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Shoshone Forest gauges fire danger in 2008

By Carole Cloudwalker

This document was published online on Monday, June 30, 2008

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Fires on the Shoshone Forest have cost the Forest Service $15 million during the past decade, according to a fire expert.

That's why forest officials each spring and early summer begin to worry and wonder what kind of a fire year they might face. They also wonder if they will need to trim non-fire budgets to pay for battling blazes.

Shoshone fire suppression manager Clint Dawson says while the Shoshone receives an annual fire suppression budget, a national financial resource also is tapped once fires actually begin.

The problem is that resource supplies all forests in the country and when it's depleted, individual forests must dip into their own funds to battle blazes on their lands. This could mean cuts in areas unrelated to fires, Dawson said.

When spring weather in Park County turned wet this year, fire potential “probably dropped for the rest of the season,” Dawson said.

He said grass that grew up when spring rains arrived should cause no concern for those managing fires on the forest this season.

“Grass isn't a problem,” Dawson said. “Grass isn't a prime carrier of fires on the forest.”

This year, he added, the Shoshone has the “prediction services” of an expert from Denver who believes because of the heavy moisture the Shoshone's North Zone (Clarks Fork, Wapiti and Greybull ranger districts) sustained, there now is potential only for an “average” number of 2008 forest fires.

That translates to about 14 fires on some 5,360 acres, Dawson said.

Those numbers are derived from averaging blazes experienced on the forest 1970-2007, a time that included the 1988 Yellowstone fires which burned about 126,000 acres in the Shoshone's North Zone.

An average fire year would be good news, Dawson said, for a 2.6 million acre forest that has sustained an estimated 450,000 acres of beetle killed trees in its North Zone, mostly 2000-04.

The beetles now have shifted to the southern end of the forest, where there are still large tracts of standing green trees they can claim and dine on, Dawson added.

In May the Shoshone was facing an above-average chance of fire, Dawson said. Then the unusually heavy rains and snows of early June arrived.

In the forest's history of wildfires during the last decade, Dawson said 2003 is remembered as the worst fire season in terms of acres charred.

In that year, 30 blazes charred more than 26,000 acres. Those numbers make a merely “average” year look pretty good to firefighters.

Other years in the last decade brought fewer blazes to the Shoshone, including the following:

€2000 - 12 fires burning 1,523 acres.

€2001 - 18 fires for 2,980 acres.

€2002 - 20 fires for 14 acres.

€2004 - 6 fires for 1 acre.

€2005 - 10 fires for 13 acres.

€2006 - 18 fires for 34,586 acres.

€2007 - 11 fires for 5,728.

Fire experts remind people regularly that fire is a natural event and often can improve the timber stand in which it occurs.

They say problems the Shoshone and many other forests are now experiencing probably are the result of heavy suppression during many years which left trees that bark-burrowing insects favor.

The resulting severe forest fires could be viewed as a natural consequence of that sort of management, even though allowing major fires to burn could have resulted in loss of property or human lives, and often was not an option for that reason.

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