Region Archives: US West

In May 2022, a group of men climbed to the top of Hyperion, a 380-foot tree that is currently the tallest in the world. When their leader, Simeon Balsam, reached the crown, he and another climber drank a cup of tea. “What absolute legends,” Balsam said from behind a camera trained on the beaming group of climbers. Balsam documented the adventure in an hourlong film posted to YouTube. It’s a braggadocious watch, full of self-satisfied narration, and inspirational house music — and proof of illegal activity. According to the film, the 11 men spent months planning the trip within Redwood National and State Parks and accumulating gear before flying from the United Kingdom to California to climb Hyperion and other old-growth redwoods. They did not obtain required permits. Furthermore, they climbed into an ecologically sensitive habitat during the breeding season of threatened marbled murrelets, according to park officials and court documents obtained by SFGATE.

CALIFORNIA — Wildfire experts knew the Northern California region where the Park Fire sparked was ready to burn, but no one expected how fast it would go up in flames. In just three days, the fire exploded into the state’s seventh-largest wildfire on record. …As of Sunday morning, it had spread to more than 350,000 acres. Neil Lareau, at the University of Nevada at Reno, said, “This fire is right up there with the fastest growing fires in history.” …A volatile mix of ingredients combined to make this particular blaze one of the most extreme the state has seen. …Much of California is on track to see its warmest July on record. …Cal Fire officials said that this blaze is a “plume-dominated fire.” That means the power of the fire is stronger than the wind, and it produces its own convection columns. …There is a high fuel load and abundant grasses in the region. 

Steve Frisch

The community of Truckee has been discussing the application to Nevada County for a use permit for the Alpenglow small diameter timber mill and wood products facility. Sierra Business Council (SBC) supports the Alpenglow Timber facility, and encourages members of the community to weigh in with their support. The selected site was previously zoned for this activity. The project will create local jobs and create employee housing. It is being proposed by a long- term resident with a 30-year history of sustainable forestry practices. SBC has worked on climate resilience, forest management and wildfire mitigation issues for 30 years with a focus on advancing the ecological restoration of our forests. To achieve restoration we must increase the pace and scale of forest treatment. To reach our restoration goals we need facilities to treat wood waste and find economically beneficial uses in order to control and reduce the cost of treatment.

James Bailey Maxwell

The pilot of an air tanker that died Thursday night while working near the Falls Fire in eastern Oregon was identified Sunday as 74-year-old man contracted by the Bureau of Land Management out of Burns. James Bailey Maxwell had 54 years flying experience and had logged about 24,000 hours of flight time, the BLM said. Maxwell is survived by family members in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, the BLM said. …The single engine Air Tractor 802A that Maxwell was flying disappeared over the Malheur National Forest while assisting on a lightning start in the vicinity of the Falls Fire. The BLM said a single engine airtanker, or SEAT, can deliver up to 800 gallons of fire retardant or water to wildland firefighters on the ground. …The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.

Related coverage in PBS News: Firefighting pilot killed in tanker plane crash in Oregon

Decades of snuffing out fires at the first sign of smoke combined with climate change have laid the groundwork for a massive wildfire in northern California and scores of smaller ones across the western U.S. and Canada, experts say. These fires are moving faster and are harder to fight than those in the past. The only way to stop future wildfires from becoming so ferocious is to use smaller controlled fires, as indigenous people did for centuries, experts say. …Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, the fires that are burning today are sometimes so severe and hot that they transform forests into a different type of ecosystem. Part of the issue is that climate change means that there are hotter conditions as plant life returns. …But he said there is no option to address the wildfire risk that doesn’t involve fire.

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.