Culture of Fire

Yesterday, we effected our first Culture of Fire underburn! Learn more at the link, but here's a snippet:

End days!

Preserving the big, fire-resistant 
Jeffrey pine trees; removing a 
lot of torchy White Fir.

Finally, we are reaching the final stages of implementation of the Sagehen Forest Project and other forestry projects in the basin plantations: logging and fire!

The hand-thinning and mastication units in the Sagehen Forest Project were completed in 2016. We tried to start burning the piles last fall, but they were still too green. All summer long, firewood cutters have been removing the logs from the piles for us (including volunteers from Northstar's Epic Promise Day), and the remaining slash is now dry and ready to burn as soon as snow comes to prevent the fires from taking off. The burn piles have a small bit of plastic sheet in them to keep the core of the pile dry enough to light after the ground gets too wet to burn.

Bamford, the contractor for the units with saw logs on them, finally executed his contract at the eleventh hour: it was awarded 6 years ago. The scary Transformer-like machines started processing logs about a week ago, and they will work until weather makes the ground too wet to continue. They'll return next season to finish. It's an impressive operation.

But, forest restoration projects are not complete until low-intensity ground fire returns to cycle nutrients and take over the task of thinning the forest before it burns catastrophically. Cool fire also removes duff layers that impede water infiltration, letting it run off and escape rather than replenish the groundwater.

That guy looks so unsafe!

This week, the Forest Service finally put fire into the plantations that they masticated in 2014. It takes a long time for all the stars to line up: air quality, fuel moisture, no wind, a storm on the way to put the fire out afterwards, fire crews in position, funding. It's amazing it ever gets done at all. Hopefully, public resistance to light smoke from prescribed fires is being overcome by the overwhelming smoke from catastrophic burns.

In the long run, this stuff is going to burn. As Craig Thomas of Sierra Forest Legacy says, "There is no 'no fire' option for California." We need to decide whether we want to work with fire, or continue to be its victim. "With fire, we've been trying to completely suppress a process that is as natural as rain...and it's not working out well for us. The next generation is going to pay our air emissions debt."

Feller-buncher head

Sagehen is working with the Living Forests project to try to build a small wood timber industry to keep some of the wood out of the flames, or at least burn it in a controlled furnace to make heat and energy.

Sagehen Forest Project photos (more recent photos are later in the album).

Of course, none of this would be possible without all of our wonderful partners in the Sagehen Forest Project including our funders at the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, National Forest Foundation, US Forest Service, Tahoe National Forest, Wildlife Conservation Board, Joint Fire Science Program, UC Berkeley, and others. Heartfelt thanks!

KGO-TV reports on wildfire issues and the Sagehen Forest Project treatments

Read story here.



Read story here.

SFP stakeholder visit

Meeting in the field on June 30, 2016 to view the current forestry work, 34 attendees representing 18 different organizations visited Sagehen to check in on the Sagehen Forest Project implementation. The group included the contractor, project funders, and members of the collaborative design process, as well as organizations and individuals involved in the upcoming Lake Tahoe west shore collaborative project:

UC Berkeley, Sagehen Creek Field Station
Truckee Ranger District, Tahoe NF, USFS
Tahoe National Forest
National Forest Foundation (NFF)
Sierra Nevada Conservancy, CA (SNC)
Wildife Conservation Board, CA (WCB)
Sierra Business Council (SBC)
Truckee Fire
Cal Fire
South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL)
Lake Tahoe Conservancy, CA (CTC)
Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA)
California State Parks
Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, USFS
Private citizens
West Forest Inc.
Pacific Southwest Research Station, USFS
USFS Region 5

While mastication is certainly traumatic, everyone seemed pleased with the overall results so far, and eager to see fire on the ground. KGO-TV--the San Francisco Bay ABC affiliate--sent a reporter, and I'll post that piece when it is released.

Saving The West

The Sagehen Forest Project has spun off several remarkable related projects.

Saving The West (STW), now Living Forests, is a policy document developed by the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz, including artist Newton Harrison and consultant Josh Harrison. STW is being developed as a rallying point to bring together a group of folks interested in addressing the glaring hole in the Sagehen Forest Project: the lack of a California market for raw wood product.



Going into the collaborative process, we all thought that getting environmentalists and loggers to agree would be the hard part. But, given a little time, that turned out to be relatively easy: everyone benefits from a healthy forest. Yet, now that we all agree on what needs to be done, we are stymied by the lack of someone to buy even the saw logs coming off the forest, much less the wood chip and small diameter wood. For the unit treatments around the station which are being funded by the National Forest Foundation (NFF) grant, we are just masticating everything into chip that will be burned on the ground. Or chopping and stacking logs into burn piles. This seems so wasteful: that material should be used, and continue to act as carbon storage.

The Center is working to put forestry issues onto the platform of the Democratic presidential nominee, as well as into the Governor's office. If these politicians start to hear about this need from both the scientists and the artists, it carries more weight and importance.

We have begun to bring Cathexis Architecture into the conversation. Cathexis has an impressive redevelopment project planned for a sizable chunk of downton Reno, NV, and they would like to build at least one wooden skyscraper. Binderholz, an Austrian company that manufactures engineered wood products, is planning to open a plant in the US. They are looking in the Pacific Northwest, but the NFF is reaching out to try to connect them with the Reno Dept. of Economic Development. If we could develop a market for wood product here, that reduces transportation costs to get material out of the forest.

The Proposal:

• STW Talking Points
• STW Proposal

Related info:

• What the West's Trees Tell Us
• Use of linear programming to optimize the social, environmental, and economic impacts of using woody feedstocks for pellet and torrefied pellet production
• CA Assembly Votes to Recognize Forests as Part of State’s Water System

Contractor agreement executed

Before...

The contract to treat the UC Berkeley-managed units around the field station has been executed! West Forest, Inc. brought their masticators out last Thursday morning, just in time for this weekend's snow, which has shut work down again until the ground dries out. Next week, we expect the hand-thinning to begin, as well.

The work done before the weather shut-down is dramatic! It's easy to see how this project will help restore ecological function: reduce stress on the big trees, reduce fire danger, and create more wildlife habitat.

See more pictures here.

...and after.

Contract awarded! Grant received!

From Joanne...

===============

I am very pleased to let you all know that the Tahoe National Forest was able to award our first contract implementing the decisions made for the Sagehen Project.  This is a wonderful and exciting step.  Everyone who participated has helped us get to this point.   We are also very pleased to announce that on March 12, 2014, the National Forest Foundation was awarded a $349,140 grant by the Sierra Nevada Conservancy that will allow implementation of the next phase of this project, as well.

I need to say that I am very proud of everyone who helped us get here.  This was truly a meeting of the minds. We started with a variety of ideas and through a great deal of good, hard work, came to an amazing place.  Everyone brought their passion but then took time to hear and understand everyone else.  I know there are still some different viewpoints, but this project is so much better today for the energy and effort that everyone put into the understanding that has developed. Thank you!

I need to say as proud as I am of everyone who participated, that I am particularly proud of the core team who put in so many hours and worked so hard to be sure we captured all the ideas and found ways to fit them together, who read and re-read the science until it could be incorporated into the design, who helped us craft a great project and then helped us explain it in the NEPA document.

I know that the implementation is our next opportunity and challenge but I welcome it and hope you do as well.  We have learned so much getting to this point, but I know that learning will continue.  Jeff Brown has told me so many times to get on with the implementation so the next group of scientists can watch us work, see the results and help us learn more.  Well, here we go….

Please accept my gratitude for your support.

Joanne

Joanne B Roubique
District Ranger
Truckee Ranger District
10811 Stockrest Springs
Truckee, Ca 96161
530-587-3558 x 232
jroubique@fs.fed.us