All this recent and ongoing wildfire in the news is a good chance to remind everyone that wildfire is a natural part of the Western landscape, and has always been an essentially self-managing process, until human interference, and a lack of science, caused a century of misguided fire suppression.
Fire is a constant in the western United States. You can’t stop it from happening, because it has always happened. It has a role to play. As humans, we choose to live in areas that are very fire-prone, which means a working understanding of both micro and macro aspects of fire and its roles and behavior in western landscapes is key to both managing your property and mitigating your fire danger.
How did this age of mega-fires happen? Well, in the 1800s, the western United States was seen primarily as a source of resources for extraction for profit. Natural processes were seen as foes to be conquered. After some very large fires in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was a concern that the extraction of timber for profit would be harmed by wildfire. No matter how unhealthy or crowded a stand might be, any tree that burned was seen as a potential pile of lumber that could not be harvested and sold. The complete eradication of any wildfire became a goal and purpose that lasted a century before science began to replace it with a better understanding of how the West came to evolve with fire. This century of suppression resulted in densely overcrowded forests, with forest floors loaded with continuous, heavy fuels in the form of branches and dead trees. Add in a drying and warming world, and you get the modern mega-fire.
Fire is still the single best tool for managing stand density and forest floor fuels, in places where it is practical to use it. Our foothills forests of Ponderosa pine and Gambel oak evolved to survive low and medium-intensity fires, and to be renewed by them. Historically, fires were pretty frequent — often occurring every 5-15 years, but normally low to medium intensity. These fires kept the forests much thinner and more open than they are today. They also kept dry fuels from accumulating on the forest floor. Crown fires were much rarer, as were high-intensity, soil-destroying mega-fires. Taller Ponderosa pines were adapted to survive low-intensity fires, so complete stand replacement was less common than it is today; more common was a thinning of younger trees that were not yet large enough to withstand fire. All of this led to a more park-like condition in our forests, a more open forest structure similar to the Manitou Experimental Forest, as opposed to the dense, impenetrable stands of mixed-age (and consequently mixed-size) conifers we see throughout the Pikes Peak region. Our dense forests, with their smaller trees under larger trees, burn quickly now because smaller trees and brush serve as “fuel ladders” to help move fire upward into the canopy of the forest (what we don’t want), creating more intense fires capable of spreading more rapidly and being far more destructive.
Living with fire on the Front Range means managing these conditions. Since we can’t use fire as a tool in an urban setting, we have to mimic the effect as best we can to properly manage residential and semi-rural wooded/brushy areas. And of course, there are some well-accepted guidelines regarding fire mitigation that we need to take seriously. I can help with that, as I have done a substantial amount of Front Range fire mitigation, and I have great resources when I want a second opinion on the best way to keep a property as safe as possible.
Fire is inescapable. It’s a part of the natural process. But it is poorly understood, often because it is sensationalized in the news. Massive acreage numbers, gloom and doom. What is more important than the SIZE of a fire, though, is the scope of the fire. A lot of fires in the West burn in lightly inhabited areas. When these fires – even the big ones – are satellite-mapped for intensity mapping later, you often see (except in the most severe circumstances) a mosaic burn pattern. Some areas will be affected by intense, stand-replacing fire. Some will be moderate, with some crowning, but only 40-50% mortality. Some will be light, with mostly brush and small trees burned. These burn scars become old burn scars in the future, and serve as fire lines to slow down or even stop new fires. They become patchworks of forest interspersed with shrubs and grassland, which is what wildlife prefers (dense forest offers cover but almost no food for critters). In Mother Nature’s toolbox, fire is the one that first brings damage, but then brings renewal. The only problem with that — we live in areas affected by fire, and fire definitely does not bring renewal to urban areas.
Fire will always be our neighbor out here.
It's part of the natural process of the West.
More to come…….