with fire as a natural tool in the ecosystem."

The subsequent policy - known commonly as "let it burn" - smoldered along quietly until 1988, when parts of Yellowstone National Park burned. It was hard to say what was hotter, Wirt said, the policy, the politics or the fires themselves.

Land managers reassessed and set new parameters for allowing wildland fires to burn.

Today, he said, the side rails for wildland fires are set long before the fire season. A fire management unit is demarcated (such as the Bob) and within that, fire management areas are plotted. Then, parameters are set, including the time of year and the climate and the type of terrain.

When a fire starts, land managers use those designations, as well as more immediate information, to determine whether to let a fire run or to attempt to snuff it.

If it's far from the wilderness edge and doesn't look like it might run out onto private land, then it's likely to be managed under the Wildland Fire Use policy.

In the case of the Little Salmon, Luhman said, land managers figured they had about 450,000 acres of wiggle room between the fire and any potential hazards, and so they stepped back to monitor the fire.

Later fires, however, were snuffed, or at least wet down, as land managers were concerned about their location or the fact that so many acres already were burning on adjacent lands.

The idea, Luhman said, was to use fire as a management tool while still keeping some of the wilderness open. And so they let the Little Salmon Complex burn up north, while smothering other wildfires in the Bob's southern portion.

"Generally," he said, "it's a natural event, and we're going to let it run its natural course. I mean, a big reason of having wilderness in the first place is to let nature do its thing. But there are social considerations, as well, and we try to take all that into account."

And so firefighters fought wilderness fires all summer, even as the Little Salmon Complex burned largely unchecked.

That is not to say, however, that it was entirely unchecked. In fact, people were checking it every day, from the air and from the ground, monitoring growth and heat and wind and weather and a host of other variables.

"This isn't a passive thing," Luhman said. "We might not be fighting the fire, but we're very active on it."

The idea, he said, is not just to let fire run wild everywhere.

"Ecologically, that might be fine," he said. "But socially, how much fire can we handle at a time?"

That question - how much fire we can handle - is also central to the wilderness fire policy. Fires burning in the backcountry take a back seat to fires burning into subdivisions, and with resources already spread thin, Mucklow figures there weren't enough people or dollars to work the fires on her district, even if they had wanted to.

"We've known for years that we can't control all the fires everywhere all at once," she said. "There's only so much you can do."

And part of what you can do is to stand back and do nothing at all. Wirt believes that, having stood back in 1983 and watched as 230 acres of wilderness went up in smoke. Since then, he's watched thousands of acres burn, and he's seen how time and Mother Nature conspire to regenerate healthy forests.

"Fire is the only way we have to manage Western ecosystems at the landscape level," he said. "If we're patient enough to let nature work, the benefits to the future will be huge. Tomorrow's forests will be healthier, and tomorrow's fires will be smaller. There's a tremendous value in fire. We need to remember, all these lands have burned before, and they're all going to burn again. It's nothing new."