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Gird End Fire restoring forest
Rather than waste resources fighting a natural fire in the backcountry, the Forest Service in Idaho chooses to allow natural processes to play out.
Rick Floch, fire mgmt officer for the Bitterroot Nat'l Forest, monitors the Gird End Fire southwest of Skalkaho Mountain. The lightning-caused blaze is being allowed to burn to clear away overstocked fuels and revitalize the forest’s health. John Cramer
In the smoky haze, Rick Floch stood next to the Gird End Fire on Thursday, watching it creep along and burn a blackened mosaic across the cluttered floor of the Bitterroot National Forest.
He had a combi, a firefighting entrenching tool, over his shoulder, but he didn’t use it.
He had a radio, but he didn’t call in reinforcements.
He didn’t have an engine nearby, so he didn’t squirt any water.
In fact, he did nothing.
“People ask, ‘Why aren’t you putting it out?’” Floch said, referring not only to the Gird End Fire but to remote wildland fires on public lands as a whole. “I say, ‘Why should we?’ We should allow more fires to play their natural roles in the ecosystem.”
Floch, the forest’s fire management officer, has been fighting Western wildfires for nearly 40 years as a ground-pounder, a helitack rappeler and a strategist.
But when he went to check the Gird End Fire southwest of Skalkaho Mountain on Thursday, he did something he’d like to see firefighters do more often whenever lightning sparks a blaze deep in the forest.
Which is to say, nothing.
Firefighters are monitoring the blaze’s movement and weather conditions to make sure private property isn’t threatened, but they aren’t attacking it.
“There’s no need to,” Floch said. “It’s surrounded by old fire scars, the winds are generally from the southwest. No structures are around. It’s the end of the fire season. And ecologically, it’s burning in an old, decadent stand of lodgepole and white bark pine.”
Rather than devoting a lot of money and manpower to fighting fires, Floch wants a more hands-off approach, allowing flames to do what they do naturally in a fire-dependent ecosystem.
Allowing remote fires to burn isn’t new. The Forest Service dropped its policy of suppressing all fires decades ago in favor of letting more blazes burn as a benefit to natural resources.
That means using fire to clear away crowded trees and dense, dry layers of needles and other debris, opening the way for the next generation of vegetation and wildlife.
But Floch wants to see more fires take their natural course.
“We’re losing a lot of our forests because not enough fires are being allowed to burn so the forest can regenerate itself naturally,” he said. “Everything’s going to burn sooner or later, so we should take a more intelligent approach.”
It’s a policy that some people scornfully call “let it burn,” which the Forest Service considers an oversimplification of a decision-making process that evaluates each fire and balances natural resource benefits, financial costs and risks to life and property.
Floch also supports a preliminary proposal of going back into the 2000 fire areas and setting controlled burns next fall and every subsequent 10 years in an effort to create a forest with a more natural mix of trees of different ages.
Floch said the Gird End Fire is a perfect candidate for a resource fire.
It was started Sept. 9 by lightning. The area hasn’t burned in decades and is overcrowded with trees. No private property is nearby. And it’s surrounded by areas that have burned in recent years.
The Bitterroot National Forest, like much of the West, has had a quiet fire season this year. The Bitterroot averages 140 fires a year. It’s had 66 this season so far.
The Gird End Fire has burned about 125 acres, creeping along a ridge line and down into a basin.
Floch, 58, donned his fire gear and headed into the fire Thursday side-stepping down a steep ridge.
He clambered over a matrix of fallen logs. He kept watch for falling snags. His fire boots sunk into burned soil the texture of talcum powder.
The fire burned some areas and left others untouched, creating a jigsaw puzzle pattern of blackened and green swaths.
It burned through a carpet of bear grass, which is sending up green shoots a week after being burned.
It scorched ninebark, huckleberry and snowberry shrubs. It burned through lodgepole pine, white bark pine, subalpine fir, Douglas fir and spruce.
The trees popped like Roman candles, their dry needles sounding like bacon sizzling in a pan. The crisp, acrid smoke filled the air, sending up white, black and gray plumes.
After a while, Floch made his way out of the fire.
He stepped over elk droppings. He flushed two fat blue grouse. He tried to push over a snag, its charred base all but eaten away by the flames.
He turned at the top of the ridge and looked down at the fire.
“Again,” he said, “why put it out?”
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