Fire Season
Page 5
Until very recently we have administered the… Forests on the assumption that while overgrazing was bad for erosion, fire was worse… . In making this assumption we have accepted the traditional theory as to the place of fire and forests in erosion, and rejected the plain story written on the face of Nature.
In an article that same year for Sunset magazine, he went so far as to note that in an arid climate such as the Southwest, any grazing at all, even of the most conservative kind, would likely produce erosion. For a high-ranking member of the Forest Service, this amounted to apostasy. To this day, stubborn advocates of public-lands ranching refuse to hear of it.
Needless to say, the answer is not as simple as removing all the cows and torching the mesas they once grazed. One fire won’t be enough to adequately thin the spreading brush and juniper; fire will need to be a recurring presence, and it remains to be seen if both the civilian public and the Forest Service have the stomach for it over the long run. Prescribed fires don’t always obey the boundary of their prescription, the most famous local example being the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000. Begun as a prescribed fire in the Bandelier National Monument of northern New Mexico, it escaped control and burned for a month before it was contained. The smoke plume blew so far east it could be seen over the Oklahoma panhandle, 200 miles away. Forty-seven thousand acres burned, causing a billion dollars’ total damage, including $340 million worth to the Los Alamos National Laboratories. The habitat of endangered spotted owls was incinerated. The town of Los Alamos had to be evacuated. More than 350 families lost their homes. Officials quibbled for years over what had gone wrong, and why. Aside from the quantifiable destruction of property, the biggest loss may have been public confidence in the very notion of prescribed fire as a legitimate tool for ecosystem restoration—at least in the intermix zone of wildlands and homes. It’s hard to win a friend for fire when you burn down his house with it.
The Gila, though, provides a canvas on which to paint with fire that is superior to any other place in the Southwest. Indeed, if it can’t be done here, it probably can’t be done anywhere in the Lower Forty-eight. Only a few tiny towns are sprinkled throughout the forest. The vast majority is uninhabited: less than one-half of one percent of it qualifies as wildland-urban interface. The biggest town around, Silver City, with a population of 10,000, lies at the Gila’s southern edge, and with prevailing winds out of the southwest, the smoke impact on humans is close to negligible. None of this means precautions aren’t taken, down to the tiniest detail. As the writer William de Buys has said: “Consider the alignment of stars a burn boss on public land must achieve: archaeological clearance, interagency consultation on threatened and endangered species, environmental analysis, survival of appeals, clean air permit, crew and equipment availability, weather window. A thousand-acre burn can take a year or more of preparation… . Even then its chances of occurring in optimal conditions are slim.”
On this mid-April day in the Mimbres Valley of the Gila National Forest, the stars have aligned. Winds are light. Fuel moisture is advantageous: neither too dry, which would make a burn dangerous, nor too wet, which would make a burn pointless. The fire goes off without a hitch, several hundred acres a day, and from where I sit it even looks rather beautiful, a soft white smoke rising off the tablelands, blown east over the Black Range crest before dispersing on the desert.
In the third week of April, the snowpack having receded, the packers Les and Kameron arrive with the boxes I stowed in the shack at the saddle. They tie their animals to various trees in the meadow, and together we empty the mules’ panniers of my supplies. When I shake Les’s hand and ask how he’s doing, he smiles through his neatly trimmed beard and says, “Living the dream, man. Living the dream.”
Hard-handed and bow-legged, these men practice one of the great and dying arts of a world without roads, and over the course of my season their handiwork today will lessen the punishment my body takes in getting to the lookout. With a base of dry and canned food in place, I will resupply myself every two weeks with fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, chocolate, cheese, and tortillas. Their effort today is rather simple, just two men on horseback, each of them leading a single mule on a rope, with panniers holding my boxes balanced at each mule’s side. I have seen them supply a big crew in rough country, however, where a single man may lead a string of as many as ten animals, and it is a sight of calm and purposeful synchronicity sweet to behold, not least because the mules seem to enjoy it.
We stack my boxes on the porch and share lunch in the warmth of the cabin. Les has enough food for three men, a feast put together last night by his wife: sandwiches, yogurt, cookies, homemade trail mix. He graciously offers me his leftovers. I consider most of what he brought a luxury here. I do not turn it down.
“You ever get lonely up here?” Kameron, the younger of the two, asks as he looks around the cabin.
“Nope. Not really.”
“You ever get, you know, sad or anything like that?”
This requires a thoughtful response. Sad is too small and mean a word for the feelings this place evokes in me, yet I’d be lying to say I live here in a state of perpetual ecstasy, like the blissed-out bodhisattva Kerouac dreamed of becoming. On the other hand I’m not about to tell two guys in leather chaps and cowboy hats about my very real and near-mystical hours of longing and nostalgia, alone in my little glass box, brooding over and exulting in my own mortality amid mountains silently magisterial in the late-day sun. Nor the hours of sitting and staring into the inscrutable heart of the desert, not thinking anything, not feeling anything—neither happy nor sad nor any quantifiable mixture thereof. Merely alive with a hungry retina and a taste for dry mountain country and a jones for the sight of that first twist of smoke.
“The only time my heart sinks is when hikers show up. But it doesn’t happen often and they never stay long.”
They laugh and look at each other, wondering, perhaps, if I’m trying to tell them something. It’s no wonder our Forest Service brethren think of us lookouts as the freaks on the peaks. We have, in the words of our forebear Edward Abbey, “an indolent, melancholy nature.” Our walk home is always uphill. We live alone on the roof of the world, clinging to the rock like condors, fiercely territorial. We ply our trade inside a steel-and-glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning. Our purpose and our pleasure is to watch: study the horizon, ride out the storms, an eagle eye peeled for evidence of flame.
Kameron leans back and yawns, rubs his clean-shaven jaw. The clouds have begun to spit sleet, compact little crystals flying horizontally on the wind, even as the sun shines overhead. Though it’s just a little squall, unlikely to last long, it serves as their excuse to get moving down the trail. I stand in the meadow and watch them descend through the trees. Les turns, offers a wave of his hand, and then they are gone. If I’m lucky, they’ll be the last of my government colleagues to set foot on this mountain all year. From here on out the peak will be mine. The thought makes me smile, as does the knowledge that hidden in my boxes of books are three spare bottles of bourbon.
On the last Monday of the month I hike in for the start of another tour, smelling along the way the sweet dry smell of pine needles in sunlight, the dog fifty yards ahead of me, both of us loafing along, finding our rhythm—no reason to rush on such a fine spring day, a beautiful morning in the Black Range for April, unusually calm. We’re a mile up the trail from the saddle, just crossing a short ridge connecting two hills, when I see a globule of smoke curl out of a canyon bottom, a mile northeast and a thousand feet below.
Fire.
Several thoughts occur to me in rapid succession. First, there is no relief lookout as yet on the mountain. On my days off—and I’ve been working overtime thus far, twelve or thirteen days instead of ten, with only a day or two off at a time—the lookout remains unstaffed, my boss having hired as my relief a student who won’t be free until the last week of May. The absence of an upcanyon haze of drift smoke indicates the fire has just p
opped up. The color and the shape of the smoke tell me still other things, so by the time I drop my pack and key up my radio—Alice looking at me curiously, her head cocked to one side—I’m pretty certain I’m the only person on earth who can see it. I also have a good idea of where it is, how it started, how big it is, and what sort of fuels it’s burning in, a bit of guesswork I can indulge after eight seasons in this line of work.
Although my knowledge of the ways of fire has grown, my initial reaction to the sight of a smoke remains unchanged over the years. It’s always a major kick. I take a couple of minutes to regulate my breathing and douse my sizzling nerve ends in the cold water of government professionalism before I press the transmit button on the radio. Otherwise I’d sound as if I were the thing on fire.
Out of habit I call dispatch under the name of my peak instead of my last name, which causes them confusion given my location. More than once they request my azimuth reading on the fire, before I finally get them to understand I am calling from the trail and not from the top. I tell them the fire is about a mile north-northeast of Wright’s Saddle, that it’s on the east side of the Black Range, in a canyon bottom, about a tenth of an acre or less, burning most likely on the ground, in grass, a small column of light gray, almost white smoke. With four and a half miles ahead of me, I tell them to give me an hour and a half to get to the top, at which point I’ll be happy to give them my azimuth from the tower. Then I switch channels and call my boss to make sure he has a copy on all I’ve just said, and by talking it through—him back in the office with maps, me standing on a boulder looking into the canyon—we put a pretty firm location on the fire: a little ways beyond the end of a road heading west out of Embree, near where a trail turns up Thief Gulch. Thus, the Thief Fire.
If you threw a hundred darts at a map of the Black Range, you’d be hard pressed to hit a spot more conducive to an unwanted fire. Brushy fuels cover steep slopes at the confluence of three drainages, offering the fire ample combustibles and plenty of avenues to move. Fire has been ruthlessly suppressed in the surrounding country for a hundred years, so fuel loads are unusually high. The rough terrain makes the area too dangerous to work with a helicopter, removing one tool from the suppression arsenal. The proximity of Embree, less than two miles east, adds private homes to the list of concerns. Were the fire to spread upslope to the west, it would begin to find thick pockets of dead fir perfectly poised to burn. Beginning in 2003, engraver beetles began to attack white fir stands on the southern end of the Black Range, resulting in an almost total mortality for that tree species over tens of thousands of acres. During my tenure I’ve seen the needles of the firs to my south turn from healthy green to bright red, then become ashen gray and fall to the ground, leaving dead standing trees to weather and rot.
Such beetles are endemic in Western coniferous forests. The mountain pine beetle, for instance, attacks lodgepole pines and is responsible for decimating nearly 4 million acres of Western pine forests in 2007 alone. Add fir beetles and the tally comes closer to 7 million acres. Bark beetles typically feed on trees already weakened by other factors. Occasionally, when forests become stressed by drought, overcrowding, or widespread root disease, beetle populations erupt into epidemics. This has happened on an irregular schedule for thousands of years; it happened here over the past half decade. A forest overgrown from an absence of fire became further stressed by a period of drought: too many trees competing for too little moisture. The beetles found thick, susceptible stands of white fir and bored through their bark. They laid eggs in little galleries carved in the space between the cambium and the sapwood. The eggs hatched and became larvae, which fed on the cambium, the living tissue that cycles nutrients from the roots to the rest of the tree. After a year, the larvae emerged as full-grown beetles and flew away to attack new trees. Only the eventual decimation of the host tree species can halt an epidemic—either that or a late hard freeze that kills the larvae. No such freeze has occurred here in years, so the beetles had their way until they killed most of the white fir trees over an area bigger than the island of Manhattan.
About 60 percent of the more than half-million-acre Black Range District has seen fire over the past fifteen years—all of that to my north. In 2003, for instance, the Boiler Fire burned 58,000 acres. In 2006 the Bull Fire burned 80,000 acres. Such figures include the total perimeter of a burn; inside the perimeter many pockets of green remain untouched by flame, and even in the charred places big-boled trees live on. These fires—the kind that burn slowly, a few hundred to a couple thousand acres a day over a period of weeks or months—create a mosaic of habitats that in their overall health and diversity help prevent bark beetle attacks. The one area of the Black Range still starved of fire is the country running from my lookout south to the forest boundary, precisely the area with the worst beetle infestation on the entire range.
It’s not difficult to grasp why fire was kept at bay here for most of the twentieth century. There is, first of all, the presence of homes and cabins along the forest edge. A scenic highway passes by, and the tourists prefer green trees to black. The mountains here hold the watershed of two little towns beyond the forest, each of them perched astride the creek banks, and a fire would strip ground cover and result in rapid muddy runoff right down their main streets. The public angst likely to arise from the sight of flames and mud was judged not worth the risk. In my time I’ve seen crews suppress at least half a dozen fires that could have grown huge to my south if left to burn.
The consensus now, from the district ranger on down through the firefighters and even to us lowly lookouts, is that this corner of the forest is going to burn, has to burn, one of these years. It’s only a matter of how and when. Maybe we’ll get lucky with a late-season smoke that hangs on through cool weather and even light rains, burning calmly for weeks, chewing up the deadfall and duff on the ground, torching through occasional dog-hair thickets of pine and fir, and leaving the mature forest partially intact. On the other hand, when the big one comes in this part of the world, the stage is more likely to be set by high winds, hot summer weather, and low humidity—followed by ignition from dry lightning or the careless human hand. A fire that can’t be caught by anything but rain, no matter the manpower thrown at it. We see such fires with increasing frequency in the Southwest: the Rodeo-Chediski and Aspen fires in Arizona (467,000 and 84,750 acres, respectively), the Hayman Fire in Colorado (137,000 acres), the Bear Fire here on the Gila (51,000 acres), fires that blew through 10,000 acres a day or more and torched every last living thing they touched, leaving a charscape in their midst.
However it happens, I want to be here for it, partly out of a selfish wish for spectacle, partly because I’ve stared at the land for thousands of hours and feel I could be useful to the folks on the ground.
With firefighters coming from between forty and a hundred and twenty miles away—no smokejumpers available in the Southwest just yet—I arrive on the peak about the same time the first crew of five reaches the Thief Fire. An airplane observer is up and circling, talking to the crew on the air-to-ground frequency. From the tower, I’m just able to see the top of the smoke rising above a ridge. It is my hunch, and it’s only a hunch, that if I’d been on the peak instead of hiking in, I’d have been a half hour later in seeing the smoke. Pure dumb luck to have been where I was, when I was.
The crew’s first task is to locate the fire’s origin and determine a cause, whether lightning or human. Much hinges on what they find. If it’s lightning-caused, my boss has several options. He can order suppression. He can put the fire in confinement status and wait to see how it behaves, planning to corral it several days out. Or he can call it a “fire-use” fire and let it burn for weeks or months on end. If, on the other hand, the fire is found to be human-caused, his only option will be total suppression.
For most of the twentieth century there was no such palette of options. The Forest Service judged each and every fire a potential travesty and responded accordingly. This policy can
be traced back to the agency’s earliest days. In 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt brought the nation’s forest reserves under the control of the Department of Agriculture, he appointed his friend and fellow conservationist Gifford Pinchot as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot, like Roosevelt a political Progressive, believed the Western forests ought to be protected from the baleful forces that had laid waste to the forests of the East and Upper Midwest—clearcuts and fires, often in that order. The goal was not to preserve timbered lands as semi-wild getaways for that portion of the American public that liked dramatic scenery. That fell to the national parks. Rather, it was to impose a Progressive-era ideal of efficiency and rational use on the raw materials of empire.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, timber barons, railroad trusts, and mining concerns had mowed down vast reaches of mature timber to feed the nation’s hunger for wood products, whether for housing, railroad ties, mine shaft supports, or fuel. Forestalling these interests, powerful as they were, was the easy part; moving the forests to the public domain did much to inhibit their destruction. But one force proved a trickier enemy: fire. It had been a presence on the landscape far longer than big trusts and rapacious conglomerates. Free-burning fire, kindled by lightning, had been the norm in Western forests for untold millennia. Its intensity fluctuated depending on variations in fuels and climate, flaring in drier epochs, fizzling in wetter ones. But as the fire historian Stephen Pyne points out, wildfire has been a presence on Earth since the Devonian period, 400 million years ago, when sufficient oxygen for combustion flooded the planet’s atmosphere.