Region Archives: US West

At an “end-of-season” briefing Wednesday in Springfield, federal and state firefighters gave U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle an update on where fire season stands in the region. U.S. Forest Service Deputy Regional Forester Merv George Jr. said there are currently 12 active incidents with 1,700 firefighters working them in Oregon. “Make no mistake, fire season is still here,” he said. “And we are waiting for season-ending weather to put our fire season to bed.” …George said this has been one of the wildest and most unpredictable fire seasons he’s ever seen. He said more than 2 million acres have burned in the Pacific Northwest. …Following a meeting with firefighters, Wyden said there is still much to do to adequately support wildfire fighting and fire suppression efforts in Oregon. At the briefing, both lawmakers outlined proposals to prevent and reduce the risk of fires in the future.

Sarah Jakober is a U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighter who serves on the Grand Ronde Rappel Crew based in Grande, Oregon. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on being a wildland firefighter. Jakober provides a window into a day on the job as climate change lengthens wildfire seasons and intensifies their impact.

CALIFORNIA — Along coastal California, the possibility of earthquakes and landslides is commonly prefaced by the phrase, “not if, but when.” This precarious reality is now a bit more predictable thanks to researchers at UC Santa Cruz and The University of Texas at Austin, who found that conditions known to cause slip along fault lines deep underground also lead to landslides above. …In California, where slow-moving slides are constant and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, this represents a major step forward in the ability to predict landslide movements—particularly in response to environmental factors like changes in groundwater levels. …”At a practical level, this study provides us with a framework for understanding how much motion to expect based on a change in rainfall, which leads to a change in water pressure in the ground that then translates into motion,” said Noah Finnegan, a professor of earth and planetary sciences.

Steve Daines

U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) recently requested more transparency from the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) about wildfire management strategy actions to help the public better understand how USFS plans to handle wildfires. … “Specifically, the Forest Service is not being transparent with state partners and the public about which wildfire management strategies are being used,” he said in a statement. “This includes whether fire monitoring is considered part of full suppression or if one wildfire can be split into different management strategies for different sections of the wildfire.” …In an Oct. 11 letter sent to USFS Chief Randy Moore, the lawmaker also noted that communities bordering National Forest System lands follow reports on nearby wildfires and their management closely to protect their lives and homes.

WASHINGTON — At a reforestation site in Washington, forest managers are experimenting with “assisted migration” — planting trees from warmer, drier regions — to boost the forest’s resilience. …“Forest geneticists spent decades and decades convincing foresters that they should use local populations of trees to get their seed from for reforestation,” said forest geneticist Sally Aitken, who has been studying the implications of climate change for trees since the early ’90s. But as the changing climate has created both new extremes and a new normal outside of what local species evolved to withstand, some forest managers are championing an approach that replants with trees adapted not to the current climate, but to the future one. …Despite the results from experiments like Stossel Creek, and others that have occurred in the Eastern U.S. as well as Canada and Mexico, assisted migration is still a controversial practice. 

DURKEE, Oregon — As the Durkee Fire burned in eastern Oregon, other major fires blazed at the same time across Oregon and Washington, straining both national and state resources. Fire crews were so strapped nationally that firefighters from Virginia with little experience with range wildfires were the only personnel available. When the fire season began to ebb at the end of September, 1.9 million acres in Oregon had burned — a state record. …The average acreage that burns each year statewide has doubled every decade since the 1990s, said Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden, who chairs the Senate Interim Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire. …In Oregon, current funding mechanisms are inadequate to address the growing complexity and cost of wildfires, Joe Krawczyk said, and the need for a “sustainable and equitable funding structure has never been more urgent.” 

When a horse dies in the Wyoming backcountry, sometimes the best way to keep it from attracting grizzly bears is using explosives to blow the carcass into tiny pieces. In fact, the U.S. Forest Service even has a how-to instruction guide how to best do that, titled “Obliterating Animal Carcasses With Explosives.” But it’s so hot and dry right now, the Forest Service can’t explode the carcasses of two horses that slipped and tumbled to their deaths Friday on a remote trail near Cody out of fear that the blasts would ignite a wildfire. …the reasoning behind exploding carcasses is brutally simple. …If the blasting goes well, the carcass is completely disintegrated, Crosby Davidson, a Forest Service regional blast expert, told Cowboy State Daily. “Later, you might find a bear licking the dirt, but there’s nothing for him to defend, so he behaves differently than if there’s a whole carcass.”

To understand the controversy around cutting Washington’s older trees, you have to get to know an economic supply line, from tree to timber to cash. There are the trees and forests themselves, then the timber cruisers and surveyors, the loggers, the millworkers, the timber town residents, the local beneficiaries of timber sales, from hospitals to libraries, the county commissioners and other officials — and the logging opponents. …We met the employees at the Washington Department of Natural Resources who lay out a sale, as well as loggers cutting trees so big on slopes so steep that some of the logging equipment was chained to a bulldozer to keep it from toppling downhill. Then we went out with opponents ripping down timber sale boundary markers to foil the sale of a forest on the Olympic Peninsula.

…Republicans in the U.S. House – including Oregon’s two Republican representatives – are hoping Congress will pass a bill before year’s end that would tackle increasingly large wildfires in the West by scaling back environmental regulations to make it easier to log and cut vegetation in federal forests… the “Fix Our Forests Act” passed the U.S. House on Sept. 24… It is expected to get a vote in the U.S. Senate after the November general election… Proponents say the bill would restore forest health, increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires and protect communities by expediting environmental analyses while reducing frivolous lawsuits and step up restoration projects. But opponents, including environmentalists and Democrats, say it would open millions of acres of federal land to logging without scientific review or community input, potentially increasing the risk of wildfires while rolling back regulations to protect endangered and threatened species.

PHOENIX – Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment Dr. Homer Wilkes and Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs signed a Shared Stewardship Agreement to strengthen collaboration between state and federal land management agencies in the State of Arizona. The State of Arizona and the USDA Forest Service have a long and successful record of collaborating on efforts to improve forest health and resilience. Today’s agreement focuses on federal and state agencies working together to respond to land management challenges and concerns across Arizona forests. Today’s agreement builds on a 2020 Shared Stewardship Memorandum of Understanding, aimed at accelerating the pace and scale of projects like the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI), and will assist the state and the Forest Service in their continued efforts to address the wildfire crisis in Arizona’s high priority “firesheds ” using funding from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.

Oregon state officials today released records that shed some light on the abrupt suspension of the second-ranking official at the Oregon Department of Forestry, deputy state forester Mike Shaw. WW first reported in August that the agency had placed Shaw on leave during the height of the largest wildfire season in Oregon history. …On Aug. 6, Shaw’s boss, Cal Mukumoto, the state forester, sent DAS director Berri Leslie an email with the subject line “ODF sensitive issue.” …The alleged misconduct is not specified in Mukumoto’s letter, but other emails that show a series of emails from a former female Department of Forestry diversity, equity and inclusion official expressing frustration that Shaw had excluded her from what the agency calls “leadership team” meetings. …On Oct. 10, The Oregonian reported a story on ODF that appears related.

Americans visit hiking and camping areas managed by the U.S. Forest Service more than 150 million times each year. …Due to a looming budget cut, the agency will not be hiring seasonal staff for the next fiscal year, leaving thousands of people out of work and putting essential conservation and biodiversity work at risk. …The spending bill that recently passed the U.S House of Representatives gave the agency around half a billion dollars less than it requested, meaning that the Forest Service faces a large budget cut. Most of the other environmental and science-based federal agencies also face large cuts. Meanwhile, the money that the agency received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law, has already been spent. …This decision does not apply to the more than 11,000 temporary firefighting positions that the Forest Service hires every year.

SACRAMENTO – California unveiled newly updated, first-of-their-kind dashboards that will help Californians track the state’s wildfire prevention work. Along with these new tools, state officials announced that 700,000 acres of land were treated for wildfire resilience in 2023, and that prescribed fire more than doubled between 2021 and 2023. For the first time, all fuels management projects are being tracked in one place, on one map, delivering valuable information for project planning and wildfire response. The updated Interagency Treatment Dashboard, led by the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, now covers data from 2021 to 2023, showing the acres of completed wildfire resilience (or “treatments”) work. …CAL FIRE also launched the Fuel Treatment Effectiveness Dashboard, which tracks how wildfire prevention projects have helped shield communities and landscapes from wildfires.

In March 1989, environmental activists from Earth First! chained themselves to trees and buried themselves under rocks, unsuccessfully preventing the North Roaring Devil timber sale in Breintenbush Hot Springs, Oregon. Dubbed the “Easter Massacre,” it ignited the Timber Wars, a years-long slew of protests, academic disputes and legal battles fixated on protecting mature, old-growth forests and the endangered northern spotted owl, ultimately culminating in the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP). Passed in 1994, the NWFP is a land management strategy that governs more than 24 million acres of federal forests across Oregon, Washington and Northern California — balancing conservation and ecological resilience with a logging economy that many small, rural communities depend on. Now, it’s getting amended, and much has changed over the past three decades. …The USFS intends to release its draft plan on Nov. 6. While the agency isn’t required to adopt any of the FAC’s recommendations, incorporating just some may reshape how the Northwest’s forests are managed.

DARRINGTON, Washington – Locals are being tapped to collect pine cones in an effort to store seeds to re-grow forests before wildfires destroy natural seed banks in the Pacific Northwest. This fall, cone collectors hit mountainous locations in search of fresh pine cones around Darrington. …Collecting cones for cash is hardly new, though, there is more attention on the work than ever before as concerns grow with larger, more destructive wildfires along the West Coast. In Darrington, a non-profit called Glacier Peak Institute acts as the middleman between Mast Reforestation and Silvaseed, the end-users of the seeds being collected today. …Kea Woodruff, Silvaseed’s general manager, “Under whatever future scenarios happen in the landscape, we had the seed we’re collecting that captures all that range of diversity so we can put trees back into the landscape in the future.”

Fire has always played a significant role in Pacific Northwest forests. Fire in the Cascades, historically sparked by lightning strikes, led to a natural succession that cleared debris on the forest floor, eliminated old and weaker individual trees, provided room for new plant growth, and, in the case of ponderosa pines, induced germination. …Yet today, due to several factors, the historical “fire season” has been replaced with the “fire year.” “Climate change has had a dramatic impact on the forest,” says George Geissler, deputy supervisor over Fire Management at the Department of Natural Resources. …As Washington state’s forester, Geissler is charged with maintaining healthy forests across the state. He says the region’s diverse environments require specific management techniques, noting that the dry eastern foothills of the Cascades are significantly different from the “almost tropical” forests of the Olympic Peninsula.

ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — The Orange County Fire Authority and U.S. Forest Service are battling over accusations that USFS policies grounded an elite aerial unit during major fires and left the Cleveland National Forest susceptible to the recent Airport blaze that torched 23,526 acres. Southern California congressional members want answers from Forest Service officials. One point of contention involves the Southern California-based Quick Reaction Force, a squad of night-flying, converted military helicopters that can drop 3,000 gallons of water and fire retardant. The force’s operators, led by Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy, allege the USFS at times grounded the team during one of the busiest fire seasons in recent history. …The crux of the issue: for the last four years, U.S. Forest Service policy has required that all aerial supervisors …must be government employees … they must work for a government agency. This policy applies only to fires in national wildlands or using USFS resources.

BOISE, Idaho — …the Wapiti Fire that tore across the steep terrain of the Boise National Forest … was a fitting example of this year’s Idaho fire season, which has left officials scrambling to keep up. Wildfires are striking more frequently and with greater intensity across the United States, a trend that will continue without action to address climate change. According to Josh Harvey, chief of fire management for the state Department of Lands, Idaho has had 318 fires this year, which have collectively burned 53,765 acres. Of those, 133 were caused by humans, while 119 were sparked by lightning. Another 66 are still under investigation. …The wildfire threat is increasing for several reasons, Harvey said, including population growth and more people moving into areas that used to be untouched. …Jen Pierce, an associate professor of geosciences at Boise State University, noted how climate change is reshaping fire seasons across the United States. Idaho is no exception.

Cecilia Greco

As climate change heightens wildfire activity and extends the wildfire season, it is imperative to implement commonsense, responsible methods of active forest management to control and mitigate wildfires. …With six out of the last seven years being the planet’s most intense wildfire seasons on record, active forest management is vital in mitigating the effects of fires and preventing future fires from spreading uncontrollably. …active forest management cannot be implemented unless bureaucratic red tape is cut and environmental review processes are reformed. …Active forest management involves using time-tested and systematic techniques to reduce the occurrence of wildfires. …To go from fire mismanagement to active management, two members of the House Committee on Natural Resources have proposed the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act. The act aims to streamline the environmental review process for efficient approval of forest management projects, ensuring they are timely and cost-effective.