Living With Fire

You'll be seeing burn scars for much of today, so let me give you the science, because the story people carry around about forest fire is mostly wrong.

These ponderosa forests EVOLVED with fire. Before we started interfering, a low, cool ground fire came through roughly every two to twenty years, burning grass, needles and seedlings and leaving the big trees standing — which is exactly what that thick, plated bark is for. The result was an open, park-like forest you could ride a horse through, with big trees widely spaced.

Then, for about a century, we put every fire out immediately. And the fuel that used to burn off every decade just accumulated — thickets of small trees, deep needle litter, ladders of brush reaching up into the canopy.

So when fire does come now, it doesn't creep along the ground. It climbs into the crowns and becomes something the forest never evolved to survive: a crown fire that kills everything and sterilises the soil.

That's why the Wallow Fire, which we'll come to, was what it was. And it's why you'll now see crews doing prescribed burns and thinning — deliberately putting fire back in, carefully, to undo a century of well-intentioned protection. Watch for the difference as we go: an old burn with grass and wildflowers and aspen shooting up is a forest recovering. A grey field of standing dead trunks with bare soil is not.