Global warming has increased the threat of wildfires, and Gargoyle Gulch is vulnerable. In January I spent $2000 on a crew that cleaned out the area around my house to insure that it would be safe in a wildfire, but that effort covered only a couple of acres. The other 38 acres of my land were untouched. The last big fire here was about 80 years ago, and in the time since the fuel for a fire has built up to dangerous levels. The area was logged about 30 years ago, but they only took lumber; the slash from the trees they piled up and left. (Slash is just the branches and other detritus left over after they take the timber.) Most of those slash piles have nicely decomposed into large humps in the ground, so they pose no threat.
However, there’s still an enormous amount of loose fuel on the forest floor, and much of the forest is overgrown with too many trees too closely spaced. I’ve been thinning them for years, and I’ve cleaned out most of the brush, but there’s still plenty of fuel on the forest floor.
Global warming is making matters worse by killing off many of my Douglas firs. My counts indicate that, except for the cool north-facing slope in one corner of my land, about half the Douglas firs (some 200 trees) have died. These snags (dead trees) are especially dangerous in forest fires; they light up like torches and burn fast and hot, spreading embers widely. Each one must be cut down, limbed, and dragged off with the tractor. The slash left over from the limbing process must then be piled and burned.
This is a tricky trade-off. Burning slash puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming. But if a wildfire sweeps through my forest, it will release a lot more carbon dioxide than I can release by burning slash piles. In other words, if I burn X tons of slash, I reduce the likelihood that Y tons of wood will burn, and Y is much greater than X. There’s no way to know the right balance.
One alternative I have tried is to put all the slash into a trailer and use the tractor to tow the trailer to an open area where I build a huge slash pile that I leave unburnt. If a wildfire comes, that pile will burn, but it’s so isolated that it won’t add to the threat. I’ve done this in two places, but it’s a lot more work than just burning the slash pile. I tried an additional experiment with one of the slash piles: driving back and forth over the pile with the tractor, smashing down the branches into a compact pile. However, some of the bigger branches are tilted upward when tractor drives over them, and they can twist around in the most unpredictable ways. I’ve been gored twice doing this, and it was only luck that saved me from serious injury. So that experiment didn’t work out.
Here’s a time-lapse movie of me burning a slash pile a week or two ago. It spans about six hours. It took a good half hour to get the fire started and another half hour before it got big. I then spent about two hours traipsing back and forth between the fire and its neighborhood, picking up slash and tossing it onto the fire. You can see that I added more wood to the fire during this time than was originally in the pile. I took several long breaks to rest; the work is exhausting because the forest floor is uneven and littered with obstacles to trip you, so walking back and forth carrying all that stuff is a lot of exercise. But the exercise is one of the reasons I do this: I shouldn’t spend so much time sitting on my butt in front of the computer writing junk like this.
At the end of the movie, I have an ash pile. It’s actually more like a pile of hot charcoal underneath a layer of ash. The charcoal is still burning, albeit slowly because of the lack of oxygen. It continues to burn for a day or two, but there are no flames and no danger of the fire spreading.
I burn only on approved burn days and will be reducing my burning over the next few weeks. Right now the ground is still damp from all the rains, so there’s little chance of the fire spreading beyond the burn pile. I bring a fire extinguisher along just to be safe, but as the weather warms and things start to dry out, I’ll have to terminate the burns.
