Forest officials watching blaze in Eagle Cap Wilderness

Bret Ruby usually tries to douse wildfires but occasionally he just watches the smoke and flames.

Ruby, who is the fire staff officer for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, is playing the role of spectator rather than firefighter with regard to a blaze burning in the Eagle Cap Wilderness about 11 air miles east of Cove.

Lightning started the fire on Aug. 3.

It’s burning near the spine of Jim White Ridge.

That’s about a mile and a half west of the Minam River.

So far the fire has spread over just half an acre.

But Ruby said Monday that he won’t be surprised if the blaze, aided by a couple more weeks of relatively warm, dry weather, creeps into a nearby thicket of mature subalpine firs.

If that happens, the fire could conceivably grow by dozens of acres, Ruby said.

“We’ll keep monitoring it very closely,” he said.

That’s a pretty simple job because the Forest Service fire lookout atop Point Prominence, about six miles to the northwest, has an unobstructed view of the area.

Ruby not only won’t be shocked if the fire expands — he won’t be disappointed, either.

The Jim White Ridge is a special sort of blaze.

A tool, you might call it.

Forest Service officials added this particular implement to their box about 20 years ago.

They came to realize that the agency’s decades-old campaign to extinguish every fire as soon as possible, though popular with the public, was not necessarily sound, scientifically speaking.

It turns out that excluding fire can harm certain types of forests — places where, over many centuries, fires periodically cleaned the ground of needles and limbs, and thinned the forest before it became overcrowded with trees and thus vulnerable to insects, disease and drought.

But after so many years of treating fire as the unmitigated enemy, the Forest Service couldn’t simply reverse course.

Swathes of public forest had grown so dense that allowing lightning fires to burn unchecked created a severe risk that blazes would become infernos that kill every tree and sterilize the soil, rather than the comparatively cool, slow-moving fires of the past, which didn’t harm mature trees.

In a few places, though, conditions even today are such that the risk of letting a fire burn is rather lighter.

The Eagle Cap Wilderness is one such place, Ruby said.

One of its advantages is sheer size.

At 361,000 acres — that’s almost one-fifth the area of Baker County — the Eagle Cap is the largest federal wilderness in Oregon.

Also, much of the wilderness consists of rocky, alpine terrain interspersed with pockets of timber.

Those thickets can burn vigorously, but in most cases there are natural firebreaks — mostly open ground on the ridgetop, in the case of the Jim White Ridge fire — that prevent the flames from spreading far.

As an added benefit this summer, Ruby said, the ground is unusually moist for late summer due to the abundant, and slow-melting, snowpack.

“There are a few snowbanks just above the fire,” he said.

Due largely to the aforementioned conditions, the Eagle Cap has hosted, as it were, at least one of these “watch but don’t fight” fires in each of the past nine summers, and more than a dozen such blazes over the past 15 years.

The Forest Service hasn’t really settled on a name for the program, though.

A decade or so ago they were called “prescribed natural fires.”

That was replaced several years ago by “wildland fire use,” a term since supplanted by the current, somewhat more cumbersome, phrase: “managing fire for resource benefits.”

The basic concept, though, hasn’t changed much, Ruby said.

The goal is to allow lightning-caused fires (the Forest Service doesn’t actually ignite any of these blazes) to burn in the Eagle Cap so long as they don’t get too close to private property or to the wilderness boundary.

Neither is likely to be an issue with the Jim White Ridge blaze, Ruby said — it’s about four miles inside the wilderness, and about the same distance from the nearest private property, at the Minam Lodge.

Most of the fires in the Eagle Cap over the past decade burned fewer than 20 acres.

In 2004 a trio of fires burned about 570 acres, and in 2003 a single fire scorched about 470 acres.

Ruby said the most likely effect on forest users, should the Jim White Ridge fire get into the adjacent stand of subalpine firs, would be the temporary closure of the Jim White Ridge trail, a relatively popular route.