Memorial Day weekend, campers and hikers might have been surprised at the sight of 600-plus acres of newly burned, south-facing terrain above Avalanche Creek.
As part of the Aspen-Sopris District wildlife habitat improvement project, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management partnered with Pitkin County and Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District on May 1 and May 3 to burn overgrown, dense and declining scrub oak, mountain mahogany, serviceberry and aspen.
Why would land agencies purposefully roast our forests after the Grizzly Creek and Basalt Mountain wildfires? Because the chaos of forest fires allows for regeneration.
Long before European colonization of North America, western landscapes and ecosystems evolved for millennia through fire cycles. Animals and plants evolved with those fire cycles, too; so much so that some species are dependent upon them.
The advent of national parks and forest preserves in the 1880s, however, spurred policies of fire prevention and suppression to protect wilderness areas and future commercial timber production. Today’s public forests reflect those policies: increased tree stand density and canopy cover accompanied by a decline in overall biodiversity.
A familiar example of this is the juniper-pinyon forest of Carbondale’s Red Hill trail system. The aging trees and almost-full canopy has a minimal grassy understory with little to offer wildlife.
The Avalanche Creek valley has a lot of shrub diversity, but it’s what the forest service calls “decadent:” woody, overgrown and in decline.
“This is winter range for elk, deer and Rocky Mountain sheep,” explained Write River National Forest Public Affairs Officer David Boyd, waving up the valley. “There’s not much food here for animals. When you burn it — especially this time of year — it’ll burn kind of patchy. Biologists call it a ‘mosaic.’ Mosaic ecosystems create ‘edges:’ places where plant diversity increases.”
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the tide turned as conservationists convinced land management agencies of the beneficial ecological role of natural fire cycles in forest health. As such, federal and state land agencies have since turned to prescribed burns — defined by the Forest Service as “the controlled application of fire by a team of fire experts under specified weather conditions to restore health to ecosystems that depend on fire.”
“Controlled” is the operative word. Twenty yards from the general briefing for the Avalanche prescribed fire was a mobile weather station tracking data on wind, temperatures, air pressure, precipitation and humidity specific to the burn site.
“They’re looking for a forecast for right here,” said Aspen-Sopris District Ranger Kevin Warner. “It’s not the same forecast we can look up online. They’re monitoring the weather conditions the day of, the few days prior. They collect fuel samples — they actually come out and cut stuff off the trees, take it back and ‘cook’ it, do other things with it, to make sure they understand what the fuels are. They’re looking at the underbrush and the moisture there, looking at where the snow levels are … They’re out here driving and looking at this area three to four days a week for a month or more.”
The final push in the prescribed Avalanche burn is to stimulate grass production in a winter-range sheep meadow toward the top of the ridge.
“If we run fire through those meadows, the grass grows taller and denser, providing that nutrition that sheep are looking for. It’s not necessarily what they’re using in the summertime,” said District Biologist Phil Nyland, “but as that grass dries and goes dormant, there’s better, more nutritious grass — and more of it.”
In addition to improving habitat and forage for wildlife, the Avalanche burn gives recreators the unique opportunity to watch forest fire regeneration right in their own backyard. Expect burned shrubs to send up the new, tender shoots elk and deer need for winter nutrition. In newly opened areas, watch for long-dormant species to finally have their time in the sun again. Wildflowers, forbs and grasses will be lush again, for many years to come — an invitation to other wildlife we might not have seen in some time. Burned trees create habitat for nesting birds and small mammals. Renewed understories offer forage to grouse, wild turkeys and bears. Wildflowers particularly go nuts after controlled burns from the heat and nutrient dump, which in turn feeds migrating and resident songbirds, gophers, chipmunks and squirrels. The forest truly comes alive.
And a bonus delight? Next year’s burn morels, for those in the know.
If you’re curious about the health of Colorado forests, the Forest Service has partnered with the Division of Forestry to publish an annual “Report on the Health of Colorado’s Forests” since 2001 (available at: www.bit.ly/COforestshealth).
About three years after a wildfire raged through Grizzly Creek, the oak brush, grasses and forbs are responding positively with new growth. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service
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