Felice Pace, Guest Author
Wildfire landscape within the East Fork Indian Creek Watersheds. Photo courtesy of Luke Rudiger’s Siskiyou Crest Blog.
I recently had the opportunity to drive the length, from bottom to top, of the Indian Creek Watershed, a tributary to the Klamath River mid-way between PacifiCorp’s dams and the Pacific Ocean. It was the first time I’d seen the watershed since the 2020 wind-driven Slater Fire ripped through, destroying 150 homes and taking one human life. What I saw was a watershed in which wildfire had killed almost all the trees, including on north facing slopes and within riparian areas. The Klamath Mountains usually burn in a mosaic of fire intensities with north slopes and riparian areas almost always burning at low intensity. So why did the Slater Fire not repeat that pattern? Why did the fire burn with such uniform high intensity?
Writing in the Winter 2020/21 issue of Forest and Rivers News, Will Harling, executive director of the Mid-Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC) and a specialist on wildfire in the Klamath Mountains, attributes the severity of the Slater Fire to “large scale helicopter logging” following a 1987 wildfire which created a “carbureted mixture of brush and slash.” The brush and slash fire was ignited when a falling snag downed a live powerline and the flames were driven into the trees and north by high winds. Harling notes that the Forest Service had rejected a plan to restore fire within the Indian Creek Watershed and intimates that the Slater Fire would not have been so destructive if that project had been completed.
I am not convinced. While high winds played a role, in my view a major reason the Slater Fire burned with such uniform, watershed-wide high intensity was the fact that, except for small amounts of wilderness, over the past 50 years or so the entire watershed has been logged. During this time the Forest Service converted fire resistant older forests, including some of the region’s most impressive old-growth Douglas Fir forests, into a sea of plantations covered with dense stands of young conifer trees. Some of those plantations were 50 years old, some younger.
Young conifer forests are notoriously flammable; an entire watershed converted to such forests was a fire disaster waiting for the right conditions to occur. Those conditions occurred in 2020 when, as Will Harling points out, a downed power line provided the only factor that was lacking, that is, an ignition source.
Intentional blindness
The Slater Fire should carry a lesson for those who manage our national forests. Converting large landscapes to uniform stands of younger trees is a recipe for fire disaster, including vastly increased risks to human and animal communities. Instead we should trust in natural forest recovery which, if allowed to proceed without human interference, will result in a diversity of tree ages and sizes and increased forest resilience going forward.
But Forest Service managers refuse to get the message. In the face of large devastating wildfires, their response is to reestablish the vast plantations of trees all the same age which was a major cause of the Slater Fire’s high intensity devastation. The most recent “Schedule of Proposed Actions” for the Klamath National Forest, for example, includes a project to respond to the 2021 River Complex which burned in the Salmon and Scott Watersheds. Here’s how the Forest Service describes that project: “To respond to conditions created by the 2021 River Complex,” including a plan to “accelerate re-establishment of conifers”.
Albert Einstein is believed to have first provided the following definition for insanity: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” By that definition, the Forest Service’s uniform response to wildfires, both the ineffective and damaging suppression actions typically undertaken during the fires and the salvage logging and reestablishment of massive tree plantations in fire’s wake, is certifiably insane.
Of course, by the time Indian Creek burns again the Forest Service managers who reestablish that sea of even-age younger trees will be long gone, on to another national forest or into retirement. When it comes to the Forest Service, accountability for misdeeds and mistakes is as rare as the Bolander’s lily which, hopefully, can still be found somewhere in the Indian Creek Watershed.
More on the Slater and other recent wildfires is available on Luke Ruediger’s Siskiyou Crest Blog. Read Will Harling on wildfire in the Winter 2020/21 issue of the Trees Foundation’s Forest and Rivers News or on the MKWC Website.
Felice Pace
Felice was born on January 10, 1947 into a working class Italian Community in South Philadelphia. He holds a BA in Economics from Yale U., an MA in Education from Montclair State University and a life-time California teaching credential. He has worked as a teacher/educator, laborer, Outward Bound instructor, social services administrator and for Native American tribes. For fifteen years Felice worked for and led the Klamath Forest Alliance as Program Coordinator and Executive Director. Currently Felice engages as an independent Klamath River, Scott River, clean water and streamflow activist and pursues a number of writing projects. Felice blogs on Klamath River issues at www.KlamBlog.org.