Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires
How many times have you heard the above saying? I know it's been drilled into my head over and over again. Fire is bad!
The title statement is important, as countless fires are caused by human carelessness. However, naturally occurring fires are a necessary and integral part of the forest ecosystem.
The forests within the Bow corridor would burn, if left alone, about every eighty years. This process of recycling is required by many fire-adapted species. In fact some, like the lodgepole pine, rarely reproduce in the absence of fire.
With cones tightly sealed with a hard wax, they usually will not open unless temperatures reach approximately 50°C. Since our record is around 34°C, these cones are going to need a fire to open them up. As a result, all the trees in a lodgepole pine forest often look the same size. In actual fact, they were born (so to speak) on the same day.
These trees have taken their adaptation to fire one step further. As sunlight hits their needles the plant converts this light to chlorophyll which is used as food. Any branches that don't receive enough sunlight promptly die. This ensures that the tree doesn't devote energy to a branch that isn't producing food.
These dead branches have the added effect of being very flammable and thus attract fire. As the area burns, the cones will open and quickly germinate in the carbon rich soil of a burn site. In this way, through death, a new generation of pines will appear.
Another fire adapted group of trees include the poplars and aspens. Closely related, they have taken to cloning to survive fires. If you've ever had a poplar in your yard, you'll be familiar with suckers, or new shoots, that pop up all over your lawn. The poplars send out horizontal roots just below the surface which will periodically send up a new shoot. This makes a single tree look like a whole stand. In autumn, all the suckers of one tree turn at the same time, thus betraying their common root system. When a fire moves through the stand, the trees are killed, or so it appears. The trees may be destroyed but the root system will often survive. Before you know it, suckers start appearing and a new stand begins.
Many forest companies will tell you that they should be allowed to move in and cut over mature forests to prevent future fires. They'll try to convince you that cutting is an effective substitute for regular fires. The only flaw with this logic is that they're talking about harvesting and removing already scarce nutrients from the soil. Fires, on the other hand, recycle those nutrients back into the soil, thus making them available for the next generation. In no way are the two interchangeable!
Fire is both a natural and necessary force in the Rockies. By preventing it, we set ourselves up for the massive Yellowstone type fires as fuel continues to build up over the years.
Natural fires are usually not a devastating occurrence. They allow the forest a fresh start and promote new growth.
Next week, we'll look at how some of the local wildlife depend on fires in their daily quest for survival. When you read stories detailing the devastation of forest fires, take note of the two main reasons they are so "devastating". First is the financial cost in lost timber and second is the danger to human habitation. Once again we've tried to impose human values onto the forest ecosystem.
The forest does not have a value system. It's adapted over thousands of years; long before man moved into the picture. Fire has always been an integral part of the natural order, and whether or not there happens to be a community nearby does not figure into this order.
I'm not saying these fires shouldn't be controlled. If it was my home in danger, I'd be the first to call in fire crews. I just want to bring across the point that fire in and of itself is not bad. It's just sometimes inconvenient to man.
What about all the other animals. We've all seen the movie "Bambi" and the horrible fire that swept through the quiet forest. What few realized is that this fire was excessively fierce--of a magnitude that would only be expected in an area that hadn't burned for hundreds of years.
Most animals are quick enough to stay ahead of fires. And when the fire burns itself out, there's usually an abundance of exposed seeds. Grouse and squirrels scurry back to take advantage of these easy pickins', and those they miss, will quickly germinate in the carbon rich soils.
Since these soils are very conducive to new growth, the area quickly begins to bloom again. The lodgepole cones will have opened and the aspen will send up new suckers. fireweed and other wildflowers will quickly cover up the blackened earth. Soon new trees and shrubs are replacing the blackened stumps and a whole new generation has begun.
Deer and elk spend much of their time along the margins. This provides the double benefit of forest cover for protection and a healthy food supply as new growth moves into the burn site.
A study in northern Montana found that of the shrubs important to grizzlies, almost all were more prevalent on old burn sites as compared to old growth areas. They found that most shrubs, resprouted from underground stems, much like the aspen sending up new suckers.
They also found that increasing fire suppression since the 1920's has led to the encroachment of conifers into shrubfields. This resulted in less food for the bears and in the long run, less bears.
Banff has recently begun experimenting with controlled burns. This was for a number of reasons, only one of which is the improvement of wildlife habitat.
One of the reasons elk, deer and bear are so popular along the highways is that much of their food has disappeared over the years as fires have been kept at bay. The highways provide some of the only open areas available to them.
Increased use of controlled burns is one answer. In addition, we need to allow natural fires to take their course. In the eastern slopes, much of the area is protected from logging within national or provincial parks and recreation areas. This only leave the danger to habitation as a viable reason to suppress fires. Perhaps we should start allowing more forest fires the chance to burn themselves out.
The Destruction of Our ForestsbyO. Ned Eddins
Opposition to forest floor clean up, any type of clear cuts, and the let burn policies of the Sierra Club and other radical environmentalist groups are destroying our National Forests. Environmentalist and bureaucratic policies have rendered federal agencies ineffective in managing our wildland (all land under federal agencies). National forests in the West are in deplorable condition, and the advocacy of letting natural fires burn, or in some cases to correct decades of fire-fuel buildup with prescribed burns, is destroying our forestlands. Examples of the catastrophic damage done to our National Parks and National Forests from advocating these policies are the Yellowstone National Park forest fires of 1988, the Mesa Verde forest fire of 2000, both of which were caused by lightning, and the prescribed burn that resulted in the Cerro Grande forest fire near Los Alamos, New Mexico in 2000. And now, there is the Colorado Hayman Fire and the Oregon Biscuit Fire of 2002 followed by the California Forest Fires of 2003 and 2004. As long as some environmental and conservation groups fight every change in forest management policy or cleanup efforts this pattern will continue...as an example, three environmental groups have filed lawsuits to prevent removal of burned trees from the Oregon Biscuit Fire area.
For other opinions look at the I Post you Decide - There have been some excellent responses, i.e. McMurray, Yanco Pronatalist, and Oneofmanyfeathers I encourage everyone to read the responses and the replies for different viewpoints. I had hoped for a lot of comments from environmentalists, but so far there have been only Yanco and two others.
Until observing the effectiveness of a clear cut strip in stopping a forest fire, I would have agreed that clear cut forest areas are bad, and still do, if the clear cut is a whole mountainside. However, one-fourth to one-half mile wide clear-cut bands, are beneficial to the forest and to wildlife. These clear-cut bands are the single most effective means of stopping a forest fire. Within a year after being clear cut, these clear cut areas have newly planted trees, grasses, abundant flowers, and are full of game signs. For several years after a ground-sterilizing forest fire there is nothing but black ground. Proper forest management, which includes letting some fires burn, prescribed burns, and areas of strip clear cuts, increases the habitat for all types of wildlife, whereas hot burning forest fires sterilizes the soil and nothing grows, or lives there, for many years.
The Internet is full of articles justifying the environmentalist's position on the Yellowstone National Park forest fires of 1988, as well as, other natural or lightning caused forest fires. Most of these sites paint a picture of Yellowstone National Park as being more beautiful than ever, and what a wonderful thing it was, and is, to observe nature at work in the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem. The following excerpt from an article by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition is representative of the misleading hype that a majority of the sites on the 1988 Yellowstone National Park forest fires are putting out.
Fourteen years later, Yellowstone forests are healthy, green, and growing. Woodlands charred in ’88 are being replaced by robust conifer under stories. The 1990s were a period of renewal for Yellowstone, and visitors today are fascinated by post-fire regret. With the return of nutrients to the soil, lush grasses and forbs benefit wildlife, new aspen growth offers diversity, while burned snags provide increased nesting habitat for birds. Wildflowers are profuse and regeneration has been prolific http://www.greateryellowstone.org/lands/wildland-fires/fires.html. This link no longer works. It would be interesting to know if the people at the Coalition have changed their minds on this prolific regeneration.
...based on the two pictures below, this description makes you wonder if anyone from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition has even seen Yellowstone.
The next two forest fire pictures show an entirely different picture of the damage done by the Yellowstone National Park forest fires of 1988. These pictures of burned areas from the Yellowstone Park forest fires were taken from the road between the South Entrance of Yellowstone National Park and Lewis Lake at the end of June 2002. In vast areas of Yellowstone, the destruction caused by the Yellowstone National Park forest fires of 1988 is nearly as visible today as in 1988. The forest fire devastation in the heavy-timbered areas of Yellowstone National Park will be present for generations. Complete regeneration from a forest fire at this altitude in the Rocky Mountains takes from one hundred to one hundred and twenty years.
There are a lot of forest fire pictures. Please be patient while the pictures load.

1988 Yellowstone Fire - 2002
For a great many people that live near Yellowstone, the 1988 Yellowstone National Park forest fires were, and still are, a catastrophe. The first of the Yellowstone Park fires started near Enos Lake in the Teton Wilderness Area. The fire was under a thousand acres for the first week while the forest service was deciding whether to put it out or not. Once the fire took off and with no hope of controlling it, one of the excuses given by, then Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Barby was that no one could predict how dry the forest was. If Park Rangers had gotten out of their pickups and led a string of packhorses across the Pacific Creek meadows, as we did two days before the fire started, they would have known how dry it was from the dusty trail.
Prevailing drought resulting in abnormally low tree moisture, accumulation of dead trees, heavy areas of downed timber, and the environmentalist let burn policy set the stage for the Yellowstone National Park forest fire disaster. These factors should have been obvious to the personnel charged with protecting our oldest National Park.
In regards to the Yellowstone National Park forest fires, Monica Turner, landscape ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concludes,
Big fires are not detrimental to the system in any way. It's difficult for the human-wild land interaction, but from the perspective of plants and animals, fire is a normal event, well within their capacity to deal with, whyfiles.org/018forest_fire/main2.html.
Dr. Turner and other proponents of letting natural fires burn fail to mention that in heavy forested areas the fire sterilizes the soil, killing the trees and burrowing animals as well as the insects. Since nothing can live in these "sterilized areas", the only way it can regenerate is by wind-spread seeds, and this takes decades, not years.
In the grand scheme of an ecological system, big fires may not be detrimental, but they are devastating to many of us. A few years ago, I rode through areas of a "dead sterile forest" below the head of the Yellowstone River. The blackened snags, and a total lack of birds, small mammals, and insect sounds produced an eerie, sad feeling as you rode along the trail.
You cannot fault environmentalist groups for their ideals, but they are completely misguided and often totally misleading with their rhetoric. In trying to protect the forests, they are destroying them. There is no question that within a few years meadows and other open areas come back better than before, but not thick-timbered areas. After fourteen years, there is little growth of new trees and certainly no bird nests, or not much of anything else for that matter, along this section of the highway near Lewis Falls.