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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us June 24, 2005 Grizzly Peak thrives again after ’02 fire By William Hampton Ashland Daily Tidings This view of the burned area of Grizzly Peak shows the contrast between the aftermath of the fire and the nearby healthy vegetation. William Hampton | Ashland Daily Tidings No matter how often nature reminds people of its cyclical nature, there seems to be the undeniable urge to stretch the circle of life into the straight line of progress. In the summer of 2002, more than 20 forest fires burned over 1 million acres in eight Western states. One of these fires was on Grizzly Peak, where contact between a tree branch and a Bonneville Power Administration transmission line ignited the forest in a blaze that took three days to put out. Strong winds carried the fire across the mountain. Fire management techniques put a stop to it after the wind died down, but 1,550 acres had already been charred — including part of an area that was still recovering from a 1992 forest fire. Fire can seem like a purely destructive force, especially to those who would assign a dollar value to the scorched tree trunks that line the mountainside. However, it also serves a valuable purpose to the ecology of a wooded area. “Semi-combusted, decomposing wood is put into a simple form that could break down; that’s what’s good for plant growth,” said Dennis Odion, a fire ecology specialist with the Native Plants Society. This changes nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen, previously trapped in the already-living organisms, into an accessible form that can be extracted from the soil by new life. A pine seedling sprouts from the ground where the Grizzly Peak fire claimed 1,550 acres of vegetation. Some seedlings are growing there naturally, while others have been planted. William Hampton | Ashland Daily Tidings Young forests are a melting pot of diverse species, with complicated food chains. But the longer a forest goes without a fire, the more entrenched its ecosystem becomes. Gradually, the most dominant species of trees, plants and insects do well enough to exclude their competitors. Sometimes this even has the effect of choking off food sources, causing fewer and fewer species to be able to thrive. The forest becomes too homogenous to effectively support its own food chains. A fire resets the scales. It clears space so that new plants can find room to grow. High-severity fires, such as the one on Grizzly Peak, are not what Odion would call ideal. But they do clear away the shady tree canopy, allowing more types of plants to take root. Some species are even attracted to burnt areas. The conditions of the aftermath are perfect for certain insects and fungi to find the sustenance they need in the decaying matter. This, in turn, draws organisms that feed on these newly abundant food sources — such as woodpeckers, which feast on the insects that swarm just underneath the dead wood. And the cycle starts anew. The cones of some trees, in fact, only open in extreme heat conditions; they are trained to take advantage of the periods when they will have the most space and resources — and the least competition. If those times never come, these trees can lose their place in line. Before modern fire-suppression methods, natural forest fires were the norm. Lightning that struck during especially hot, dry, windy periods would start the woods ablaze, and the fire would put itself out when it ran out of fuel. Now, these fires are generally suppressed. “It’s pretty easy to put out lightning,” Odion said. “If a fire were started by a thunderstorm today, or you know, it were later in summer, different people who track the smoke from fire lookouts — they report it, and one person could go and put it out. They just draw a line around it and use a shovel. … That explains the phenomenon we have now; almost all fires we have now that burn as wildfires are human ignitions.” Natural fires were frequently of low severity, which means they could sweep through an area and rid it of underbrush without catching the tree canopy on fire. Under most conditions, Odion said, only biomass less than 1 inch in diameter will become fuel for a fire. The foliage and the lichen hanging from trees takes off, and the tall trees, which may look like fuel, are left damaged but still standing. “It’s pretty common, conventional wisdom: You walk down there, there’s wood everywhere,” Odion said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Look at a redwood forest. There’s more wood in a redwood forest than any forest on Earth, and they don’t burn very well.” In severe cases, like the Grizzly Peak fire, there is enough biomass to keep a fire in one place long enough to travel to the tree canopy — which is devastating to the trees as well as the undergrowth. High-severity fires that cause greater damage to huge areas of forest have become common when a summer with the right conditions comes around. Odion said this is because human fire-suppression methods don’t let fire do its job of clearing out the undergrowth. When small fires are suppressed in an area for a long enough period, he said, the area is ripe for destruction, and the next time a fire hits during hot, dry, windy conditions, everything goes up in flames. “A lot of management is aimed at getting the low severity fire back,” Odion said. “Not many people view the fire you are about to see as OK,” he said of the area affected by the burn, “and that’s partly because of the economic value of the forest. Sometimes it’s good to get a new forest; you know, renew the forest’s ecological process.” Those in favor of fire suppression argue that allowing fire to take its own course has its own dangers. Obviously, at least the minimum must be done to ensure fires don’t head toward populated areas. In addition, every time the balance is reset in a forest, there is the danger that, this time, natural selection won’t turn out so well. Noxious weeds, some native to the area and some tracked in by humans, can take hold in an area where they have no natural enemies. These can flourish in a newly burned area, taking up all the new real estate and threatening the very biodiversity for which the fire should have paved the way. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Online Pharmacy Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams