After Prescribed Burn, Wildfire 'Just Laid Down'

Preparing for fire has already helped suppress one near Weaverville.

Forested slopes bear the scars of five wildfires, which threatened the community over the last two decades. In August 2014, a spark from a boat that had come off its trailer hit Highway 299 and lifted into the tree crowns. The resulting flames, which turned into the Oregon Fire, raced across the tight canopy, forcing evacuations and threatening the high school.

Nine months before, however, federal and local partners removed some trees and thinned brush in an area called Five Cent Gulch. They then lit a prescribed fire to burn away remaining brush, logs, snags and forest debris. So when the Oregon Fire came along to threaten the area, the lack of heavy fuel on the land slowed it down, enabling crews and tanker planes to catch up and gain control.

“The fire ran head on into this thinned and burned unit, and the fire just laid down,” said Nick Goulette, who directs the Watershed Center, a local land stewardship group. “My home was evacuated as a part of that fire, so I was very thankful.”

Five Cent Gulch is located within the Weaverville Community Forest, made up of some 13,000 acres governed by one of the first federal master stewardship agreements in the country. Authorized by Congress in 2003, these arrangements permit communities and other interested parties to support and fund restoration projects on forest land.

“We’re seeing more and more collaboratives not only be formed but also be effective in terms of trying to deal with forest health issues,” said Al Olson, who directs ecosystem services for the U.S. Forest Service across California.

Reducing fire risk through active management has been a goal of the community forest since its inception, says Kelly Sheen, executive director of the Trinity County Resource Conservation District.

“Not managing it is not an effective tool for managing the forest,” Sheen said.

Reducing fuels by thinning the understory, removing trees to open up canopy, and burning what’s left on the ground is the strategy that scientists and policymakers say California forests need. Last year, Cal Fire announced it intended to triple the amount of land it treats in order to reduce risk. The U.S. Forest Service says its goal in 2019 is to treat 250,000 acres by either reducing and rearranging vegetation or with prescribed burns.

In Weaverville, working with the federal government to utilize more fire on the Trinity County landscape has been a huge shift.

A Common Foe

During the 1980s and ‘90s, the heat of the Timber Wars poured into every public space in the area, says Bob Morris, a 45-year Trinity County resident and environmentalist. In a small town, there's no place to hide.

“It was terrible,” Morris said. “Death threats were common. People were arming themselves.”

It got so bad, parents told their children not to walk in front of windows at night. Morris’ neighbor, a logger named Clarence Rose, became, literally, his enemy, and Rose felt the same way about him.

Then, a common foe emerged.

What got people talking again was what Morris calls the “dysfunctionality” of federal forest management.

“Environmentalists saw it, industry saw it, and that was our first unifying ‘we have something in common,’ that was the first thing that we saw.”

Morris and Rose shared a growing concern about decisions made by the U.S. Forest Service in Shasta -Trinity. Then, in 1999, the Bureau of Land Management lost control of a prescribed fire, which accidentally destroyed 23 homes in Lewiston. Around the same time, BLM proposed a land swap with a private timber company of nearly 1,000 acres near Weaverville, a trade that would have likely clear-cut trees out of some of the best views in town.

That proposal galvanized local concern for the forest. After years of negotiations, those BLM acres became the first patch of the Weaverville Community Forest. Ever since, the former enemies, environmentalist Bob Morris and ex-logger Clarence Rose, have served as two of the land’s informal stewards.

“Once you find areas of agreement, you can make huge progress," said Morris. “Dissimilar interests finding common ground and working together, it’s been huge, a huge change after 40 years of polarization.”

From the start, the community has stuck to certain values: fire reduction, preserving views and recreational access, and responsible timber harvesting.

“I’m proud of it, actually,” Morris said.

And he and the other stewards hope their community forest is only the beginning.

Ecologically Responsible Thinning

In his boyhood, Kelly Sheen says, the forest was just a playground, the place where he ate from invasive blackberry plants and roamed off undermaintained trails.

“I took it for granted,” Sheen said.