September 24, 2008

"Settin' the Woods on Fire"
by Zach Wallace

Lately we’ve been listening to Hank Williams down in the cookhouse.  In one of my favorite songs he croons, “Tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire.”  During a recent day of our Forests and Communities class we got to watch a helicopter do exactly that.

We spent the morning interpreting the fire regimes of the Swan Valley with fire history expert Steve Barrett.  Students learned to read the fire history of forest stands based on their current conditions.  We classified the severity of fire into three basic categories: non-lethal, medium severity and stand replacing.

Fire history expert Steve Barrett interprets a valley bottom Ponderosa Pine stand, with a burned stump in the foreground.

It was a coincidence that the same day we introduced students to the restorative power of fire on the landscape, Flathead National Forest Assistant Fire Officer John Ingebretson was undertaking a prescribed ecological burn on the Swan Front.  The burn had been planned for over three years and the first window of ideal weather conditions happened to arrive on our fire ecology day.  Needless to say, it fit right into the lesson plan.

The burning ridge top, seen through binoculars.

Fire officer John Ingebretson explains the prescribed ecological burn in progress.

We stood on the beach of Holland Lake and watched the choppers dropping a napalm-type mixture onto the ridgeline above Barber Creek.  John explained that the choppers were lighting the ridge top forests and allowing the fire to burn down into the thicker timber in order to reduce the amount fuel and keep the fire under control.  The ecological goals of the burn included aiding the regeneration of whitebark pine in the higher elevations and improving wildlife habitat in the thicker woods down slope.  Funding for the project came through a partnership with The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. 

A helicopter ignites the ridgeline in a cloud of smoke.

Contractors mix the napalm-type slurry at the Condon airfield.

As the choppers continued their work on the ridge, we drove up Kraft Creek into the Crazy Horse fire, a lightening ignited blaze that burned 8,900 acres on the Mission side of the valley in 2003.  Walking through the fire gave students a view of the mosaic of live and dead trees left by the burn.  We saw first hand the resistance of fire-adapted species, like Western larch, the lone green survivors in stands of charred snags.  We waded through thick fireweed, shrubs and seedling trees, appreciating the rapid regeneration of plants from the charred soil.

Regenerating vegetation in the Crazy Horse burn.

The group in front of the Crazy Horse burn.

That night, on the way back from a Community Council meeting we pulled over on the side of the road to check the progress of the burn on the Swan Front.  The glowing orange embers looked like Christmas lights strung out across the ridgeline.  Every few minutes an entire tree would go up in a burst of flames, then fade slowly into the darkness.

The day felt complete – we had begun by peering into the fire scars of old Ponderosa Pines, living witnesses to the frequent burns that native people once used to manage the valley bottoms.  We visited fire suppressed forests on the edge of ignition and walked through a recent burn.  Finally, we came full circle to the return of fire as a landscape-scale management tool.  Some forty years after retired ranger and Swan Valley resident Bud Moore began arguing for the return of ecological fire to the landscape, we were watching it burn.