Article by Allen Best
History – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
The wildfire history of a landscape is arcane knowledge. Various government agencies assiduously record people and their doings, and several state and federal agencies have tried to determine “what is natural” for wildlife.
But for fires, which we now understand balance our landscapes in critical ways, there is no clearinghouse of information, no well-defined timeline that helps us to define what is “natural” for a particular piece of geography.
We know more about recent fires than past fires. Federal land management agencies have kept detailed computer records since 1980, and fire maps archived in various repositories tell the story into the 1960s.
Persistent fire historians can piece together the story to the 1940s, and perhaps even beyond, by interviewing various old-timers.
Beyond that, fire records are haphazard. Seventy years ago land agencies did not think it was important to record what they did. They put out fires, and very capably so.
“This greater attention to record-keeping and putting fire into historical perspective reflects the new thinking, which sees fire as a vital part of ecological processes,” explains Peter Blume, the Grand Junction-based fire management officer for the White River National Forest and Bureau of Land Management.
“However, the agencies themselves have also changed. The agencies before were very much field-oriented, with relatively little emphasis put on record-keeping and documents. Now, there is great attention to documentation, in large part because of new laws and regulations.”
Yet, from newspaper accounts and diaries, and even more important, by studying fire stands and calculating ages of forest stands, fire ecologists can piece together stories of the past. It’s mostly a matter of time, which is to say money — because nobody thought fire history would prove to be important until relatively recently.
One such case where fire history has been reconstructed is at Taylor Park. Located on the western flanks of the Sawatch Range, it’s home to Tincup and right over the divide from St. Elmo. Taylor Park is thick with lodgepole pine, which grows to 11,000 feet and higher on south- and west-facing slopes.
Fire scars, forest age, and such written history as exists all tell of a major fire there in the 1870s and 1880s. As perhaps this year will be, that was a banner time for fires in Colorado, with an unusual number at higher elevations. Many blamed those fires on the Ute Indians, who were being forced off their treaty lands to more arid lands south and west. The Utes, many people said, set the fires in spite.
Tom Zimmerman, who now works as fire ecology program leader for the interagency fire staff in Boise, Idaho, did his Ph.D. dissertation about Taylor Park. He said he found no substantiation that the Indians set the fires. What is possible, he says, is that the departure of the Utes was coincidental with the fire cycle of lodgepole pine, which normally burns every 300 years or so.
However, there is also evidence that man is implicated in contributing to wildfires in a different way at Taylor Park. Studying the sparse and then more detailed Forest Service records, Zimmerman found successful suppression of small fires. The unintended consequence of that suppression, he says, is that dwarf mistletoe has invaded those lodgepole stands. That increased mortality boosts potential for a higher intensity ground fire, and perhaps a high-intensity crown fire — where fire is spread from tree top to tree top.
“One of my thoughts was that if, in the absence of other control mechanisms, we continued to put out all fires, the disease will continue to spread, and that will cause more fuel build up — and potentially a high-intensity, stand-replacement fire.”
Another view comes from Jerry Chonka, the Gunnison-based fire management officer for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. He’s been tromping the Gunnison country for 26 years, noticing fire scars on stumps, studying the age of forests.
Chonka has found little evidence of fires in the past 100 years. Before that, when the miners and railroaders and ranchers were first setting up shop, he sees some fires. But for large-scale fires he directs attention back to when the Utes dominated the landscape.
“Based on fire scar studies and just rooting around in the woods, it’s my educated guess that between 40,000 and 70,000 acres a year were burned,” he says, with three-quarters of the fires being deliberately set by Native Americans. “And then when settlers came in, they grazed the snot out of this country, and that took away the fuel bed, and then they started fire suppression. That just sort of stopped fire dead in its tracks.”
In contrast, he estimates that at most, 1,500 acres were burned in a single year during the 20th century in the Gunnison Country.
But a fire or collection of fires that may have covered one million acres is noted in the area between Tomichi Creek and the San Luis Valley. It’s assigned the year 1853, although it could have occurred before or after by several years. There is no evidence of what started that fire or fires.
Evidence of the fire can be seen in the combination of dead trees and doghair lodgepole, estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 stems per acre, in the Needle Creek area west of Marshall Pass. Trees there date to within 5 to 10 years of one another in age.
In Chonka’s theory, the Utes set fires to grasslands to encourage regeneration. Fresh grass drew bison and elk, and he also sees fire benefiting bighorn sheep, and hence the Utes. “It’s my opinion that this basin was a sea of grass, and the Indians managed it for buffalo.” He sees a similar fire regime in South Park.
Study of fire scars on sagebrush are impossible, but there are fire scars on Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, all of which seem to have ended about 1860 or 1870, he says. “I’ve found enough of them.”
With reduced fire sequences came many changes. Over time, the grasslands have been invaded by lodgepole pine and, to an extent, Douglas fir. Some forests have been more dense. With more trees, less water is flowing. “You can go into some of this country and see where there were big beaver dams,” he says.
Lodgepole dominates the Gunnison country more. When fires are absent, more trees grow, and they become collectively more susceptible to fire. Chonka also sees aspen as being ultimately jeopardized by absence of fire.
Fire frequency varies by species, elevation, and microclimate. Chonka estimates that ponderosa pine forests in the Gunnison Basin burned every 15 to 25 years, and Douglas fir perhaps every 25 to 40 years.
Lodgepole pine, at lower elevations, burned every 50 to 70 years.
Stand-replacing fires in lodgepole burned every 150 to 300 years. Spruce and fir forests, which tend to be above 10,000 feet, burned every 250 to 400 years. Blowdowns and insect invasions, the latter often accompanying the former, could hasten fire cycles.
When Chonka began battling forest blazes on the Front Range in 1956, the Forest Service had a clearly defined policy. “Back then, fire was the No. 1 enemy. We had the 10 o’clock policy, where you would have the fire controlled by 10 o’clock the next morning.”
People who talked about wanting to do prescribed fires were looked upon as idiots, he recalls. Eventually, that group included him, earning him the label of a pyro.
Now, like many fire managers, he is frustrated at what he perceives to be a lack of public understanding about the need for fire in our public lands.
“There’s just no way we’re going to be able to fix this problem,” he says.
“The National Fire Plan is a great thing, and we’re getting more firefighters to the ground, but we lost the battle when we lost the Native Americans in the 1870s. We have had 130 years of things not happening.
“Part of it is the public. They will not accept large fires, and fires burning all over the place, like it was in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, particularly at lower elevations in the ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir forests. That’s where the problem really is. The higher up in elevation you go, it’s not much of a problem. It’s a little out of whack in those higher elevations, but when fires occur every 250 to 400 years, how far out of whack can you be?
“But down lower, where fires used to occur every 15 to 40 years, we’ve got a big problem.”
He wants thinning, logging, and, where it’s accepted, more prescribed burning. Prescribed burning, as was amply demonstrated at Los Alamos in 2000, has risks. “When we’re out there fighting a fire, we’re wearing a white hat, and if we’re out setting a prescribed fire, we wear a gray hat, and if anything goes wrong, then we’re wearing a dark, dark shade of gray,” he says.
Peering into the future, he predicted a “big catastrophic fire looming on the Front Range.”
He made that statement four days before the Hayman fire began.
Allen Best has been covering forest fires since 1977, and currently free-lances from Glenwood Springs, Arvada, and sundry other spots.