new and innovative ideas for “green construction”, protecting our forests, managing resources. . . . . What are the proponents for “green construction” techniques view on protecting our popular commodity (wood lumber), and what is the overall consensus of the research figures of how much SF of wood lumber is sold per year, and how much SF of harvestable lumber burns each year?
When I see in the news every single year, headlines that read “…. million acres of forests burn in US Northwest” “…..acres burn in US Southwest…”
the main goal is not to control the overall disaster that forest fires can wreak, but rather to protect these forests from development, and tree harvesting, and when a fire occurs to realize there is no plan in place to contain the fires to a minimal spread (acreage wise).
I mean no disrespect to the firemen who selflessly and heroically battle forest fires, but to help them out, a mapped out plan for containing forest fires within an agreed upon acceptable zone of continuous trees, would be helpful.
clearing the forests in agreed upon increments is best for all sides!
green construction is great in theory, but not when there is no outrage by the proponents to push to the forefront – protection of forests from fires to spread in outrageous proportions. Lumber is a commodity that needs to be taken serious by those who tout their “green construction” horns. It doesn’t get any more natural & clean then “wood lumber” as A green product. You want to talk about waste, research the overall acres of harvestable lumber that have needlessly burned in the U.S. in the past 40years. Any guess on the approx amount? properly planned and implemented, Lumber harvesting can be utilized for fire prevention and control!
It is not reasonable to propose that elimination of forest fires is feasible. But, it is plausible to propose a plan for protecting the rights to harvest trees & lumber in a manner to spur the lumber market as well as create planned grids in forests where lumber companies can go in & harvest trees as to prevent more than X amount of acres from being continuously connected. if lumber is cut in a rotational pattern in a planned out method.
….. acres of forests(U.S. commodity) have burned and something must be done!
Replies
Here in Southern Utah there are whole mountains covered with "bug trees' that were killed by beetles.
They stand waiting for fire, can't be logged due to lawsuits filed by tree huggers.
Fire is better than loggers is the bottom line for these people.
Not really a reply to your post, but it's what I see locally.
Joe H
JoeH
I wish you really had your facts right..
Those "bugtrees" may not contain marketable wood.. or the cost of extraction isn't worth the market value of the wood..
In Minnesota we had a "Blow down" where hundreds of acres of woods In the boundry Waters canoe area was blown over by winds.. everybody started to scream about removing all of the wood but bottom line most of the trees were too small to be marketable and by the time the wood could have been harvested it would have blue stained..
Yet even today if you go up there locals blame the tree huggers.
I wish you really had your facts right..
Those "bugtrees" may not contain marketable wood.. or the cost of extraction isn't worth the market value of the wood..
Frenchy, you have no FACTS, other than your opinion of me.
When you say these trees MAY NOT have any value, you are guessing.
You think I'm a right wing AH, from that you assume that I am wrong re the value of the lumber, or the feasibility of logging it.
I can say for sure there is a big logging operation harvesting that same wood from privately held land, but not from the gov owned land.
Cedar Breaks National Monument is covered with dead trees. Couple years ago I was there and saw little piles of dead stuff piled up. It was a "demonstration project" so we'd know they were on it. Thousands of acres of dead trees & they are piling up what's on the ground. Another 50 years and they'll have it whipped I'm sure.
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This is less than an hour from home, I know what's there.
Joe H
I wouldn't think of getting between you and Frenchy, LOL, but i'd like to insert that the National Park Service and the National Forest Service are completely different entities.NPS is under Dept. of Interior and the NFS is under the Dept. of Agriculture.
Edited 10/29/2006 6:06 pm ET by splintergroupie
The bottom line for the forest is that fires are better than loggers much of the time.There's nothing 'wrong' with forest fires...it's a natural part of the forest. Now we DO have too many fires these days...mainly becauase we spend so much effort trying to prevent them, rather than let them burn naturally periodically.Logging is not a way to prevent forest fires any more than draining lakes is a way to prevent drownings. ;o)Coincidently, there was a great documentary this morning on FCS forests. Seems that Europe 'gets' the concept while us Americans still have no clue.
"clearing the forests in agreed upon increments is best for all sides!"
Do you really think there will be any agreements soon? The tree-huggers are so against any kind of clear-cutting it's ridiculous. I'm not sure they can see the connection to wildfires and "no clear-cutting". I don't even think they want fire breaks. Such a huge waste of resources. Yes, there is still some old-growth forestation but those trees will die, sooner or later. Better to put them to good use than waste them in a fire.
I wonder what they would say if all of the spotted owls were killed in a forest fire that was a result of their habitat being left alone, with no management.
The Show-Low/Chedesky fire in northern AZ in '02 was the result of arson (so the laid-off fireman who started it would have work) and a signal fire that got out of control in the middle of summer when any kind of fires are forbidden, by a woman hiker who injured her foot or ankle. The news chopper crew who picked her up left the fire to continue burning. The two fires met about halfway and burned over 640K acres. Not prime timber land but still was a complete waste of trees, homes, resources, water and IIRC, lives.
"Better to put them to good use than waste them in a fire."
I agree 200%!!!!
highfigh,
It's so easy to blame the tree huggers!
Know your facts.. There is a process whereby trees can be removed from national forests. However often trees cannot be economically removed. Trees may be too small, the wrong variety, or damaged by bugs or stains.. all of which makes the value of the trees next to worthless.
Besides it can often be a giant chess game..
In chess you often make a move that sacrafices one player for a bigger player..
Wood producers sometimes sacrafice one area which may have a marginal net profit for a harvest elsewhere.. They get a lot of support which helps thir bottom line while one area or another is sacraficed..
It's so easy to blame the tree huggers!
Where exactly did tree huggers come from. My guess is the same place every fringe group comes from, born out of necessity. If countless lumber barons hadn't raped the land, if politicians hadn't sold the public's interest for a song. If tree harvesting had been performed in a responsible manor, sustainable yield, harvested at maturity, etc. There would be no need for "tree huggers". Every extreme action produces an equal and opposite reaction, it's the only way to keep the rape and pillage mentality in check. Around here logging is the main industry and I assure you many loggers are tree huggers in one form or another. Too many have seen their livelihood go down the toilet because of poor forest management, the logger of today is no hick, most realize poor management of woodlands is the biggest threat to their industry.
A balancing act, if ever there was one.
Fire is part of nature. Many trees and other forest plants depend on fire for survival or reproduction. Fire can renew a forest...though Smokey Bear preached another gospel.
It should also be noted that, though fire gets the attention, forest timber yields are reduced far more by insects and disease than by fire. Fire has an important role in reducing insect and disease epidemics. Fire is even "prescribed" (intentionally set) to treat insect and disease conditions in the forest.
It gets dicey where forests are peppered with human populations. The "Let Burn" policy adopted in the 70's to "return" fire to the forests even came under attack in the Yellowstone Fires of '88 (even though no major human settlements were at risk).
I was a firefighter in those Yellowstone fires. If you watched the news, you would think the entire 2 million acres of the Park burned--completely to the ground. The truth is only 2% (2% of 2 million is still a sizable 40,000 acres) of the Park was completely burned (fires can be funny...burning slowly along the ground, removing underbrush, without killing trees...then the wind picks up and the fire races through the crowns of the trees...leaping ahead...skipping parts of the forest and hitting others).
News stories often blame fire suppression efforts for making fires worse...sometimes this is true...sometimes not. Some reports blamed the Smoky Bear campaign for allowing fuels (dead trees, etc. to pile up in the forest that could have been removed by allowing more frequent, but lower intensity fires)
This logic was used on Yellowstone, but there the natural return interval for fire is about once every 100 years. This fact reveals a fallacy...it had been less than 100 years since the fire suppression efforts were employed...so the fire fighting had not really allowed any fire cycles to be skipped (since the last set of big fires there around 1900)--so no extra fuels.
I have seen parts of Yellowstone that I tried to put fires out in (a futile effort...the fires just chased us around until the snows of October finally put the fires out), the new forests in the burned areas are beautiful.
Where fire can not be allowed to safely burn, removing trees by harvesting is a good option (to both mimic fire's role in nature and prevent actual fire) and is routinely employed on most federal and state forest lands. On private land, foresters advise "defensible space" around buildings and communities.
"the new forests in the burned areas are beautiful"
Second that statement. The damage done by us driving cars through each year is far greater than the renewing force of that fire was. It is amazing to see the explosion of growth in the burned areas.
Chipper and ALL
While the theory of "Forest Management" sounds like the answer to forest fires. It is in fact the one of the prime reasons that the forests burn up so readily. And now I'll state that my knowledge/opinions come from working for a Fire Bombing Company as an Aircraft Mechanic for over a decade fighting those fires, observing the events and listening to all the people involved.
The forest evolved to be burned over periodically. The summer lightning storms would trigger those fires which burned the underbrush, deadfalls and forest floor litter, the trees survived because they have a thick insulating bark. After the fire the forest floor re-growth provided food for the critters living there, and the thinned out trees continued to grow larger. The burns were naturally smaller and self spacing and more or less limited to ground fires.
Man always thinks that nature is something that can be controlled and taken care of. When forests are protected from the normal burns that were supposed to take place the forest density increases (more trees per acre) along with the dry debris on the ground. When it does burn the forest has so much fuel to feed the fires that it jumps to the tops of the trees and a fast moving crown fire develops which kills all the trees. Those types of fires, can when the conditions are right become huge firestorms that usually need the weather to put out.
The United States (to the best of my knowledge) has Federal, State, and individual Federal/State Parks. Each making the decisions for their jurisdiction. Bureaucracy that take time to work through. Then there are the Interface Fires that take place between the wild areas and the developed ones, and the additional governments involved.
In Canada each Province pretty much takes care of their own area, but readily share resources when needed. When a fire is detected the decision to fight is made and coordinated by that Province's Forest Service. One organization does the whole thing. Generally this works to get the fires when they are small. There are occasionally some that get away and become big, more now because of the effects of climate change and past no burn policies. When you realize that all the
Province's fires we have are fought with only a few thousand people in total (and it's almost unheard of to have the Military involved) it shows that it's possible to be better.
The bureaucracy come into play across our borders too. A fire burning a mile or two across the line that could be quickly actioned, won't be until until the governments(guess which one) involved decide on who does what, and who is going to pay. Once that has been taken care of the fire has grown from a few acres to thousands.
You wanted to parcel up the forest so the fires can't get too big. That seems like a good idea until you take into account the access roads that go in allowing all the recreational users that follow with their campfires, cigarettes, and vehicle sparked fires. One solution creates another problem.
We kid ourselves when we think that we can "improve" on nature, but we keep trying. ;-)
Soon this thread will end up in the tavern (if it hasn't already while I "one fingered" this) and I won't be able to follow and read the roasting I'll get. My thoughts/opinions aren't intended to insult.
All the best.
Well said. Another consideration is the amount of logging waste left behind. The limbs and upper trunks left behind create a layer of kindling hundreds of acres across, one lightening strike, a cigarette or campfire and the place burns so bad it eats the topsoil right to the bare sand requiring a century or more just to start a basic ground cover. Photo below is a good example, The Kingston Plains of Northern Michigan. Thousands of acres of huge pine logged in the early 1900's the area burned after logging. A hundred years later all that recovered is moss and grass with a few trees interspersed between the tombstone stumps, just a reminder nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
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I worked stand exam for the FS for several seasons. There are hillsides around here that were planted five times in the wake of logging, and they were never able to reestablish a forest bec of some delicate combination of aspect, soils, slope, etc. The terms for it is "losing the site"; it'll have to fill in from the edges.
Two things: those fires aren't necessarily burning harvestible timber, and selectively cutting and/or fuels reduction won't necessarily ensure reduced harvestible timber lost.
In 1941, those halcyon pre-treehugger days, 30 million acres burned in the US, with 9 out of 10 fires human-caused. Perhaps it would be more useful to simply put forests and grasslands off-limits to humans. It will be harder to manage lightning, global warming and drought, though.
Fire isn't necessarily a foe; species with serotinous cones REQUIRE fire to propagate, and so do some endangered species of plants. Clear-cutting isn't a good method of silvaculture for every species: 4-per-acre seed-tree cuts in larch work and it won't likely burn if properly slashed, but that won't regenerate a spruce/fir or redwood forest.
Fighting fire requires equipment, and sometimes the National Guard. Unfortunately, they and most of their equipment are in Iraq, so fires that weren't actively threatening homes in my area burned without interference this past summer, filling the valley with smoke for weeks at a time, affecting health as well as tourism. Write your President and tell 'im we want 'em back.
That timber that burns might not have been harvestible except by economically untenable means, as in Sikorskis. Or it may be more suitable for firewood than dimension stock, as the lodgepole in Yellowstone was. As mentioned, fire also serves as nature's way of clearing out the bug population, while not harvesting can protect wildlife, fisheries, and watersheds.
Simply recommending more cutting or more fuels reduction is...well....simplistic. The damned tree-huggers aren't the problem - unless you simply want a scapegoat - and there is no "overall consensus". Check out the recent audit of the success of Bush's touted "Healthy Forests Initiative" and read the executive summary of the pdf file linked there.
Edited 10/28/2006 10:31 pm ET by splintergroupie
Amen to that.
Mother nature never heard of Keep it simple, stupid. Forests are complex ecosystems, and need to be treated (managed is such a misnomer) as such.
We can harvest timber well for the long term, but simple, blanket strategies won't cut it.zak
"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone." --John Ruskin
"so it goes"
--"it (timber) may be more suitable for firewood than dimension stock, as the lodgepole in Yellowstone was."One of our tasks in Yellowstone was cutting trees (lodgepole) around buildings (defensable space), loading the wood on a truck, shipping it out of the Park to a gravel pit where we burned it (couldn't sell timber from a National Park where harvesting was not allowed).Meanwhile, a private contractor was cutting firewood outside the Park and trucking it in for sale to campers. Just a little too ironic, don't ya think.
That is ironic.
I, too have set fire to a lot of lumber in the name of fire protection. It's an agonizingly slow process when you think about how much acreage has huge fuel buildup from decades of aggresive fire fighting.zak
"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone." --John Ruskin
"so it goes"
Some irony is more expensive than others, yep.
Hard to beat forest fires for wanton waste of materials in the Circus. My entry in the Rules-Is-Rules category: i worked on an FS engineering crew on the Minarets RD on a bridge costing $600,000 over a stream we diverted through a 6" culvert to protect the endangered Lahontan trout in it. The trout wasn't native to that stream, but had been transported there by a rancher.
At least we had a bridge when we were done...
Who paid for that one? I don't think being able to divert it through a 6" makes it a stream, more of a trickling creek. "I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Edited 10/29/2006 6:19 am by highfigh
Forest Service, engineering and roads, and it's worse than you think. The project was mandated bec of the ES status of the Lahontan trout, regardless of whether their presence was artificial or not, but it dovetailed nicely with the Roads Dept. need to spend the $$$ in order to get a similar amount of funding the next year. I was picked up for about six weeks at the end in a bid to spend it fast enough as the fiscal year end approached. Then we spent most of our time driving back and forth...pretty, though...
You could have sent some to me. Thanks, thanks a lot!
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
"Fire isn't necessarily a foe; species with serotinous cones REQUIRE fire to propagate, and so do some endangered species of plants. Clear-cutting isn't a good method of silvaculture for every species: 4-per-acre seed-tree cuts in larch work and it won't likely burn if properly slashed, but that won't regenerate a spruce/fir or redwood forest"Right, but with judicious fire breaks, the whole forest won't burn when one nimrod starts a fire. "Write your President and tell 'im we want 'em back."They aren't all in Iraq and remember, it's called NATIONAL guard, not STATE guard. This means we can take people from one state and have them help in another. It's not like every tree is on fire but the way people are burning things, they may be soon enough. Clear cutting isn't a good solution in all cases but leaving them all alone isn't, either. Active, intelligent management of our resources is going to be the best way of harvesting what is useful and leaving the rest. Nothing like a good fire to get things growing again, though. All of the extra carbon is just what a lot of plants need to kick in and as you said, some cones need fire to release their seeds.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
A "judicious" fire break is a lot like a "judicious" levee, except it's a lot easier to predict a flood zone than fire behavior. Where i live, you'd see where I-90 wasn't a large enough firebreak to defend, time and again. The people who live in the interface zones are finally getting the message about cleaning up around their houses, but a funny story:My friends diligently logged around their place last winter, slashed and burnt early in the summer, early in the day. The piles were seemingly out by the afternoon, but a big wind sprang up and fanned the remnants. Before it got knocked down, several acres had burn and the services of three volunteer fire districts were employed. (The feds were off fighting their first fire of the season about two miles away.) The space IS much clearer now... <G>The comment about the National Guard was based on letters our Governor wrote the DOD earlier this year pleading for our Guard back for the critical summer months of firefighting . He said he'd be glad to let Iraq have them during winter; he was refused. Yes, they ARE the National Guard...but which nation? The great majority of our formerly 11 Montana NG helicopters will never see MT again. Luckily we didn't have a long fire season this year, though the very local Gash Creek Fire spent time as the #1 fire priority in the nation. I talked to a neighbor down the road who contracted his services to the FS for three weeks of mechanicking to the tune of over $21K... coulda been a Guardsman. Your tax dollars at work...A lot of people think harvesting and fuels reduction are synonymous, but they aren't, and neither guarantees success against fire, for that matter, thought i don't deny in interface areas it's an imperiative, though the private ownership in these areas complicates the process. Fuels reduction, instead of offering a ROI, can be simply a very costly proposition. Then theirs bureaucracy: did you look at the report i linked to for an idea of how hard it is to decide where the federal money goes?
Yes, I did read it and it's a clear case of too much micro-managing. Also a case of not enough people knowing how these things work. Harvesting is harvesting. If it happens in an area where there is one type of plant, it's called clear-cutting. Otherwise, it's selective, as you know. I still can't see why fuels reduction isn't allowed. It has to help because it doesn't seem possible that every ember will ignite something when it's blown across a break unless the area is totally dry (Yeah, I know logic and fire are two different things).
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
"Harvesting is harvesting"? Like a house is a house, maybe. There is a huge amount of difference between a clear cut and a selection harvest. A clear cut in itself is neither good nor bad, but depends on a range of factors, the greatest of which is size, but also governed by desired outcome. Is it done for fire suppression, wildlife manipulation, bug control, maximizing yield, or more likely a combo of all these factors and more? Selective cutting is far more complicated, factoring in percentages of cover left and which species are selected for/against, as well as the above constraints on clear-cuts.Another factor is method of harvest, the economic balacing act of extraction v. monetary value of the wood. Helicopter, hi-lead, skidders? Roads, no-roads? Can the area only be logged when the ground is frozen? Landings? Dust control? Slash disposal: chipping, pile/burn, broadcast? Then there's the political spectrum, the NIMBYs who want their 10K sf house, but not out of 'their' forest; who want fuels reduction, but not if 'their' forest will get smokey. Also, every 'controlled' burn has the potential to go wild...and who pays for that? If the federal entity, the Forest Service, had a much larger budget and an actual inventory and ranking of the best sites to address, it would be a good start, but still would do nothing to address fuel loads on non-FS lands. No one is saying "fuels reduction isn't allowed", as you lament, only that to equate it with harvesting or even to suggest it can pay for itself is simplistic and most often wrong. Not all harvesting is created equal. Silvaculture is much more complicated than logging and logging is much more complicated than fuels reduction. Harvesting is not a panacea for eliminating trees going up in smoke.
What I meant is that harvesting removes the tree from wherever it is but it doesn't need to be a clear-cutting operation. It can be selective and there can still be a useful yield. It could also be clear-cutting with the added benefit of creating a break by removing fuel for a future fire. I should have elaborated. There's not a simple answer but just about everything I have heard before this thread has been that when someone wants to harvest trees, someone like the Sierra Club files a suit to block it. Obviously, more objective information needs to get out to the general public because what's usually presented is far from objective. That's the mainstream media for ya. Thanks for the information.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
My former husband has been a logging engineer for over 20 years now. He started off with enormous intention for responsible harvesting, but he's been pretty disillusioned by the political gaming pursued by the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, etc. Even his salvage sales (burned-over areas) get court-challenged. In the view of some, the Roadless Initiative went too far, but HFI seems to have brought out the antis in force, instead of having the intended effect. The Bisquit Fire debacle is one such example of over-reaching by the Bushies and the unintended consequences. It's not a matter many times of objective material not being available, but of what one's core beliefs are.
There are enviro and logger groups who are finally putting their heads together and realizing it's in the best interests of all to have a negotiated solution instead of countless rounds of court challenges and appeals, who realize the federal gov't might not be the best entity to work this out.
highfigh,
You mentioned the Sierra club,
It might help you to understand a few facts. They have finite resources and won't use them foolishly to protect every patch of land.. They are extremely selective in the battles they fight. IF The Sierra club or some other group started a lawsuit, you can be assured it wasn't at somebodies whim..
Most of the members of Sierra club understand our need for wood and try to work with loggers to help them get sustainable yields rather than simple clearcuts.. It's clearly a win-win situation for everybody.
Economically loggers like to clear cut because costs are dramatically cut per tree felled. IN addition loggers often want to replace a forest with mono-culture (one high value high yield tree planted rather than the diverse nature of most real forests..
While it costs more to harvest selectively in a real forest rather than the monoculture tree farms, it does provide a real savings. It's hard for a insect/disease to get a start in a natural forest. An insect that is attracted to one type of tree may be killed by another type of tree. Same with disease.. while a few trees will always die off in a natural forest, you won't have the broad die off common inmonocultured tree farms..
Not every chunk of land needs to be a natural forest however in America we have less than 2% of the original old growth forests. I can understand vigourous protection of such a small and finite resource..
The issue is less about getting the trees and more about how they go about getting said trees.Typically (not always) loggers get trees by building roads. Roads are one of the single most destructive things to do to a forest ecosystem. While it may not effect the trees directly, is had a huge impact on the wildlife in a lot of these forests.The Sierra Club and others, understandably, also see that one road being a gateway to even more roads. And, again, dead trees *are not a bad thing* for the forrest. Yes, they are fuel for fires. That's not a bad thing. They rot. That's not a bad thing. They provide a home to all sorts of animals. That's not a bad thing.That said, clear cutting isn't necessarily bad, either. It's ugly. VERY ugly. And often is done in a poorly managed way. But selective clear cutting and replanting can work as well.As many have said, there is no one right answer.Also, heres more info on FSC (an organization I did not know about until this morning):http://www.fsc.org/en/Apparently, Home Depot now prefers FSC lumber over non-FSC lumber. The key is to get consumers to prefer it now... ;o)
Managing our forests is a complex issue with few simple answers. Apparently, different forest types require different management practices.
Here are a couple of sites that should provide some answers to your questions. I hope they are helpful.
Sustainable Forestry - Wikipedia
Ponderosa Pine Fire Ecology on the Colorado Plateau
As a 20 year old fire fighter I was in the right place at the right time when the decision was made from way up in the chain of command to set a backfire in old growth timber in a southern oregon wilderness area. The main fire was burning into the wilderness area and the area we burned was to divert the fire to skirt the main body of the wilderness area. I was the one who got to light it off and it was so dry those monsters really burned.
The trees in that part of the world are so large that it still makes my head spin. Sugar pines with trunks ranging from 4' to 6' in diameter and a cedar of some kind almost as big, not to mention a few other oversized species.
As far as magnitude goes, personally burning a hundred acres of old growth will always be the largest impact I've had on this earth. To this day I get an odd feeling just talking about it since it was the right thing to do in order to save the wilderness area, but it's hard to not get a knot in the stomach for all that fine wood that went up in smoke.
Firefighting was a great summer job.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
'87 or '88 ? I was a firefighter based in Montana, but was shipped out to that vacinity in '87.Siskiyou?
What crew were you on? Lolo?
I was on the Fort Washakie intial attack helitack crew from '85 to '93 and freelanced as a crewboss trainer for '94. Our fire season ends in Sept. so after things slow down we'd pimp out our guys as type 2 crewbosses, freelance helicopter crews or work the late season on the Bighorn IR crew.
That fire would have been '87. I can't think of the forest off the top of my head, but it seemed that our fire camp was in northern cali and the fire was not far over the boarder. I started out that fire on a handcrew, but since I had helitack experience was pulled off to help shuttle crews. The one way walk into that fire was something like 12 miles and the dry stream beds we were following were murder on the knees even though it was the end of the summer and we were in top shape.
In '88 I was the lowest paid guy on the crew, but had been on the crew the longest so when our fearless leader burned out and quit early in the season I took over as a 21 year old gs-3 forman. While most of the other crews got sucked into Yellowstone we were run ragged chasing smaller fires all over western Wyoming.
What a great time. We were getting 80 hours of oats a week during July and had to slow down to 60 in August to keep from going loopy. We looked like concentration camp victims by the time we started cashing checks in Oct.
You probably got sucked into Yellowstone? What a mess.
Do you remember hearing of a girl that kept a diary of evil deeds and filed an EEO complaint at the end of the '90ish fire season, getting 12 members of the Bighorn IR crew canned for telling dirty jokes? She was on my crew for half the year and I gave her the choice of transfering or calling it quits since she was a pain in the buttt.
I'm now living in Boise so all the fire activity around here has me missing the good old days. The guys I worked with are now just about at the 20 year mark. I probably should have stayed full time for the retirement benefits.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
Kootenai...in those two seasons ('87 & '88) most of us started out on other crews (timber cruising, trail work) and by mid-summer we were on fire crews all over the west.In '87 we were flown from the Missoula smoke jumper base to N. CA in a noisy old WWII bomber. We ended up in the Kalmath NF with a base at Forks of Salmon, CA (about 20 miles south of the Oregon line, not far Medford, OR, between the Redwood Coast and Mt Shasta.You gave a good description of the forest...I can still see it now. I was impressed with how steep the slopes were out there (I thought I knew steep mountains from my time in CO, WY, ID, MT, etc.).They knew how to have a good time In N. CA. I still remember the names of places there...Happy Camp, Wiskeytown, Sawyers Bar (good joke there...).I mentioned it in another thread, We had two deaths in our fire camp that summer. That was sobering.I did get sucked into Yellowstone in '88. Hard to fight a fire with all those reporters around. An AP photo of me ended up in USA Today and dozens of other newspapers...my 15 min. of fame.With travel pay, I ended up with 127 hours one week...I did not know there were that many hours in a week (there are 168 it turns out). I was a sawyer, clearing line...we would cut line as long as we could stand it, then I'd spend my break (while others lounged) sharpening the chain on my saw, when I finished sharpening...it was back to work. The best of times though!
I mentioned it in another thread, We had two deaths in our fire camp that summer. That was sobering.
We almost killed 8 of the crew in Oregon building fence of all things. We had a day off, which would have ment sitting in fire camp, but there was a nasty cold going around and the only crews that were getting it were in camp for a day off so we opted out. Instead we heard a barbed wire fence needed to be built on the forest and many of us grew up rural enough to be good at it so the crew strung some wire.
Our fence line came to a blown down sugar pine that was at least 5' in diameter with an uprooted root ball an easy 15'-18' in diameter. We had our small 20" bars and took turns over lunch whittling away at the trunk nearly 30 feet from the uprooted base while the 8 guys sat in the shade under the huge root ball.
When we made it through the trunk the roots still attached had enough spring to stand the 30' stump upright! Had the 8 guys still been eating lunch they would have all bit the dirt since it happened so fast.
Neat country. And you're right--it's a steep son of a gun over there.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.