Region Archives: US West

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. —  The Sierra Nevada Alliance has received $2.5 million from Cal Fire’s Wood Products and Bioenergy Program to support its Sierra Corps Forestry Fellowship Program. Cal Fire’s funding will ensure the operation of this essential program for an additional four years, beginning this summer. Developed in 2019, Sierra Corps aims to produce quality forest health managers in the Sierra Nevada that receive professional mentorship and guidance, creating future forest leaders. Alliance fellows work with host sites to complete forest fuels reduction, prescribed fire, reforestation, and biomass utilization to build healthy and resilient forests in the face of climate change and rampant wildfires. Sierra Corps is critical to supporting healthy, resilient forests and the people and ecosystems that depend on them. California needs registered professional foresters, more skilled project managers, and other forest community leaders to coordinate project efficiency. 

For more than a century, Yosemite National Park was viewed as a refuge where nature prevails unmolested by man-made forces amid picturesque vistas of granite cliffs, waterfalls and giant sequoias. But this year is different. The park has now become the latest cauldron in controversial federal forest thinning operations unfolding on public lands across the West in response to climate change, drought and the risk of catastrophic wildfires. A U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday was expected to hear a request by the nonprofit Earth Island Institute for a preliminary injunction to halt the National Park Service’s ongoing “biomass removal project” across nearly 2,000 acres within the park. In a lawsuit that was filed a day earlier, environmentalists argued that the work violates federal environmental requirements. The project authorizes crews to remove thousands of standing dead trees and healthy trees to reduce the fire risk to … groves of giant sequoias…

They are the largest trees in the world, living monuments with massive trunks and towering canopies that can thrive for 3,000 years. But ancient sequoia trees, which have been decimated by severe wildfires around California’s Sierra Nevada, are struggling to keep up with ever worsening conditions. And this summer, they could face their worst fate yet. The trees, which grow in a narrow band of the Sierra Nevada, are accustomed to frequent wildfires — their tree rings show fire recurring every six to 30 years. But the worsening intensity of recent blazes have been too much for them to handle. Since 2020, three fires have resulted in the loss of 13 to 19 percent of the entire population, said Christy Brigham, chief of resources management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Deborah Williams

One of the most significant conservation laws ever enacted — the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) — is facing its greatest threat in 42 years. …this is a matter of consequence to the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the nation. …ANILCA was and is a profoundly foresighted law that intentionally safeguards intact ecosystems, ecosystem services, many of our most iconic species, our ability to enjoy these national treasures and Indigenous food security. …Unfortunately, ANILCA is in jeopardy because of a recent split-panel decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals… This significantly jeopardizes … all of the 104 million acres of national public lands protected by ANILCA. If a Secretary of Interior can trade land to corporations to build a road through congressionally designated wilderness, then future Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture can, on their own, trade away lands in National Parks… in Alaska to corporations or the state — for social and economic development purposes.

Thanks to climate change, high-elevation forests in the Central Cascade mountains of the Pacific Northwest are burning more frequently and expansively than in the recent past, prompting researchers and fire managers to question whether forests will be able to recover from these emerging fire patterns and whether they will require human assistance to do so. A new study by Portland State University researchers characterizes the role of fire refugia—the green islands of live trees that remain after forest fires—in forest regeneration following large and severe fires in the High Cascade mountains of Oregon and Washington. The results of this study can help determine when human intervention in the form of tree replanting is warranted, when it isn’t, where replanting efforts should be targeted and what species should be prioritized. …Results can be used by forest managers to pinpoint where natural tree regeneration is likely or unlikely to occur after fires. 

As the Western states enter the traditional wildland fire season there is a report that only 65 to 70 percent of US Forest Service firefighting positions in California are filled. An article written by Brianna Sacks of BuzzFeed News stated that about 1,200 full-time positions are unfilled in the state. Approximately 35 percent of entry- to mid-level positions on engine crews are filled, as are about half of the similar positions on hotshot crews.  …Hotshot crews that can’t meet the rigid interagency standards for staffing and training will not be able to respond to a fire as a hotshot crew, and will be reduced to becoming a less qualified Type 2 crew, or forming “modules” of smaller numbers of personnel. Some of them may export their personnel to fill in on engines so that THOSE resources can respond. 

At 9 on a Saturday morning, Dan Holman, a 74-year-old retired oncologist, picks up a chainsaw and heads into the forest.  The forest in question is on the slopes of a hill outside of Chewelah in northeast Washington — and just a stone’s throw away from Holman’s home in the woods.  Armed with the chainsaw and years of experience, Holman spends the next four hours working with more than 50 of his neighbors to make their community safer from wildfires. The smell of freshly cut lodgepole pine and fir soon mixes with smoke from small fires used to clear weeds and brush.  Holman is one of the estimated 2.5 million Washingtonians to live in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, regions where burnable forests or vegetation meet urban development.  …“The main issue right now with the WUI is wildland fires — the lack of fire protection, the lack of fuel mitigation to protect the homes,” said Holman.

The Tongass National Forest in the U.S. state of Alaska is a special place for conservation biologist Dominick DellaSala, even after decades of traveling the world to study temperate rainforests.  “The trees are enormous,” DellaSala, chief scientist at the Earth Island Institute’s World Heritage project, told Mongabay. “It’s like being in a cathedral. It’s an amazing place.”  …DellaSala and his colleagues recently published a study revealing that the forests of the Tongass hold about a fifth of all the carbon in the entire United States National Forest system. That’s the equivalent of 1.5 times all the greenhouse gas emissions by the U.S. in 2019.  Their research came out April 13 in the journal Land.  …In 2006, a group of researchers calculated that the carbon held in the Tongass’s forests amounted to 8% of all the carbon in all the forests found in the United States outside of Alaska and Hawai‘i.

The air smells of ash and the landscape is leached of color. Spots of green punctuate the valley floor in places. But along the ridges, the powdery residue of charred trees has fallen like snow, accumulating up to 4 inches deep. These are the slices of forest where the fire burned the hottest, scorching ponderosa pines from crown to root. Once titans, they are now matchsticks.  … Before a tsunami of flames ripped through this canyon in Tierra Monte, the canopy was so thick that it was impossible to see the nearby mountain. But two prescribed burns set by the US Forest Service (USFS) – one on Hermits Peak, the other in Calf Canyon to the south-west – have changed all that.  When the blazes merged to form the biggest wildfire in state history, flames engulfed nearly 160 acres (65 hectares) of riparian forest that once belonged to her father. “It wiped us out,” Lopez said.

CRESCENT MILLS, California — For days and weeks last summer, the Dixie Fire seemed unstoppable. …Within days it consumed whole hillsides of forest, threatening some communities, destroying the town of Greenville. …A visit nearly a year later to a scorched landscape is still surprisingly sobering. Everywhere you look you see miles and miles of blackened forest. …And, a newly created sawmill in Crescent Mills. The logs here were taken from nearby hillsides burned in the fire. They can still be turned into useable lumber, but the clock is ticking. …Removing the burned and dead trees is just the start. Bringing the forest back will be a complex, time consuming process. …It’s finding a way to take a lot of that dead material off the landscape, reseeding the ground and then go back in and treat those forests again for future generations.”

Scott Stephens

UC Berkeley professor Scott Stephens, a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center research network, has spent over 30 years studying wildfire in California. He spoke with us about what it will take to preserve the state’s forests in an era of increasingly catastrophic wildfires. “I estimate that climate change is no more than 25% of the problem. I think it’s 75% forest structure—that’s just my intuition from working in this field for 30 years. Drought has made fuel moisture conditions so low that sparks start new fires very efficiently. I never get worried about the size of fires, though—I get worried about what goes on inside: how much vegetation has burned severely, how much forest is dying, how big and continuous the high-severity patches are. We’ve had areas that have seen high-severity fire three times in 20 years. There’s no way a forest is ever going to survive that.

OREGON—The wildland-urban interface from Talent to Jacksonville is being willfully and skillfully treated for fire resiliency and long-term ecological health, but the job is huge and the effort needed to tackle it is massive.  The West Bear All Lands project brings together 12 public and private organizations, including Lomakatsi and Rogue Forest Partners, into one 27,000-acre project designed to pool available dollars, hands and expertise.  The West Bear project builds on work done and collaborative connections made between public and private agencies tried and tested during the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project. The 12,500-acre stewardship project stretches from the Siskiyou Summit to Wagner Creek. West Bear All Lands picks up where the resiliency stewardship project left off, just outside the city of Talent, and is funded to go into the Applegate area around Jacksonville, Lomakatsi Executive Director Marko Bey said.

OREGON — Hoping for a repeat of 2021, when the region was spared catastrophic wildfires, fire agencies have set a goal of dousing 98% of fires by the time they reach 10 acres in size. That’s the right approach, and the only sensible plan during the hot summer months. We can only hope it succeeds, because even the best strategy is no guarantee.  The Oregon Department of Forestry, which protects state and Bureau of Land Management forests, and the U.S. Forest Service, responsible for national forest lands, share the philosophy that all-out attack is the best policy.  Some environmental groups argue that forests need fire to return to a healthier, more natural state. While that may be true in the abstract, that kind of “good fire” cannot be relied upon during fire season. …But fire season has begun, and hot, dry weather will be here soon enough.

Ken Ribelin, right

FLAGSTAFF, Arizona — When forest restoration giant Wally Covington drives by the Ribelin Logging Co. sort yard on East Huntington in Flagstaff and sees the equipment up for sale, it makes him sad. “They are very good operators in the forest and had a huge impact on the community.”  With decades of experience, millions of dollars invested in logging equipment and a deep love for the forest, Ribelin Logging Co. President Ken Ribelin says the family-owned and operated business – a thriving logging company that at one time employed almost 70 people and could run 50 to 60 truckloads of timber a day – is closing.  …Ribelin had become frustrated with a lack of Forest Service timber sales in recent decades and the number of appeals filed on those that have been offered for bid. …“Finding people who can do the work in this backbreaking industry is tough, and contracts are getting more complicated and difficult to administer,” said Van Beek.

CALIFORNIA — The Sierra Nevada Conservancy recently approved spending about $4.3 million on six wildfire prevention projects in Shasta, Trinity, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties. The conservancy’s board of directors on June 2 approved $21 million in Wildfire Recovery and Forest Resilience grants for the Sierra Nevada and Cascade region, which included funding for North State projects to reduce the threat of wildfires, according to the conservancy. The board’s approval brings the total state commitment on fire prevention projects in the North State to more than $15 million in the past week. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection last week announced similar grants totaling more than $11 million to reduce the wildfire threat in local communities in Shasta, Siskiyou and Tehama counties.

A fire that burned 170 acres of Joshua Tree National Park at the end of April was the result of a combination of air pollution, drought, invasive grasses, and human activity. The Elk Fire, which San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies say was sparked by two teenage campers last week near San Andreas Road on the southwest side of Yucca Valley, was 100% contained within a few days, but not before it burned through 431 acres of Mojave Desert landscape, including the 170 acres in the park. Unlike forest ecosystems, wildfire is not a natural part of desert ecosystems. Joshua Tree National Park’s native shrubs and trees are widely spaced out, and the nutrient-poor desert soil historically meant there has been limited fuel to feed a fire’s spread. But in the past few decades, invasive grasses have thrived as smog dumps nitrogen onto the desert soil, allowing fires like the Elk Fire to grow. 

…Recently, to mark Earth Day, President Joe Biden traveled to Washington state to announce an executive order to safeguard mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. It is no coincidence that Biden picked Washington to make this announcement. Nowhere is the importance of our forests more evident than in the Evergreen State. …But our forests are at a crossroads. For the first time, our state is less than 50% forested. Our forests are being replaced by shopping malls, subdivisions and parking lots. At the same time, we are confronting a forest health crisis… To utilize forests to address our climate crisis, we need to come together around an offensive and defensive strategy. …investments in our forests, forest products and forest health not only help solve our climate crisis, they address affordable housing and support almost $6 billion annually in jobs.   

The Sierra Nevada Conservancy Governing Board (Board) approved more than $21 million in Wildfire Recovery and Forest Resilience grants at its quarterly board meeting June 2 and discussed staff recommendations for operational updates responding to legislation that expanded the Sierra Nevada Conservancy’s service area. The 2021 Budget Act appropriated $50 million to the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) to support wildfire-recovery and forest-resilience priorities and the Board approved guidelines at its December 2021 meeting making $23,750,000 available for the first grant cycle of the Wildfire Recovery and Forest Resilience Directed Grant Program. In total, the Board approved just over $21 million that will go to 18 different projects in the Sierra Nevada and California’s Cascade Mountain region. It also approved updated guidelines so the next phase of the Wildfire Recovery and Forest Resilience Grant Program can begin later this month.

Forest agencies in Jackson County are gearing up for this year’s fire season, which officially begins Wednesday. Agencies will be adding more staff and equipment this year and, hopefully, adding fire observation cameras on top of Mount Ashland and King Mountain. The region’s Oregon Department of Forestry team is almost fully staffed up, but they’ve had to spend more time on recruitment for seasonal firefighting positions, according to Southwest Oregon District Forester Tyler McCarty “Ninety percent of our staffing is seasonal, and that model has to go away,” says McCarty. “We cannot retain folks and the amount of turnover we’re seeing. We have to change the model and we need to get into more permanent employees who are doing fuel reduction work in the wintertime and fighting fires for us during the summer.”

DENVER – The Simms Fire that burned 313 acres and three structures southwest of Montrose last month stemmed from a prescribed burn that got underway on May 16 and spread beyond its initial boundaries four days later, the U.S. Forest Service said Wednesday. the initial investigation found that the prescribed burn that started on May 16 in a 188-acre area blew up again on May 19 during a wind event, escaping the fire lines. Crews had been monitoring the burn area that day and saw the smoke come up from the prescribed burn area. After the fire escaped containment lines, firefighters did an initial attack and spent days, aided by precipitation, working on the fire until it was fully contained on May 23 after burning 313 acres and three structures.

Conservation groups are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its assessment of the Flathead National Forest’s road-building policy in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat. Last year, the U.S. District Court in Missoula ordered FWS to reevaluate its 2018 biological opinion which stated that the way in which the Flathead National Forest closed roads didn’t threaten grizzly bears and bull trout. Both animals are protected under the Endangered Species Act, and roads are known to restrict movement of grizzlies and impact stream quality for bull trout. During last year’s case, Friends of the Wild Swan and the Swan View Coalition argued that closing roads by blocking entrances with logs or boulders allowed continued use by off-road vehicles, and the court agreed.

Thinning public woodlands to remove millions of dead trees is a way to generate much needed cash to reduce wildfire risks, improve forest health and protect rural homeowners and farms. It is money the U.S. Forest Service and Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources don’t have because the bulk of their funds are tied up fighting fires. …On the Colville National Forest, Forest Service funding was insufficient to thin overcrowded timber stands until a broad-base group called A-Z collaborative formed. …the key component is thinning. The Forest Service awarded a contract to Vaagen Brothers Lumber, who expanded operations in Colville to produce cross-laminated timber (CLT) and now turns former fire fuels into state-of-the-art building materials. …The key to reducing wildfire risk and expanding CLT manufacturing is a reliable and steady supply of thinned trees. Without a long-term flow of trees from federal and state forest… the accumulations of wildfire fuels grows…

The Center for Biological Diversity has launched a lawsuit against the United States Fish and Wildlife Services for not listing 11 critically at-risk species under the Endangered Species Act, including the white bark pine tree found in Montana. For years, the white bark pine tree has been under attack from two natural threats, including blister rust, a deadly disease that is spread through the wind. The white bark pine is also plagued by beetle kill, which has been increased due to climate change. White bark pine trees are a species of tree found in high elevations, almost at the timber line. …Although, the USFWS agrees that the white bark pine is at-risk, the lawsuit alleges that instead of enacting protections for the species, the federal agency appears to be in an indefinite holding pattern.

Lauren Boebert

Prescribed burns have been a source of tension this spring, with the U.S. Forest Service attributing the largest wildfire in New Mexico history in part to an escaped burn. Now, they are central to Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District Rep. Lauren Boebert’s criticism of the Forest Service. Boebert attacked Forest Service Chief Randy Moore’s announcement on May 20 that he was pausing all prescribed burns on National Forest lands, saying the move would exacerbate wildfires and harm Colorado’s communities. …Boebert explained her criticism, “98% of all prescribed burns never have any issues. A 90-day blanket moratorium on prescribed burns in every national forest throughout the country defies science and common sense,” she said in a statement. “… prescribed burns play an important role in reducing the risk and severity of catastrophic wildfires. …we need to actively manage our forests in order to protect our communities from devastating wildfires.”