Spring burning underway in Sanders County

Fire in the woods and smoke in the sky now could mean less chance of intense, destructive wildfire and less smoke in the sky when fire season eventually arrives later on.

At least that is what land managers for the Plains/Thompson Falls Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service are hoping and planning for as district personnel prescribe burned nearly 300 acres in two areas earlier this month as part of the district’s annual spring burn plan. Those areas, a combination of ecosystem maintenance burning units and previously harvested timber sale units, are only a portion of the total area planned to be burned, depending on if and when prescription guidelines can be met for the other areas planned for ignition.

The areas burned earlier this month – in the Swamp Creek drainage about seven miles west of Plains (approximately 70 acres) and at the Weber Gulch trailhead about two miles north of Thompson Falls (approximately 220 acres) – were both accomplished in the wildland urban interface, an action point of emphasis for the Forest Service and people like Dewey Arnold, the Plains/Thompson Falls District fuels specialist.

"One of our biggest priorities is treatments in the urban interface, especially around residences and high-use dispersed sites," Arnold said. "Our current direction is to concentrate on getting into those areas and making them more fire safe as soon as we can."

Ironically, one of the best ways of reducing fire risk during fire season is the judicious use of fire as a fuel reduction tool when it is not fire season, and local USFS personnel were doing just that these past few weeks. It’s almost a burn now or be burned later type of situation – anything that burns now will not be available to burn when fire season truly arrives.

Prescribed burning is an effective tool used to attain a variety of natural resource objectives. After timber harvest, burning is used to reduce slash loadings created by the logging, and to prepare the site for tree planting or natural regeneration of trees. Ecosystem maintenance burning not tied to any other activity is utilized to reduce hazardous fuels, to improve forage conditions for big game, to maintain traditionally open winter range areas and to restore a more natural regime of fire processes on the landscape, or to accomplish some combination of those goals.

Burning in the wildland urban interface can be viewed as somewhat of a tradeoff – adjacent land and homeowners could expect smoky conditions which could persist for several days, but the risk of wildfire later on could be greatly reduced.

As an example of that tradeoff, a few residences in the Weber Gulch area were impacted by short-term smoke last week, but the burn was a long-term success from the Forest Service’s point of view.

"The Game Range units at the Weber Gulch trailhead were harvested and, by law, we are mandated to treat fuels generated by timber harvest," District Fire Management Officer Rick Cavill said. "Our burning met the identified objectives for the project. We regret the fact that smoke impacted some folks and make every effort to avoid doing that, but it just cannot be avoided sometimes, unfortunately."

In the areas prescribe burned these past few weeks, the ground and tree boles may appear a little black right now, but the forests will be leaner and greener, and less susceptible to damaging fire in the immediate future.

The Forest Service plans on doing more burning in the coming weeks, including an ecosystem maintenance treatment near the Weber Gulch trailhead just west of the area burned earlier this month.

Other areas that could potentially be burned this spring are located in the Dry, Cherry, Mosquito and Chipmunk creek drainages in the Thompson Falls area, and the Weeksville Creek drainage west of Plains. Several ecosystem units in the Cougar Peak area may also be burned in the next several weeks.

Burning projects will either be fired by hand with drip torches, as they were during the earlier burning on the Game Range project, or by a helicopter equipped with an ignition device, or by a combination of those methods.

All prescribed burning activities must comply with air quality restrictions as outlined and administered by the Montana/Idaho Airshed Group. Burns will be conducted when air dispersion patterns and weather forecasts are favorable but smoky conditions could possibly still develop. Burn managers will attempt to minimize smoke effects and reduce the impact to the public.