Back to the Rim, Part 3: No Cigar

The Kaibab Forest was once magnificent. Today it is a tattered remnant of its former self. Ever since the Kaibab Forest was stolen from the Paiutes, first by the Mormons and then by the U.S. Government, the Forest has suffered and declined.

The Kaibab was one of the first western forests to be railroad logged. The gentle terrain was perfect for long, straight rail lines deep into the (as it turned out) non-infinite colonnade. Railroad logging was first; after WW II massive skidder/chainsaw clearcutting was instituted.

If you followed prior instructions here and focused Google Earth on Fredonia, do it again and close in to 35,000 feet “Eye alt”. Soar southward. From 35,000 feet the Kaibab Forest looks like it was hit by a giant cheese grater. The formerly continuous forest is now a hairnet forest, a spiderweb of non-logged strips of trees between the clearcuts.

The USFS attempted, from about 1950 to roughly 1990, to convert the Kaibab National Forest into a government-owned (socialist) tree farm. The agency desired a ponderosa pine plantation for commercial purposes, for the benefit of the Government and their “partners”.

This venture failed. This should really come as no surprise to anyone. As we have pointed out so many times from the very beginning of this blog, tree farms are not forests. They are nothing like. The government is and always has been incompetent at tree farming (this should come as no surprise, either). Consequently, the Kaibab N.F., for the most part, has been deforested and converted to brush.

Oh sure, there are still some trees on the Kaibab Plateau. But the forest-ness is gone, along with the heritage trees of the former forest. There is also plenty of new tick brush where forest used to be, and thickets of tiny, torchy conifers.

In 2004 the Kaibab N.F. was kicked started into a fuels management/prescribed fire program by the Healthy Forests Act (see here). This is sort of a good thing, but wrong-headed:

The objectives of the Topeka project are to improve forest health and resilience to enable the forest to better withstand natural disturbances such as drought, insects, disease and wildfires; and, to substantially reduce forest fuel levels in order to lower the risk of uncharacteristically intense wildfires to the forest, nearby private inholdings, and Grand Canyon National Park.

Their objective should be to restore the heritage Kaibab Forest. The way to do that is, in part, through fuels management and prescribed burning, which they are doing, although they don’t know why, and only on a very small scale.

Fuels management is a necessary part of forest restoration because many areas within the Kaibab Forest have accumulated 150 years worth of biomass build-up. Two negative things happen when accumulated fuels burn. First, the fires are very hot and tend to crown, killing all the living trees. Second, the fires fail to combust all the fuels.

When pine needles accumulate for 150 years, the resulting duff is too thick and dense to burn well or completely. When accumulated duff does get hot enough to burn through, the soil underneath gets baked. The old trees, the heritage trees, are killed when hot, glowing duff boils the cambiums around their bases.

Fires in thick fuels tend to produce more fuels, by killing the living biomass while imperfectly combusting the old accumulations. Trees get killed. Brush sprouts back. More fuels remain than before the fire. The hazard is worsened, and the mess burns again. Eventually, forest is a forest no more, but a fire-type brush field.

The Kaibab N.F. has a program to deal with heavy fuels. They treated close to 18,500 acres in 2004:

During the past year forest managers spent considerable time and energy working to reduce hazardous fuels through forest thinning and prescribed burning projects. The accumulation of this hard work resulted in close to 18,500 acres being treated, an increase of almost 7,000 acres from what was accomplished in 2003.

Prescribed burning: Kaibab fire managers accomplished 8,882 acres of prescribed burning on the Forest’s three districts in 2004. That included both underburning, in which fire is used to remove the build-up of fuels on the forest floor, and pile burning, in which fire is used to burn stacks of trees and limbs that resulted from thinning projects.

Thinning: The Kaibab National Forest completed more acres of thinning in 2004 than in recent years, accounting for a total of 9,617 acres treated.

The increase in the number of acres treated through thinning and prescribed burning is the result of strengthened commitment by the Forest Service to restore the fire-adapted ecosystems of Southwest forests. The many benefits from forest restoration include, enhancing wildlife habitat, reducing the risk of high-intensity wildland fires, managing rates of insect infestation and disease, and generally improving overall forest health.

Again, the Kaibab N.F. has no concept of their forest history, or the heritage nature of the Kaibab Forest, nor the understanding of how the Forest came to be. However, they are doing some restoration, mostly by accident, so some praise might be in order.

Might be, but isn’t. The Kaibab N.F. destroys far more forest acres per year than they restore. This year, 2006, is special because the dimwits in charge of the Kaibab N.F. attempted to destroy their entire forest last month.

Next Back to the Rim segment: the Warm Fire