Forest official pleased with fires' progress

Nathan Goodrich is pretty pleased with how his two fires have behaved themselves.

It’s not that Goodrich kindled the blazes in the Eagle Cap Wilderness northeast of Baker City.

Lightning handled that chore in August.

But since the fires were ignited, Goodrich has been responsible for checking on their progress.

He’s the fire management officer at the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest’s Enterprise office.

And his main goal with both the Jim White Ridge fire, which was sparked on Aug. 3, and the nearby Pot Creek fire, which started on Aug. 20, was to leave the blazes to their own devices as long as that was practical.

The Forest Service shifted to that hands-off approach, so different from the agency’s aggressive attitude toward dousing fires that prevailed for most of the 20th century, about 20 years ago in the Eagle Cap, Oregon’s largest federal wilderness at 365,000 acres.

The basic idea, Goodrich said this morning, is to let lightning-caused fires in the wilderness burn just as they did before Smokey Bear came along, with little or no human intervention.

Fire scientists have concluded that in many cases the success that the Forest Service and other agencies have had in quickly extinguishing fires, both in the wilderness and elsewhere, has harmed rather than helped the forest.

In particular, excluding the fires that historically burned on a regular cycle has allowed logs, limbs and other combustible stuff to accumulate in abnormally high amounts.

One result is that many fires across the West over the past couple decades have burned hotter, and moved faster, than was typical even earlier in the 20th century.

In the more distant past, by contrast, periodic lightning fires created firebreaks that prevented future blazes from spreading, Goodrich said.

That exact phenomenon has played a role in keeping both the Jim White Ridge and Pot Creek fires in check, he said.

Both fires have burned to the boundary of a 1910 fire that scorched an estimated 100,000 acres in the Minam River Canyon, Goodrich said.

The Jim White Ridge fire burned a patch of older trees that survived that fire, but the fire essentially stopped when it reached the border of the old fire.

Wallowa-Whitman officials have revised the estimated size of the Jim White Ridge fire down from 5 acres to 3 acres.

The Pot Creek fire has covered about 358 acres, but in much of that area the flames stayed on the ground, reducing the fuel load but sparing most of the mature trees, Goodrich said.

The blaze has burned more intensely in several patches of 5 acres or so.

This mixture of fire severity, what fire experts call the “mosaic pattern,” is typical of lightning fires in higher elevation parts of the Eagle Cap, Goodrich said.

“That’s what ultimately ends up creating meadows and openings,” he said.

Besides serving as natural firebreaks, these openings are ideal habitat for grasses and shrubs that wildlife such as deer and elk rely on for food.

“We’re viewing the fire as a great success even though it’s a pretty small footprint,” Goodrich said. “It’s doing a nice job of cleaning up some of the fuel load. I think we’ll see the benefits for a long time.”

The one exception to the Wallowa-Whitman’s “watch but don’t fight” policy happened on Aug. 24, when Goodrich called in a helicopter to dump water on the Pot Creek fire.

That stopped the fire from spreading downhill into the Minam River Canyon, where the gusty winds common there could have turned the blaze into an inferno, Goodrich said.

He said he made that decision for two main reasons.

First, in late August it was likely that prime burning conditions would continue for at least another month, meaning the Pot Creek fire had the potential to grow larger than Forest Service officials prefer.

Second, the forests in parts of the canyon are not natural, and for the very reason mentioned earlier: Fuel loads are unusually high because the Forest Service has limited the spread of fires in the area for most of the past century.

(The 1910 fire being the biggest exception.)

This is the ninth consecutive summer in which Wallowa-Whitman officials have allowed at least one lightning fire to burn in the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

The Pot Creek fire is one of the larger such blazes.

Updated information about the two wilderness fires, and blazes elsewhere in Northeastern Oregon, is available online at www.bmidc.org.