John McCarthy's Journal

August 11, 2007 : Trapper Creek, Idaho

6:35 am Crawl out of the tent: catch early light above the black spine of the Sawtooth Mountains. I put on my yellow fire shirt and green protective pants to join 10 members of the Yosemite Fire crew for a day working with fire.

Camp sits above 8,000 feet along a ridgeline between the Sawtooth Wilderness and Ten Mile roadless area in the Boise National Forest. Here, in these big areas of wild land, fire can play its natural role and fire is beneficial for the landscape. Up over the north ridge are scattered cabins and a sensitive watershed, where a fire would be bad. In these remote areas is the challenge of fire management today -- walking the fine line on the fire line --between good for the land and bad for people.

6:40 am Breakfast: fruit, cereal, bread and jam - no toaster.

7:01 am Photo op: sun pokes over the Sawtooths.

7:03 am Coffee ready: good coffee from a French press. These guys are from California.

7:05 am Trapper Ridge Wildland Fire Use morning briefing: Trapper Base, down in the valley at the Lowman Ranger District, radios us. "We're looking at a Red Flag Warning today and tomorrow, starting this afternoon at 1500 hours. Low relative humidity below 15 percent with little recovery overnight, combined with high winds, gusts up to 35 miles per hour and a Haines Index of 6. Break."

"Yeah, alright," calls out the crew boss, Jeff Hinson, age 34. These folks like fire.

"We're going to see a lot more activity, with spotting fires and ground fire movement," says Dave Koch, division commander. "The big picture is going well. The full suppression effort on the north boundary is holding. We're seeing scattered heat in the east and the southwest."

About 18,000 acres are involved in Trapper Ridge Wildland Fire Use (WFU), where the management effort is to gain resource benefits from fire on the landscape. Tomorrow is the fourth week of keeping this fire going in the right direction, and keeping it away from problem areas. The young men I'm preparing to go with into the fire are here to direct the fire and put it out only if it goes the wrong way. I'm here to see how and why they do it. Because I work for The Wilderness Society in forest management, I want to see fire on the land for its ecological values and still be safe for people.

Koch explains he wants to split the Yosemite crew, with half going about six miles away to a different vantage point. "I wouldn't have walked all the way over there yesterday - if I thought we were going to send people there," Jeff says to the crew, not over the radio. In the radio he says, "Copy. When will we make the move?" Times are set and crew members are selected.

7:10 am Camp split: These folks are a Wildland Fire Use Module, a specialized fire crew that is self-sufficient and able to stay in the field for two weeks or more. Food, water, gear and cooking equipment is often flown by helicopter into remote wilderness or roadless lands. "Heli-camping," they call it. They split all the food and camp gear into two piles - tossing boxes and bags into different ice chests. "We've got a lot of random food but with some creativity we'll be OK for a couple days," says assistant crew boss Isaiah Hirschfield, 33. The split takes up almost two hours.

8:35 am Smoke: I walk out the ridge to look for fire. Smoke is visible about a mile and a half away. We're at the northeast corner of the fire, and it's spotty, leaving a mixed intensity, varied patchwork of burned, un-burned, hot, not hot forest. The mix of intensity looks good and will be good for the land.

8:37 am Woodpecker: A hairy woodpecker alights in a whitebark pine. Whitebark pine are fire-dependent trees. Fire opens a seedbed and eliminates competition from shade tolerant trees. Whitebark pine-nuts are critical food for bears, birds and chipmunks.

9:15 am Time to head out: Jeff gives us our assignment. "Get out there and see what's going on."

Four of us hike out, with lunches, four quarts water, hand tools, hard hats, two radios and full PPE, and personal protection equipment including fire shelters. I've got almost three decades on all of them.

9:30 am Fire line: A fire line was cut about a 100 feet wide, straight down a 45-degree slope, in the effort to keep the fire from heading north to the sensitive watershed and scattered summer cabins. Although fire use is beneficial for nutrient cycles, water quality, fish and wildlife, parts of an area may need to be protected, especially for human safety and property. The north side presented a serious challenge to keep the fire from running down slope. Helicopters with water buckets, airplanes with fire retardant and a couple hundred people worked to keep the fire out of harm's way.

"Very nice, they did a low-impact line here with the limbs cut away from ground flames instead of cutting the trees down," says Danie Brocchini, 24. And they scattered the branches instead of making big piles. Most people will probably walk right by it. You don't often see that kind of work from a shot crew."

The Black Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew from Nevada did a 10-day hitch here and cut the fire line.

"It's a very gray line between fire use and full-on suppression sometimes," Daniel says. The basic technique of wildfire fighting is to cut a line down to bare soil around it, to check spread and then proceed to choke out the fuels. With fire use it's never fully lined, confined-contained-controlled. It's uncontrolled from start to finish, but there are often a lot of management actions, hence the grey line.

In many ways, it's easier to overdo firefighting and throw everything at a fire to stop it. I t's harder to manage a fire to keep it going, skirting the danger zones and facing risks of blow-ups every day. Doing everything possible to put a fire out is a simpler decision, than doing everything smart to keep it going its natural course.

9:36 am Walk into the black: into the fire perimeter, where variable intensity patterns are obvious. A lot of green plants from grasses to trees remain - it's not all black.

9:38 am First smoke: a downed lodgepole pine smolders. We walk on by. With suppression, at the edge of the fire, we'd be throwing dirt, digging the log into the ground, doing mop-up. With fire use, we walk. "Up here we know it's not going very far, maybe burn log-to-log, and burn itself out. We keep eyes on it and see what happens," Daniel says.

"See what happens" could be a Fire Use Module motto. If fire moves in the desired direction - all OK. If it goes in an undesired direction - they take action, everything from hand work to calling in aerial support.

9:46 am North Fork Boise River drainage view: we look down into Rabbit Fire, where more than 150,000 acres burned in 1994 - most at high intensity. All-consuming fire is one of the reasons to manage for smaller, variable intensity fires - to avoid large fires where dense, uniform vegetation makes a continuous fuel load and can take off across vast areas. Rabbit Fire curls around south and east of Trapper Ridge WFU, reducing the fuel load where it bumps into the old burn. Old burns don't burn big or hot. A mixed landscape with patchy old burns means it's not likely to burn huge.

9:58 am First radio check: "See any heat?," Jeff asks.
"Just some puffing, log-to-log," Dan replies.
"Heads-up in the black; watch for snags," Jeff says.
"Copy."

9:55 am Wolf track: fresh, maybe this morning. I howl, to show the California guys how it's done. No answer.

10:22 am Spring fed pond: even at this elevation there are seeps and springs, prime wildlife habitat, and we see lots of elk tracks. Fire opens up the forest for new growth, in succulent forbs and shrubs.

10:27 am Take five for safety: walking hard without a trail, working up a sweat already. Yosemite FUM is on day five, with an additional day driving up from home base at the National Park. The first days were spent reconnoitering the territory and getting fully conditioned. "Nothing really prepares you for 8,000 feet," says Ian Santa Cruz, 29. Another crew member pulled in his belt four notches already.

Cooper Fouch, 24, explains how both he and Ian are recent UC-Davis graduates, business and history respectively, but the job market isn't great. "We're both out here."

I got to come out here for at least three reasons. One, I took the week long, basic fire school last summer to be safe and to know procedures on fires. Two, I've spent a lot of days in the field and talking with fire managers since then. Three, a backpack trip last week toughened me up to be able to keep up. I'm here to see fire use in action.

10:41 am Helicopter: hear the chop of the helicopter pickup for the other crew.

10: 58 am "Hinson - Hirschfield, were at H-3." The other crew is moved.

11:02 am At the lookout point: we've climbed up a knob to get an expansive view down the North Fork, at 8,400 feet with about 300 degrees open sight looking north, east and south.

11:10 am Weather check: Daniel does the first of hourly weather checks: relative humidity, dew point, wind speed and direction, temperature, and probability of ignition.

11:32 am Chase smoke: Jeff calls in for Ian and Coop to head back downhill and hook in with the fifth crew member, Brian Good, 24, to put out a smoke threatening to take off and move north. Brian hauls the chain saw out of camp to open up some burn clusters.

11:40 am Smoke blowing our way: the ridge before West Fork Creek is swirling with smoke. "I expect fire will come over the ridge soon from the other side," Daniel says. It's about three-quarters of a mile to the ridge from where we are.

11:51 am First tree torches off: Smoke swirls in waves and flames surge in a crackling roar. Sub-alpine fir are a dominant species up here, with limbs drooping to the ground. When they ignite, the fire catches from the bottom and lights off like a torch.

12:02 pm Single engine aircraft over head: air patrol flies over us, circles and calls on the air-to-ground channel after Daniel flashes a mirror to show where we are. "It's pretty open slopes and even as it's spotting it will move pretty slow," air patrol says.

"Yeah, that's what it looks like from here," Daniel says.

"Hey, I'm glad you're there with a good view, you'll save me a lot of flying time," air patrols says as they fly west.

12:15 pm Two hawks over head: probably red tails, one does a barrel roll.

12:42 pm Helicopter recon: Dave Koch calls down, "it looks like it could head north but not likely it will crown out." Crowning fires throw flame direct from tree to tree. Spotting fires toss embers with the wind, sometimes a half mile in big gusts. Ground fires run through brush and grass. Rolling fires move down steep slopes carried by burning logs. Assessments here are for spotting and rolling, with little tree density or grass to move in the crown or on the ground at anticipated wind speeds.

Dave is from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and works most of the year as a fire trainer. The Yosemite crew is from the National Park Service. We're on Forest Service ground, with Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state fire people and private contractors all also having a hand in it. Fire management is an interagency, all-hands on-deck kind of operation. It works because of cooperation, based on old-fashioned neighborliness in times of need.

12:55 pm Fire use work: "it's monitoring, somebody's got to keep eyes on these fires due to its potential to get up and run," Daniel says. "That's where we come in, to go out, set up shop and be on the ground."

If people are going to be at all comfortable with fire use, regular surveillance relieves some of the worry. Fire Use Modules, 17 crews nationwide from all the land management agencies, are designed to have flexibility to put people on the ground in remote areas - splitting up the crew in pairs if needed. Back home in the National Park, Yosemite FUM does all its fuels work in a six to seven month season, doing prescribed or controlled burns, slash burning from thinning projects, suppression to protect people and structures, and fire use to return fire to the landscape.

The crew talks all the time about fire behavior, fire ecology, fire effects, fire technology.

"A major mistake is the common assumption to think fire is all bad - put it out, always," Daniel says. "We put all fires out for 80 to 100 years and I've heard it said it will take that long to restore the fire cycles."

I say, go one step further - fire is good for the land at the right times and in the right places.

1:14 pm Crew boss arrives: Jeff sizes up the fire potential with Daniel. "It's going to keep backing down and connect with that old Rabbit Fire. It's going to take a couple days at least," Jeff says.

1:39 pm Helicopter recon: "If it starts to get up on this slope, we'll call in some buckets," Dave says as they fly over a trigger point, perpendicular to the river, where they will take action. "I don't think it has a lot of potential to get there. This is a good monitoring gig for you, to see what it's doing," he adds as they fly to the other corner with activity.

2:07 pm Another torch, down-slope: "That's what it's going to do all day, make little runs with some spotting," Jeff says.

2:30 pm Other fire use work: in addition to gathering data, monitoring movements and hand work with fire lines, fire modules do point protection for cabins, bridges, and sensitive resources like salmon spawning beds, Jeff explains. Sometimes they lay hose for sprinklers or wrap buildings with a tin foil-like shield. They often leave behind a blueprint with specs to speed doing it next fire. They also can do back-burns, to ignite fuels to have fire burn into spent fuels.

2:50 pm More torching at irregular intervals: every hour the temperature goes up, relative humidity goes down, wind gusts speed up. Red Flag Warning seems appropriate. Torching continues across the ridge at various locations. It's easy to see how fires can be spotty at varying intensity.

3:15 pm Lower crew moves on: Brian calls in with report on breaking up the hot spot. Jeff sends them into the upper end of the North Fork drainage to check on fuel loads.

3:28 pm Falcon at eye level, maybe a prairie falcon, whizzes by.

3:55 pm Smoke column south: a major smoke festers in the south, more than 50 miles away toward the edge of the forest into the sagebrush ecosystem. Forms into a fist-like column with smoke plume running northeast toward Sun Valley. Another hawk.

4:15 pm Smoke column north: another smoke boils up to the north, maybe 50 miles away. Expect it's the Monumental Fire east of Cascade, threatening the cabins around Warm Lake. Smoke is a major problem with all wildfires, for health reasons and disruptions to people's summer activities. Last week, I backpacked in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and could see from the ridge across the Middle Fork Salmon River canyon, about 10 miles wide. Now the air is thickening with smoke.

4:25 pm Smoke column northeast: another smoke rises above the horizon, about 75 miles out. Suspect it's Shower Bath Fire on the Salmon-Challis National Forest, which chased us out of the wilderness last week when the access road closed the day we left. Road closures limit recreation and constrict potential emergency evacuations.

4:53 pm Torching again: fire slops over the ridge in three spots, burning out holes up to five acres.

5:05 pm Big idea: we can't and shouldn't even try to put all fires out. When you're keeping track of these wilderness and roadless forest fires, it's important not to get caught off guard. The air attack retardant and bucket drops, the dozers and hand crews digging line -- these protection efforts are needed close to communities - not out here. Here, fire is part of the natural cycles just like rain and snow. Idaho has almost 1.5 million acres involved in fire so far this season. In the midst of all the protection efforts, there are two other big Wildland Fire Use complexes going on in different forests, in addition to Trapper Ridge. Amidst the overall intense, long, hot summer - fire is playing its natural role.

6:20 pm Think about going to camp: Jeff asks if there are any dinner plans.

7:05 pm Looking for smoke: Brian calls in with report on fuels down below. They shine a mirror signal for us to locate them. Jeff directs him by compass bearing to a hot spot in the basin. They never locate it, where trees hide the smoke, while we can view it with ease from above.

7:07 pm Red tail hawk: eye level.

7:10 pm The evening weather shifts: first rise in humidity and drop in temperatures all afternoon.

7:22 pm Good day: "we got out, saw some fire happening," Jeff says as we head back to camp.

7:49 pm Hot spot: a couple of lodgepole snags are aflame down in the forest, for no apparent connective reason, as we walk by.

8:04 pm Mop up: at the hot spots on the ridge where Brian and the others knocked down fuels, we stop to pull some logs into the burnout area. Daniel and Jeff pile some bigger sticks, toss on cut green branches for ignition and walk away as the fire burns off the fuel. In regular mop up operations, you'd load everything into the zone and put it out cold with dirt. We walk on.

8:31 pm Back at camp: smoke plume from the southern fire smudges the crest of the Sawtooths, as sunset throws orangey pink on the peaks.

8:45 pm Recap the day: everyone recounts fire observations and looks over maps. The fuel and terrain situations from the other crew members are described. "It's definitely good to figure out what that part of the fire is doing," Jeff says.

8:50 pm Dinner: Burrito makings are done, with meat, rice, beans, salsa, even avocado. These guys are from California, and we all roll up a couple.

9:01 pm Distant giant smoke: "Whoa, check it out," Jeff calls, to point out Shower Bath Fire, 75 miles away, glowing fiery red from alpenglow in a many mile-high column.

9:02 pm Last radio check-in: "What did you see today," asks Trapper Base. Back and forth on fire behavior, supply needs.

9:15 pm Boot fire: Coop still telling stories about a hot ember getting under the brush guard in his boot. "I'm wondering what's that smell and then it's like my foot was on fire."

9:25 pm Night fire: first star and dark enough to see flames kicking up over in Ten Mile drainage, with trees torching. First three spots, then five, up to nine, cools to one. Thousands of stars out now.

10:35 pm Tent: crash.

Fire in the Media » « The Trapper Ridge Story