Region Archives: US West

Nick Smith

Writing recently on X, Frontier Institute President and CEO Kendall Cotton observed that Montana’s Horse Gulch Fire is burning in a portion of Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest that was slated for landscape-scale thinning and controlled burns, that is, before anti-forestry litigation dramatically scaled back the planned effort, known as the “Middleman Project.” …the Middleman Project planned active forest management on 53,131 acres to mitigate wildfire risks …Two years after the project was approved, two anti-forestry groups sued to stop the project, claiming it violated federal law… The litigants focused on the adequacy and detail of the 584-page Environmental Assessment. According to the Frontier Institute’s research, in April 2024 the Forest Service agreed to a settlement to reduce the scale of the Middleman Project, forgoing almost all of the planned timber harvest and temporary road construction. They even agreed to pay $39,000 of taxpayer dollars to the anti-forestry groups to cover attorney fees!

COLVILLE, Wash.—Kurtis Vaagen of Vaagen Bros Lumber leads a decade-long project to restore 50,000 acres of the Colville National Forest, aiming to create fire-resilient forests for future generations while emphasizing community and environmental stewardship. …Over the last three decades, state and federal policy changes have restricted timber harvests on both state and federal forestlands, compelling the forest products industry to adopt more efficient and sustainable timber harvesting practices. One lumber company based in Colville, Vaagen Bros Lumber, bid on a contract to restore the Colville National Forest over a decade ago. Emphasizing sustainability and the creation of future forests, Kurtis Vaagen, Vice President of Vaagen Bros Lumber, stated that their goal is to restore the forest to be fire-resilient for future generations.

LAKE TAHOE, Calif./Nev. – Tahoe Fire & Fuels Team forest thinning projects are underway in the Lake Tahoe Basin. These projects are expected to continue for the next several weeks with some projects continuing through the fall, conditions and weather permitting. For project details view the Forest Thinning Projects Map at Tahoe Living With Fire which highlights current and upcoming projects. After decades of fire suppression, Tahoe Basin’s forests are overstocked and highly vulnerable to insects, disease, and catastrophic wildfire. Forest thinning projects are a vital forest management tool used by land managers to help protect communities by removing excess vegetation (fuels) on public lands that can feed unwanted wildfires. These projects complement defensible space and home hardening efforts on private property in neighborhoods and communities. Forest thinning also contributes to improved forest health, wildlife habitat, and watershed and forest resilience in the face of climate change.

OREGON — One of the biggest fires burning in the United States is the Durkee Fire in eastern Oregon. As of Wednesday morning, the fire was reported at 244,858 acres and continues to grow as intense weather is expected to hit the area. The Oregon Department of Transportation closed Interstate 84 from Pendleton to Ontario on Wednesday. …The area is under a red flag warning, hurricane force winds and a flash flood warning, according to the Durkee Fire updates. The National Weather Service also expects extreme thunderstorms and lightning in the area. Due to the immense heat the Durkee Fire is creating and the existing winds, it is creating its own storms and changing the overall wind patterns. “We call those pyrocumulus and you end up with a thunderstorm over the fire because there’s so much heat and just enough moisture above the fire to get a storm that forms,” Mike Cantin, a meteorologist said.

Last week the Oregon Department of Forestry and Oregon State University researchers released a new draft map showing relative wildfire hazard throughout the state. They define wildfire hazard as a combination of how likely a wildfire is to occur and its potential intensity. The release comes two years after the state published a similar map, then called a “wildfire risk map,” before pulling the graphic over outrage from residents about how the information would impact property values and insurance rates. …This time around the state has focused on more public outreach to assuage fears like Byrd’s, hosting meetings in high-hazard areas in southern, central and northeastern Oregon. Other than public outreach, the color scheme of the new draft map has changed and there are fewer categories of wildfire hazard — three compared to five. But, as Golden explained, it’s not a drastically different map.

PORTLAND, Ore. – Millions of acres of national forest lands across Oregon and Washington are continuing to see record-breaking dry timber conditions on both sides of the Cascades, the U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday. These critical conditions are spurring rapid wildfire growth from recent lightning storms, including the July 16-17th storms which produced over 2,000 strikes in 48 hours. Places like the Fremont-Winema and Deschutes national forests in Oregon have surpassed 75 days without wetting rains. And 45 days without wetting rain is widespread across the Pacific Northwest from the Rogue River-Siskiyou area of far southern Oregon over to the Wallowa-Whitman range in the east and north into the Okanogan-Wenatchee country of central Washington. “This is shaping up to be another monster fire year in the Pacific Northwest – and it’s just mid-July,” said Ed Hiatt, Pacific Northwest Assistant Fire Director for Operations.

Barred owl and spotted owl

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a plan to start killing 15,000 barred owls a year in the Pacific Northwest, starting as soon as this fall. This extraordinary initiative — more than a dozen years in the making — is intended to save the imperiled northern spotted owl from extinction. Barred owls have been moving west into spotted owl territory for decades, aggressively outcompeting them for prey and nesting sites. If its plan is adopted, the federal agency will soon launch what’s expected to be a three-decade campaign in which certified hunters will eventually shoot nearly half a million barred owls. Bridget Moran, with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Bend, Oregon, has been working on the strategy. “The spotted owl is at a crossroads. We have the science to indicate what we can do to conserve spotted owls, and [it’s] telling us that we must manage barred owls in addition to habitat to save them.”

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A newly enhanced database is expected to help wildfire managers and scientists better predict where and when wildfires may occur by incorporating hundreds of additional factors that impact the ignition and spread of fire. “There is a tremendous amount of interest in what enables wildfire ignitions and what can be done to prevent them,” said Erica Fleishman, an Oregon State University professor. The Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database was developed in 2013 by the U.S. Forest Service and since been updated five times. It incorporates basic information such as ignition location, discovery date and final wildfire size. The revised database now includes many new environmental and social factors, such as topography and vegetation, social vulnerability and economic justice metrics, and practical attributes such as the distance from the ignition to the nearest road.

ARIZONA—Navajo County last week celebrated hard won gains in the decade-long effort to protect fire-prone communities. An effort to save the timber industry in the White Mountains and thin overgrown forests has doubled the annual acres thinned while skirting the edge of financial disaster, government relations director Rochelle Lacapa told the supervisors at its last meeting. Navajo County Supervisor Jason Whiting currently heads the Northern Arizona Counties Association, which has taken the lead in saving the struggling timber industry and keeping forest-restoration efforts alive. The Apache Sitgreaves National Forests now hand out contracts for thinning projects in the White Mountains that cover about 16,000 acres annually. A decade ago, the White Mountains Stewardship Program managed to thin about 8,000 acres per year, while receiving a Forest Service subsidy of about $3,000 to $5,000 per acre. That effort is widely credited with saving Alpine and perhaps Springerville from the Wallow Fire.

Hamilton, Montana — Just days after going to “Very High” fire danger, the Bitterroot National Forest announced today that it is raising its fire danger level to “Extreme” and will go into Stage 2 fire restrictions starting Friday, July 19, due to continued hot weather and record dry fuel conditions. Extreme is the highest fire danger level possible.  When fire danger is “Extreme,” fires start quickly, spread furiously, and burns intensely.  All fires are potentially serious and development into high intensity burning will be faster and occur even on smaller fires.  Direct attack – fire fighters using direct methods to suppress a fire – is rarely possible and may be dangerous except immediately after ignition. … Forest officials are asking the public to be especially careful when camping and visiting the forest.

Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Forestry will release the proposed wildfire hazard map at 8 a.m. Thursday. There, Oregonians can look up specific tax lots to see how susceptible they are to wildfires. This is Oregon’s second attempt at creating a wildfire map. State fire officials and OSU first released a map in 2022 under a tight one-year deadline set by Senate Bill 762. That first iteration received intense public backlash, particularly from property owners concerned it would affect their homeowners’ insurance. The state ultimately rescinded it. ….Once the map is finalized in October, the state’s Building Code Division will begin its administrative process for creating new building codes, and the Oregon State Fire Marshal will begin creating rules for defensible space. Both processes will have opportunities for public comment.

So far in this year’s California’s wildfire season, about 20 times more acres of land have burned than around this time last year. Since the beginning of the year, there were more than 3,500 wildfires across the state through early July, causing about 207,000 acres of land to burn. Around this time last year, about 10,000 acres had burned. The five-year average of acres burned through mid-July is about 39,000, Cal Fire said last week. “We are not just in a fire season, but we are in a fire year,” Joe Tyler, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said at a news conference earlier in July. …As part of its 2024 budget, California will allocate $2.6 billion through 2028 to fighting wildfires and improving forest health, in addition to $200 million annually to help prevent fires. 

WALDPORT, Oregon – A plan to spray herbicides on a Weyerhaeuser clearcut near one of Waldport’s municipal water sources has drawn condemnation by people who oppose the practice and triggered city officials to take precautionary measures. City officials have not yet been notified when ground spraying on the 110-acre “Pankey Pit” clearcut located immediately east of Waldport on Mount Eckman will begin, the 14-day public comment period required before any action ends Wednesday. …The City’s plan includes having an observer on site during the spray, shutting down the water intake for 72 hours and conducting water tests to determine if any contaminates exist. …“This is out of an abundance of caution,” city manager Dann Cutter told YachatsNews. “We will be on site and monitoring, but only a very narrow portion of the logged area falls into the watershed above our intake. Their mapping shows a significant buffer zone.”

This opinion editorial is a rebuttal to “Burn Back Better? USFS Chief’s Letter Of Intent Provokes Revolt In The Firefighting Community” One of the best methods for reducing the impact of wildfires is to reduce the number of trees per acre by thinning the larger trees and following up with prescribed fire, to enhance forest resilience, by removing surplus smaller trees that act as ladder fuels and potentially killing the larger trees in a wildfire. …Let’s … support the Forest Service when in “Full Suppression” mode and when implementing fuels treatment projects. We need to armor against the uninformed individuals who throw rocks and promote untrue and misleading characterizations of fuels treatments the Forest Service has accomplished using beneficial fire. It is time we push back and use all our collective influence to cooperatively work together and with the Fire and Smoke Management Agencies to reduce the flammability of California’s and Nevada’s fire-prone landscapes.

In recent years, California wildfires have taken on increased severity and reshaped the landscape. California Spotted Owls in the state’s central and southern forests—have been feeling that heat: Destructive megafires burned more of their habitat in 2020 and 2021 alone than in the previous 35 years. Experts say these growing disasters represent the most urgent threat to the birds. Recognizing this mounting menace—along with other hazards—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year announced plans to give the birds Endangered Species Act protections. Yet the California Spotted Owl’s best hope, counterintuitively, may also lie in fire. Research increasingly suggests that lower-severity burning not only inoculates many drier forests against destructive megafires, but also creates the mosaic of habitat types that the birds gravitate toward. …fire will frame the future for these birds, either devouring the forests they need to survive or clearing a path toward a safer future.

ARIZONA—The USDA Forest Service is developing a five-year plan to reintroduce native plants and ponderosa pine trees in a 551-acre section of the Telegraph Fire burn scar to reestablish habitat for the Mexican spotted owl. Restoration also will support the San Carlos Apache Tribal Forest Protection landscape, one of 21 landscapes the Forest Service recently identified as part of the agency’s 10-year strategy for confronting the wildfire crisis, by reducing wildfire exposure to communities within the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. The Telegraph Fire burned through 180,757 acres in June 2021 on the Tonto National Forest Globe Ranger District. The fire reduced the Mexican spotted owls’ nesting source (ponderosa pine) and protected activity centers. These centers sustain and enhance sections of the forest that are presently, recently or historically occupied by breeding Mexican spotted owls.

Commercial logging may proceed in a Forest Service project south of Anaconda, but all other activities must cease until a lawsuit is concluded, according to a federal judge. On Friday, two and a half weeks after hearing oral arguments, Missoula federal district judge Dana Christensen issued his ruling granting most of the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction to stop the Pintler Face Project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. All noncommercial activity, such as thinning and prescribed burning, will be put on hold across the 73,000-acre project until the lawsuit is concluded, but Christensen allowed the four commercial timber sales to go forward to prevent economic hardship. The logging work is slated to start on July 16. …Mike Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director, said he was happy that the judge said the plaintiffs are likely to win the lawsuit on the merits.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Forest scientists at Oregon State University studying tree regeneration have found that wildfire smoke comes with an unexpected benefit: It has a cooling capacity that can make life easier for vulnerable seedlings. …Smoke’s impact on maximum and average near-surface temperature was similar to the temperature reduction caused by an increase of 15% in canopy cover, OSU College of Forestry research assistant Amanda Brackett said. The finding is line with the idea that while smoke can cause a range of concerns, fire is a natural forest occurrence with ecological upsides. …“Smoke absorbs and scatters incoming solar radiation, reducing how much reaches the forest floor, but we did not anticipate seeing this level of impact,” she said. “That extra cooling effect may be important during extreme heat events when canopy cover and topography do not provide enough protection from harmful and potentially lethal temperatures in the understory.”