Fire, Fire, Shit's on Fire

We live less than three miles from The Carson National Forest.  A few weeks ago, lightning started a small fire there.  The Forest Service had already scheduled a controlled burn in the area in the upcoming days, so they took the opportunity of the naturally-caused fire to merge their work managing that fire with the work they needed to do for the scheduled burn.

View from our backyard, looking toward the fires

 Though the lightning started fire had been burning for awhile, I hadn't noticed it beyond a light smell of smoke until they started the controlled burn on Saturday.  Then yesterday I went out for a walk with the dog down our driveway.  When we turned around to come home, I noticed that the near horizon was covered in heavy smoke.  As the day progressed and the wind turned, the smoke blew toward us, though thankfully the mass of it was slightly north and later south.  Visibility in the direction of the fire was less than two miles.  In the opposite direction, the mountains and Taos Valley were shrouded in a thick veil of smoke.

It wasn't too terrible right around the house, though it was strong enough that we mostly stayed inside with the doors and windows closed.  We went out a few times but the smoke was strong enough to make the dog sneeze repeatedly and I got a sore throat and a headache.  There was so much smoke in the area of the fire (which was actually many individual fires) that I was worried that the fire might get out of control and spread onto the open valley floor.

The smoke spreading

Today, the Carson National Forest Service shared some photos on Facebook and I can understand now why there was so much smoke and I realize that the danger was not as I had imagined. 

[Here's a great collection of photos showing the crew managing the fire in Carson National Forest.]

When I think of forest fires I think of raging, out of control, all-consuming infernos.  That's not the case with controlled burns.  The purpose of the controlled burn is to reduce the brushy detritus on the forest floor before it gets thick enough that an accidentally or naturally caused fire can create the kind of fire that consumes trees and spreads quickly across the landscape and possibly into areas where people live.

In the past, the practice has been to suppress the natural lightning-caused fires that occur periodically in the forest.  This intervention allowed the accumulation of lots of natural debris on the forest floors, and ultimately led to more serious all-consuming forest fires.

Controlled burns allow foresters to selectively burn designated sections of the forest under ideal weather conditions--conditions where fires are less likely to get out of control.

Periodic fires are essential to the health of the ecosystem.  They help manage pest and disease populations, and are necessary for certain trees and plants to reproduce.  The Giant Sequoias, for example, rely on the heat of fire for their reproduction.

The Daniel Boone National Forest has a great page explaining the function of controlled forest burns. 

According to this site, the past practice of suppressing forest fires has been detrimental in several important ways:

"Fire exclusion practices have resulted in forests being plagued with a variety of problems, including overcrowding resulting from encroachment of species normally eliminated by fire; vulnerability of trees to insects and disease; and inadequate reproduction of fire resistant species. In addition, heavy accumulation of fuel -- dead vegetation of forest floors-- can cause catastrophic fires, threaten public safety, impair forests and ecosystem health, and degrade air quality.

The Forest Service has made it a priority to reintroduce fire into fire dependent ecosystems to help promote ecosystem health. Controlled burning is viewed by the land management agencies as an agent of change that helps "mother nature" return an ecosystem to its historic range."

Photo by The U.S. Forest Service-Carson National Forest, showing wildflowers still growing after the fire has moved through.

As the photos from the Carson National Forest show, the burning underbrush generates a lot of smoke.  However, the controlled burning of this material leaves the trees generally unharmed and forest undergrowth is quick to regenerate.

Photo by The U.S. Forest Service-Carson National Forest