How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks

[pmbryant]

From the NY Times: July 22 2003

How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks

By JAMES GORMAN


SUSANVILLE, Calif. — Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks — the leavings of bark beetles — and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash.

Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, they come to an abrupt transition.

September's blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service.

When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest that was different from the rest, and stopped dead, like a mime at an invisible wall. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular forest fires swept through the high dry country and no one tried to stop them.

"It just stopped," Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost surprised. Mr. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit it.

(snip)

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/22/science/earth/22FIRE.html

[pw]

1. You think this will be used to promote logging

even though the logging practices that the timber companies are promoting as "healthy" are almost the opposite of what saved the woods in this case?

[Porcupine]

2. Local Native Americans practiced spring/fall controlled burning

before the white guys came and killed them off.

I have lived near the Lassen forest in Chico. The second growth after logging is now incredibly thick stands of small diameter trees. It desperately needs controlled burns before there are catostrohpic fires.

You can see where weaker fires have burned and the forest is visibly healthier. It's crazy up there to be sure.