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I soon fancied myself “the fastest staple gun in the West” for the way I kept fresh Smokey Bear posters displayed all over the district.

 My greatest fire prevention ally as a Toiyabe National Forest fire prevention guard was Smokey Bear. That’s backward, of course. I was Smokey’s ally, and only one of many throughout the United States.

Smokey had been America’s “forest fire preventin’ bear” for nineteen years by the time I became the Bridgeport Ranger District fire prevention guard in 1963. With his famous “Only you can prevent forest fires!” tag line, Smokey had become the most recognized symbol in advertising history.

I was proud to be on Smokey’s team, and used the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Program materials I ordered each year to the fullest. I soon—albeit secretly—fancied myself “the fastest staple gun in the West” for the way I kept fresh Smokey Bear posters displayed on well-maintained peak-roofed signboards—all strategically located, by the way, in accordance with a fire prevention sign plan—all over the district.

In addition to stapling these colorful posters to these signboards, I installed and maintained the signboards—crafted in the ranger station’s shop by fire crew members on days they were not working in the field—all over the district. And so, in addition to its pumper unit and fire tools, my patrol rig was equipped with a post-hole digger, tamping bar, and other sign structure installation tools as well as a five-gallon bucket of brown stain and paint brushes to keep both newly installed as well as older signage looking sharp.

Smokey Bear posters were also displayed in Bridgeport’s public buildings, stores, restaurants, motels, and gas stations as well as at resorts and businesses throughout the district. A supply of Smokey Bear comic books for children met while on patrol was always in the patrol truck along with free national forest maps—yep, they were free in those days—and other information for public distribution. Every campfire permit issued on the district had a small Smokey Bear fire prevention reminder stapled to it.

All of these efforts were, of course, supplementary to the dozens of personal fire prevention contacts with forest visitors and users which I made every day while on patrol.

Although I could not back up my belief with statistics that all these fire prevention efforts actually prevented any wildfires, the district ranger and the fire control officer and I were convinced they did.

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

This article is free from Law360 after you register.

Feds Cite ‘Scientific Support’ For Policy Shift On Tree Removal

Excerpt:

Law360 (February 14, 2023, 3:33 PM EST) — The U.S. Forest Service is defending its decision, in early 2021, to scrap a decades-old restriction on cutting down old and large trees in the Pacific Northwest, arguing that a more flexible standard is needed to ensure that forests in the region can survive a growing number of wildfires.

Responding on Friday to a lawsuit filed by environmental activists, the Forest Service cast its old regulations — prohibiting the removal of trees that measure over 21 inches in diameter — as outdated and overly rigid.

The federal agency said its new standard, adopted in January 2021, provides a flexible approach that emphasizes protecting old trees in the Pacific Northwest but allows the removal of certain tree species that aren’t fire tolerant and crowd out ecologically beneficial species. That policy shift, the Forest Service said, “satisfies all statutory requirements and enjoys strong scientific support.”

“The weight of scientific consensus counsels the Forest Service to mitigate [wildfire] threats by actively managing forests to favor more historically prevalent, fire tolerant species,” it argued. “But that change is impossible if the Forest Service cannot cut any competing fire intolerant species over 21 inches in diameter.”

Federal authorities adopted the 21-inch prohibition as part of a 1994 series of timber regulations known as the Eastside Screens, which applied to 7.9 million acres of national forests in the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon and Washington.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/articles/1575462/feds-cite-scientific-support-for-policy-shift-on-tree-removal?copied=1

That’s the title of a Courthouse News article. Subtitle: “If forest roads can exist as long as 20 years, are they really temporary?”

“On appeal, North Cascades argues nothing within the Forest Service’s contracts with intervenors Skagit Log and Construction, Hampton Tree Farms and Hampton Lumber Mills guaranteed that roads would be closed at the end of its use. As such, the Forest Service violated the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan because there will be a net increase in road mileage within the project area for as long as 20 years.”

Folks, this isn’t a forest planning issue, not directly, but it may be of interest here on Smokey Wire. The outfit I work for (I’m Director of Sustainability Communications at the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, SFI), just released a book, Black Faces in Green Spaces: The Journeys of Black Professionals in Green Careers.

The 120-page publication, was produced by Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences (MANRRS), Project Learning Tree, and the SFI—all are non-profits. It profiles 22 Black Americans who share their personal stories about finding their passions and overcoming challenges, and offer advice to the next generation about exploring their own careers in the forest and conservation sector.

This is a very positive Black History Month story. Journeys includes a brief history of Black Americans in forestry from the colonial period to the present, along with a foreword by Randy Moore, chief of the US Forest Service and the first Black American to hold the position. Several USFS folks are profiled, including Beattra Wilson, Assistant Director for Urban and Community Forestry.

Although you may not be a reporter, you’re welcome to attend the virtual Media Briefing and Q&A session tomorrow, Wednesday, February 15, 2023 from 11–11:30 a.m. Eastern Time. You can register for the Zoom session here. You’ll be able to ask questions of Mia Farrell (Past-President) and Marcus Bernard (current President) of MANRRS, and others.

You can download Journeys as a PDF for free. Individual printed copies of Journeys are also available for $39.99. Bulk orders for organizations that want to distribute printed copies to employees, students, networks, and partners are welcome ($800/box of 25 copies). We’re asking folks to consider buying or donating a box and give them to schools, colleges, and universities across the US, such as Title I schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

Forgive me for shamelessly promoting this book. I’m proud to have been a part of the Journeys team.

Sheep grazed on allotments on the Bridgeport Ranger District, Toiyabe National Forest. 

As the eastern Sierra summer of 1966 wore on, the Toiyabe National Forest dried out. By the middle of July the fire danger was extreme, and fire safety restrictions including prohibition of open campfires outside developed campgrounds were announced. These required special signage and increased the intensity of my patrols.

I was on patrol in the Twin Lakes area early one August afternoon. It had been a relatively slow morning and, just as I began to wish the pace would pick up, it did. But not in any way I expected.

“D-4-5, this is KMB-652.” It was Pam, the district clerk.

“KMB-652, this is D-4-5, over.”

“Les, we’ve had a couple reports of a dead sheep in the Honeymoon Flats Campground. Will you check it out, please?”

A dead sheep? I hadn’t seen sheep in the Twin Lakes basin for days. This one, I surmised, must be a stray from an allotment. Oh well, all in a day’s work. Hoping the poor critter wouldn’t be too ripe, I responded affirmatively.

A few minutes later, I approached Honeymoon Flat. The sheep wasn’t difficult to locate. Lying just off the highway, on the road into the campground, it appeared to have drawn more people than flies since its demise. The small crowd’s attention shifted to me as I pulled up alongside the wooly carcass of a fully-grown ewe.

Howdy,” I said to no-one in particular, closing the patrol truck door behind me. A cool afternoon breeze blew off the Sierra and stirred the aspen.

“It’s a dead sheep!” explained a helpful bystander. I nodded agreement and smiled thanks for his assessment. “Are you going to get rid of it?”

“Yes, sir.” Scratching my head briefly, I sized up the problem and then, in reluctant resignation, strode purposefully toward part of the solution. The crowd’s eyes followed me intently.

Fortunately, the campground garbage had been collected recently, and I found an almost empty can. Quickly transferring its content into another, I hauled the can back and pushed it under the ewe. Because dead animals don’t exactly leap into garbage cans, I had to pry this one into its casket with a shovel. Once the corpse was in the can, I set it upright and slapped on the lid. Then, dropping the tailgate to the horizontal position, I dragged the canned sheep to the rear of the patrol truck. There was just enough room for the can to ride behind the pumper unit and the fire tool box.

But one problem remained. That was one heavy garbage can! I doubt I could have lifted it, at least not gracefully. But an independent streak doesn’t allow me to ask for help—even in situations like that. With all eyes on me, I stooped to pick it up….

“Here, let me give you a hand,” volunteered a burly fellow. Saved!

“Thanks.”

We easily lifted the can onto the tailgate, where I lashed it securely in place. Having a dead sheep fall off one’s patrol truck onto the highway, it seemed to me, would be most embarrassing. With a ripple of applause and a few chuckles, the crowd dispersed. And the sheep was soon disposed of in the nearby Forest Service dump I would burn in a few days.

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

The last few days I get this at http://www.fs.fed.us/contactus/employee_search.shtml

Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.

We can’t connect to the server at www.fs.fed.us.

Part of the Toiyabe National Forest’s popular Honeymoon Flat Campground lies along Robinson Creek.

 It had been a snowy winter and a wet spring. In terms of fire danger, that was good and bad. Fuels were moist, but the wet spring of 1963 had produced a bumper crop of flash fuels—mostly that inadvertent Siberian import, cheatgrass—that would cure by midsummer. Bridgeport District Ranger Bob Hoag expected a busy fire season, and Fire Control Officer Marion Hysell’s small fire organization was as ready as it could be. It was my second summer on the district—my first as fire prevention guard, and I’d been lined out with a full bag of fire prevention duties.

When the telephone sounded the Bridgeport Ranger Station’s three rings about dinner time on July 11, the fire crew figured it was the first human-caused wildfire of my three-week-old fire prevention guard career. The three-man fire crew and I were dispatched not to a fire but to a flood…sort of…at the Honeymoon Flat Campground on Robinson Creek.

The crew and I arrived to find a large Jeffrey pine had fallen into the creek and was diverting water into lower-lying campsites. That tree had to go, and we soon figured the best way to make it go was to put a chain around its trunk and winch it out of the channel. Perhaps anticipating such a need, John had driven his own vehicle, an International Harvester Scout equipped with a winch, to the scene while the rest of us responded in a Forest Service rig.

We had the winch. We had the chain. All we needed was someone stupid enough to brave the swift, icy waters and hook the chain around the tree trunk. For some reason, the guy who a year earlier had told the district ranger he could type—and wound up filling in as district clerk—told the crew he was a pretty good swimmer. Some people never learn!

I took off my boots, wrapped a safety line around my waist, attached another line to the chain, waded in upstream of the target, and let the current sweep me about a dozen yards to the offending tree. Once there, I pulled the chain to me, secured it around the trunk, and signaled the crew to pull me back. That they did and, while I shivered in a blanket next to a blazing campfire demonstrating the difficulty of drinking generous campers’ hot coffee while my teeth chattered, John revved up his winch and, along with crew muscle, finished the job.

Those campers thought the Forest Service was okay!

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

PR from Sen. Feinstein’s office. Good move, IMHO:

• Establishes a prescribed fire-training center in the West. Currently, the U.S. Forest Service operates just one prescribed fire training center in Florida.

The smoke chaser pack carried by Bridgeport Ranger District firefighters in the 1960s included a Pulaski, shovel, canteen, headlight for hardhat, rations, first-aid kit, snakebite kit, map, and other useful odds and ends.

One July 1962 evening a motorist southbound on U.S. Highway 395 drove into the Bridgeport Ranger Station to report a fire high in the crags above Devils Gate Summit. Second-year forestry aide Dick and rookie I were dispatched to the fire in a pickup into which we loaded two smoke chaser packs and two five-gallon water packs. We drove north, spotted the smoke, parked off the highway, put on our hardhats, strapped on our smoke chaser packs, and began the climb up steep rocky slopes toward the fire.

About forty minutes of climbing later we reached the fire. It wasn’t much as fires go—a large Jeffrey pine snag, a few smaller pines and junipers, and some mountain mahogany burning here, smoldering there, and smoking everywhere. But it had potential, and we attacked it with whatever vigor our steep climb had left us.

Once we had a line around the fire, Dick advised the ranger station by radio that we had it contained and controlled. As we began mopping it up, Dick commented on some real hot spots and allowed “We sure could use some water on this job before it gets dark.”

Knowing we meant me, I gazed at the pickup far below. There the two water packs waited.  “I’ll go get it.”

“Right,” Dick agreed, and added as I started down the mountain, “Bring both of ‘em.”

Both of them! Water weighs eight pounds a gallon. Ten gallons of water weight eighty pounds, twice as much as a smoke chaser pack. I knew I was in for a long crawl-and-a-half back up the mountain with those two water packs.

It was dark by the time this firefighter had scrambled back to the fire with that ten gallons of water. It was cold by the time the two firefighters had used that water to cool off the last of the hot spots inside their fire line. It was darn cold by the time the two firefighters, who knew better than to try to get off those crags at night, had kindled a small fire inside their fire line to heat their canned rations, boil water for coffee, and warm their hands. And it was colder still when, at first light, they declared the fire out, shouldered their gear, and made their way off the crags toward the pickup, Bridgeport, and a hot two-dollar breakfast on Uncle Sam at the Sportsman’s Inn as it opened for the day.

From UC Davis…. We have a Northwest Forest Plan to address northern spotted owls and old-growth. Maybe we need a Western Wildfire Forest Plan that amends forest plans to address wildfire….

Unprecedented Levels of High-Severity Fire Burn in Sierra Nevada Forests

The ‘Wrong Kind of Fire’ Is Burning Compared to Historical Patterns

For the study, published in the journal Ecosphere, scientists analyzed fire severity data from the U.S. Forest Service and Google Earth Engine, across seven major forest types. 

They found that in low- and middle-elevation forest types, the average annual area that burned at low-to-moderate severity has decreased from more than 90% before 1850 to 60-70% today. 

At the same time, the area burned annually at high severity has nearly quintupled, rising from less than 10% to 43% today. (High-severity burns are those where more than 95% of aboveground tree biomass is killed by fire.)