The Yellow Pine Fire
September 13th, 2007
There have been many terrible fires this fire season. Okefenokee Swamp burned in the 386,722 acre Big Turnaround Fire. The Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe incinerated 254 homes. Megafires have raged across Oregon, Alaska, Montana, and California.
The worst fire, however, the most destructive and most egregious fire of the 2007 Fire Season, is the Yellow Pine Fire of over 750,000 acres which is still burning in Idaho.
The Yellow Pine Fire is our name for a collage of dozens of fires that have blackened the Boise, Payette, and Nez Perce National Forests. The Yellow Pine Fire is a complex that includes the Rattlesnake, Raines, Loon, Zena, Profile, Landmark, Monumental, Krassel, and Trapper Ridge Fires, and a few dozen more.
Those fires have merged, for the most part, except where separated by Burns of recent years, into one large blackened stain that stretches from the Gospel Hump Wilderness north of the Salmon River (main fork), southwardly up the South and Middle Fork watersheds, and over the top of the Salmon Mountains into the Middle Fork watershed of the Payette River 90 miles to the south.
Nearly two million acres of forests have been impacted, but the exact fire acreage is difficult to extract from InciWeb reports. The individual sub-fires have been consolidated and the names changed mid-season, obscuring the facts with bureaucratic smoke. The Rattlesnake Fire is close to 100,000 acres; the East Zone Complex over 275,000 acres; the Cascade Complex nearly 300,000, the Krassel Whoofoo near 70,000 acres; and the Trapper Ridge Whoofoo is over 20,000 acres, totaling 765,000 acres (1200 square miles) for just those particular tiles in the “mosaic” that is the Yellow Pine Fire. A final total is also presently unattainable because many of those fires are still burning and expanding (see here).
In the center of that 90 by 30 mile Burn Zone is the town of Yellow Pine, ID, our chosen namesake for the Yellow Pine Fire. Yellow Pine is a “sleepy mountain hamlet” with a population of 40 in 2004 (here). The town hosts the internationally recognized Yellow Pine Harmonica Festival (here), which unfortunately had to be cancelled this year, due to megafire.
The Yellow Pine area also has motels, lodges, guest ranches, hunting and fishing guides, outfitters, and an avalanche of tourists and recreationalists, all of which shut down or didn’t show up this summer. Yellow Pine is still engaged in a Level 3 mandatory evacuation that began in August. The Warm Lake and Johnson Creek Roads have been restricted to fire personnel since August 2nd. The entire South Fork Salmon River watershed was closed to the public on that date. The communities of Secesh, Johnson Creek, Warm Lake, Burgdorf, and Warren have also been affected by the Yellow Pine Fire, as well as the larger towns of McCall, Cascade, and Riggins.
Yellow Pine was visited by tragedy last summer, too. The South Fork Complex Fire (here) burned 50,000 acres near and at Yellow Pine, and four people lost their lives in a helicopter crash (here) associated with that fire.
This summer has also been horrific for the residents and friends of Yellow Pine. The USFS has been doing structure protection, raking yards, wrapping homes in foil, and installing sprinkler systems. Only a dozen structures have been lost so far, half of them homes. But that is small respite. The town has been more or less uninhabitable all summer.
The future will be worse, however. The forests surrounding Yellow Pine have been destroyed for dozens of miles in every direction. The landscape looks as if it had been attacked with napalm. The stench of smoke and grit of ash still fill the air, and the streams and rivers will run thick with sediment from erosion this winter, burying the gravel beds where endangered salmon spawn. Terrestrial and avian wildlife (some on the T&E list) are fled or dead, and their habitat has been incinerated.
The future landscape will be one of thistles, cheat grass, and brush punctuated by hundreds of square miles of charred snags. The green forest has become a forest of black spikes.
Never again will an old-growth forest grow there, because never again will an individual tree have a chance to grow old. The next fire in the Yellow Pine Burn will occur in the next 10 to 30 years, and it will kill whatever few trees lived through or will regenerate after this fire.
The USFS did not attempt to constrain the Yellow Pine Fire. They will not attempt to constrain future fires, either. In the tick brush that will arise on the Yellow Pine Burn, future fires will be more severe, more dangerous, and larger in area. Firefighters (wisely) will not dare to face down the future firestorms that will arise in the Yellow Pine Burn.
The Yellow Pine Fire was planned and implemented by the US Forest Service. They declared their intentions in Fire Management Today last fall (here), in the Ten Year Fire Plan, in the semi-official declarations of Let It Burn Laboratories (such as the Payette NF).
The Yellow Pine Fire is part of the USFS’s Grand Experiment. They let the fires burn just as they said they would, under the faulty premises that the fires would be “good” for the environment and make the forests “healthy” again, and most especially, because they could do it “cheaply.”
Those are all Big Lies. The Yellow Pine Fire was not good for the forest, or health-inducing, but instead destroyed the forest. The fire did no good for any natural resources anywhere. Approximately 20 million tons of carbon dioxide and combustion byproducts were released into the atmosphere by the Yellow Pine Fire. Decay of killed trees will release five times more than that over the next two decades, or until the Yellow Pine Burn burns again, which ever comes first.
And the Yellow Pine Fire did not come cheap. The fire suppression costs have not been released but surely amount to $50-100 million. In addition, perhaps $4 billion in timber was destroyed, and equal value was lost in potential future growth, and an unknown opportunity cost was incurred by the local recreation industry, as well as unknown future losses. The cost/losses to wildlife, wildlife habitat, and ecological integrity are incalculable.
The forests destroyed were priceless, though, and therefore no monetary sum can account for the loss.
History and legacy were incinerated as well. The former landscape was cultural in origin, an artifact of human occupation. The First Residents used, manipulated, and managed the Salmon and Payette River watersheds for millennia. Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery would never have made it to the Pacific Ocean had not those residents, the Agaidika of the Lemhi Shoshone, provided the Corps horses and guides (here).
The incineration of the Salmon and Payette River watersheds, the forests of Yellow Pine, is the heaviest tragedy of this tragic 2007 Fire Season. The Yellow Pine Fire was a travesty and a mega-crime against Humanity and Nature. The scorched landscape across more than a thousand square miles will become a brushy, repetitive fire hazard, further obliterating the former priceless, heritage forest. The ancient, tended forest has become abandoned wasteland now, and will remain wasteland for hundreds or thousands of years, perhaps until the return of the ice sheets of the next Ice Age glaciation.
September 13th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Part and parcel of the USFS Let It Burn strategy is little or no initial attack.
Without initial attack, fires rapidly become bigger, and the bigger they become, the most dangerous, difficult, and expensive it becomes to contain them. No initial attack leads to megafires. Uncontained fires sometimes smolder in place, but sometimes they do not. The fires that grow do so in a chain reaction, self-reinforcing fashion, meaning they propagate and spread like a cancer across the body of the land.
The reduction in (elimination of) initial attack has taken place nation-wide, not just in Idaho. This disturbing report from SoCal appears (here) on the website of the Daily Bulletin of Ontario, CA:
September 13th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I rowed the Main Salmon a few years back and it was an awesome experience. It breaks my heart to think of what the Main and the Middle Fork look like now. Of course, when I went through it didn’t look anything like what Lewis and Clark saw. It was the “faux wilderness” created by letting it grow wild; dense and overgrown. Well, I guess we fixed that, didn’t we? How sad.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Two shirt tail related SOSF posts are:
Whoofoos Kill Old-Growth, here:
http://www.sosforests.com/?p=448
and Homeland, here:
http://www.sosforests.com/?p=449
September 19th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Here are maps (lifted from InciWeb) of the Yellow Pine Fire, beginning with the Rattlesnake Fire north of the Salmon River and continuing south into the Payette watershed. The maps overlap. The total north-south length of the Yellow Pine Fire is approximately 90 miles. An area of over 1,200 square miles has been burned.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Hello Mike — I have a summer home in Warren, Idaho. You hit the nail right on the head in THE YELLOW PINE FIRE. I took a copy of your post to the Winter Inn in Warren and left it on the bar. It was read by many, not one disagreed with the content. Since around the early 1980s the Payette National Forest has engaged in the illegal closing of roads, destruction of cabins, mining sites and other historical sites.
They LIED to us at the fire meetings all summer about how they could not get the the firefighting equipment they needed and about how this was a suppresion fire.
We have contacted an attorney who has filed legal actions against the Federal Government before and won. He thinks we can prosecute those responsible for implementing the Ten Year Fire Plan on the Payette Forest. It would take a lot of work in discovery and would be a five to ten year battle.
Would you be willing to help us in discovery if we can get this up and running?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I am willing to help you any way I can.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Late is better then never. I am so glad to have found this page. (I see that you have a link to an old website I built.) The “Yellow Pine Fire” - that is sort of how we thought about it all - as several fires tried to converge on our village. It seemed like it would never end. I am printing your story to share with others.
One point I would like to make. The fire crews did not help us with preparing for the 2007 fire, they were told to stay off private land. They did wrap picnic tables down the road and some old buildings. They also did a lot of work along Johnson Creek road, but the power lines burned down anyway (several times.) We kept hearing about “point protection” and resource management. Our local volunteer fire department augmented with a strike team patrolled our village and put out the spot fires. (Not all of us were able to evacuate.)
Another point I would like to make is that some members of our volunteer fire department were ‘locked out’ by the road blocks, even tho we had been told our fire department was responsible for protecting the village. (not to mention that we didn’t have mail for 47 days, no power for nearly 2 months, no supplies were allowed in or medicine, etc..)