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Shoshone Forest to implement new philosophy for ‘managing' wildfires

By Carole Cloudwalker

This document was published online on Wednesday, August 20, 2008

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The Shoshone Forest is poised to implement a new firefighting philosophy that says there's more than one way to manage a single blaze.

And one of the ways, the argument goes, is to do nothing but monitor a forest fire as it burns through timber that has lived too long and now serves merely as an attractive nuisance, drawing beetles and diseases, but no longer sustaining animals or serving as a viable timber base.

Naturally, that cannot occur near threatened homes or businesses, or in areas where the lives of the public or firefighters could be endangered.

During a meeting with the public last week, Gunbarrel Fire Incident Commander Don Angell told North Fork cabin owners and year-round residents they have the “largest wildland use fire in the history of the Rocky Mountain area.”

Mapped at more than 41,000 acres, the Gunbarrel Fire drew the interest of six officials from the forest's regional office in Denver.

Shoshone District Ranger Terry Root said the half-dozen top officials, which included Deputy Regional Forester Tony Dixon, came to Cody Tuesday to observe the fire and the way Angell's team was handling it.

That's because his team is on the cusp of a philosophical transition in firefighting the Forest Service plans to make by next summer, Root said.

Instead of being merely “suppression teams” of various levels, whose only purpose is to stamp out all forest fires in the true Smokey Bear tradition, every firefighting group in the future will be more oriented to multi-tasking, Root said.

Experts will evaluate terrain, prevailing winds, the proximity of buildings, the season and current fire conditions, among other factors, and will determine the various ways in which a given fire should best be fought.

Then a team like Angell's, trained to do far more than just suppress blazes, will sometimes fight a fire, but at other times will allow it to burn in areas like much of the Shoshone Forest today, where there are too many dead and dying trees waiting for the match-strike of a passing lightning storm to ignite them.

Stepping back and allowing forest fires to clean out dead and dying trees is known as “fire use” or “beneficial use,” Root said.

“Angell's team usually is a suppression team, not a fire use team” he said. “This is new to them.”

He said the group of officials from Denver came to see “how it went to use a suppression team on a fire use fire.”

That leads to the new philosophy, he added.

“Next year the Forest Service will have ‘fire management,' not specific fire suppression or fire use teams,” the district ranger said.

“It's a little bit of an adjustment to change and think fire is good in some places,” Root said. That can make for a difficult transition, especially for firefighters who grew up with the Smokey Bear tradition, Root said.

But the old thinking that if it burned, it must be extinguished likely contributed to the problem of creating old-growth forests ripe for flames, he said.

“If we had let some things burn in the past, we'd have fire breaks and more mosaics of different age tree stands, instead of just old growth trees,” he added.

Beetles favor mature timber that has lost is ability to repel insects. (Younger trees are able to “spit out” insects that tap into their bark by emitting pitch that sweeps them away.)

While a forest, after years of drought, probably would have beetle infestations in any case, Root said their impact might have been reduced if so many fires had not been suppressed for so long, and “if we had recognized the value of fire in the backcountry.”

The Gunbarrel Fire, he added, “is a fire that helped the suppression team understand how we'll use (different approaches) on the same fire,” Root said. “It's a transition for all of us.”

He said the Denver team “was pleased with the results” they observed last week.

Shoshone Forest Supervisor Becky Aus agreed that “fire management is changing,” adding, “In my view, that's a good thing.”

Change will be nationwide, but the Shoshone is on the cusp partly through luck and partly through management, she said.

The luck was not all good, since it created large stands of timber that died all at once, in part because fires that were suppressed for many years. That did not allow for mosaic patterns in which some places burned naturally and some did not, so trees were of varying ages.

Under the new nationwide policy that will be implemented in 2009, Aus said, “managers will have more options to consider.”

These will include the resource values that are at risk, the benefits of letting a fire burn and the cost of suppression.

It's a “more comprehensive way of allowing for more decision space,” Aus said. “It's going to allow for better decision-making.”

Aus said the Shoshone paved the way for this thinking in June by amending its Forest Plan to allow wild fires outside wilderness areas to burn once all conditions had been evaluated.

“We're ahead of the curve” in that, Aus added.

She said the Gunbarrel “has been an exciting fire to deal with” because of the learning curve that has gone into its management.

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