Are Our Forests Really Overgrown?

Another fire is active within 20 miles of us today.  It is the Courtney Fire in Oakhurst and 21 structures have burned since it started yesterday around noon.  This comes on top of last week's Bridge Fire that almost destroyed 250 homes in Ponderosa Basin, near us.  Two other fires are active near Coulterville.

We all know it is year three of drought and everything is extremely dry.  But one of the real culprits here is the overabundance of fuels in the woods and a 100 years of fire repression without adequate management of fuel loads.  The inability of the Forest Services to properly manage lands due to excessive meddling and lawsuits by environmental groups is adding greatly to the problem.

So what does it mean to say there is too much fuel in the forests.  Well, over 100 years ago several naturalists made surveys of the forests from Arizona to Washington.  They counted numbers of trees per acre.  The general result was that the pine forests of then held about 30 to 40 mature trees per acre.  Smaller tress were regularly kept in check by ground fires.  Today, it is easy to see 300 to 400 trees per acre, many of which are small and midsize trees that constitute the majority of the fuel load, and the danger.

Here is an article that appeared last year during the huge, 400 sq. mile Rim Fire in Mariposa County and Yosemite Park.    Fire-in-Yosemite-offers-forest-management-lessons  It discusses the results of an ongoing survey that started 100 years ago and shows clearly the high fuels load.

Here is a quote:  "Big increase in tree density - A large part of the answer may be found in Stephens' interrupted expedition. His four-person research team was in the process of measuring tree diameters and densities on 15,000 acres that had been studied by the U.S. Forest Service in 1911.
The group found as many as 400 trees per acre on the land. That's compared with between 60 and 90 trees per acre in 1911. There was also between 30 and 40 tons of woody debris per acre on the forest floor, compared with 6 to 8 tons 102 years ago, Stephens said. Besides the dramatic increase in tree density, the researchers found more undergrowth species and, although there were still many old growth trees, the average size of the trees was smaller than in 1911, he said.
"We know the last fire in that area was in about 1905. That's 100 years without fire," Stephens said. "If you don't clear trees and brush and do some prescribed burning, you are eventually going to get a very closed forest that is very dense."

There is a little good news in some places around the Sierra.  I have been riding a lot of forestry roads and roads like Highway 4 Ebbett's Pass yesterday.   I am seeing more instances of Forestry and other agencies doing fuel reduction alongside the roads to about 100 yards back from the road edges.  They are trimming limbs, collecting dead-fall and trash, and cutting the medium size-infill trees for later burning.

I believe we need much more of this thinning, We we consider that the Rim Fire costs about $100 million, think of all the labor hours that could provide valuable jobs to forest workers.  Think of all the homes that could be saved from out-of-control fires.

Jerry Brown, are you listening?