Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.158] on Friday, August 21, 2015 at 15:53:27 :
In Reply to: Looking Off My Porch Right now! Pict. posted by Willy-N [72.171.192.118] on Thursday, August 20, 2015 at 23:28:32 :
Looks like that dry cold front stirred up the Columbia basin and blew some of the smoke up here finally. Usually Wallace is above it, but you can definitely smell the smoke in the air today. 105 years ago today (Aug 21st) was the 2nd day of the "big blowup". Within a couple days after that the weather changed and there was snow halfway down the mountains. We could sure use a change like that right now.
Everything sounds bad over in your neck of the woods, all the way from Newhalem to Aeneas Valley. At some point we're going to have to wrap our heads around the idea that pine forests burn, just like people on the coast know that the tide comes in. The pioneers said you could drive a wagon from Ft Colville to Tonasket, the forests were so open back then. The Indians and natural fires burned the underbrush so the big yellow pines could survive and ground fires didn't crown. Then the loggers came in and took all the big trees, and the foresters imposed fire suppression, so now what used to be open forests of big trees is now thickets of dog-hair bull pine and grand fir, so every fire is a crown fire. I suppose it was 20 years ago now that the Sherman Pass fire showed how these "modern" forests burn.
Here in my neck of the woods fire is not so common and the forests aren't naturally so open, but it still used to be a regular thing for the ridge-tops and south facing hillsides to burn. That provided browse for the elk and encouraged huckleberries and beargrass, but it also provided natural fire breaks so that a valley fire was unlikely to get out of the valley it started in. I don't like seeing the forests burned, but I know that in the interior West, fire is as natural as weather, and like a flood building up behind a levee, the longer we hold it back, the worse it is when it breaks out.
At this point, my immediate area doesn't have any fires burning, but that was just luck of the draw in the last round of lightning strikes. The Forest Service has closed the whole North Fork to public access.
The good thing is that I'm not aware of a single bad fire this year that was started by people. They've all been lightning strikes, so they weren't anybody's fault, aside from effects of a century of fire suppression and 30 years of almost no logging.