Abe’s Chair is a peak at the head of Sawtooth Valley, so named because it resembles the stone furniture that supports the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It rises nearly 3000 feet from the valley floor, topping out at 9947 feet above sea level, and—thankfully—no half-mile high statue of Lincoln sits between the ridges that are its arms.
Last week, Julie and I parked a car at the mouth of Sawmill Canyon, on the east side of Abe’s Chair, and drove the pickup around to the west side and parked at the mouth of Little Beaver Creek.
We planned to circumnavigate the peak. There’s a walkable road that goes halfway up Little Beaver Creek, but what trails exist after the road ends have been maintained by deer, elk, and mountain goats.
On the map it looked like we’d get to the car before dark, but most of Abe’s Chair’s forested areas burned in last fall’s Ross Fork Fire. We didn’t know if downed trees would be a problem, or if the heavy rains of summer would have dug impassable channels through the burned landscape. We didn’t know if we would find old mines or the remains of trappers’ cabins or the rusty frames of old logging equipment, all things we lingered over earlier in the summer, while looking for morel mushrooms lower in the burn.
A wildfire exposes the things a forest has hidden, even if those things are only the skeletal forms of the earth, suddenly obvious as rock and sand and the fire-hardened mud of once-green meadows. When a fire burns as hot as the Ross Fork Fire did, the forest floor turns to crusted ash and mineral soil, big trees turn into rust-red shadows on the ground, and roots turn into acres of tunnels.
Walk through a burn and you’ll now and then feel your foot sink deep into the ground where a big root, burning slowly and completely like a giant fuse, has left a hollow in clinker-like soil. You pull your foot up and take another step, hoping it lands on more solid ground.
Going around the back of Abe’s Chair took us four hours and twenty minutes, pickup to car. That was less time than it would have taken if the area hadn’t burned. The fire had cleared whole hillsides of trees.
Morel season was mostly over, but we did find a few late bloomers in wet places beside still active springs. Some green had sprouted along the edges of dry creeks. Up high the fire had left stands of live trees and parklike meadows. On some hillsides the lupine was so thick that it left a heavy, almost chemical perfume in the air. You could taste it with every breath.
Life does come back after a fire, but there are places in the Ross Fork fire where nothing now lives and will not live for decades. Down toward the bottom of Sawmill Canyon, the rain has cut new creek beds. Piles of unstable mud and rock rise eight feet high around the blackened trunks of trees. Not much is left that’s living. The rocky ground drains quickly.
It had rained heavily a week before, but all the way down Sawmill Canyon, our footsteps raised puffs of black dust, which drifted along at knee level when the wind was going our way.
Life needs a foothold to get started, and after the Ross Fork fire, a lot of those footholds are gone.
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It’s raining in Sawtooth Valley this morning, and it rained yesterday and the day before. Hurricane Hilary has sent a plume of moisture up from Southern California, and it’s added to the monsoon moisture that was coming anyway.
As I write, there are likely more mudslides crashing down Sawmill Canyon. We’re not going to walk up there and find out. It was a scary enough place when it was dry.
If Hurricane Hilary had happened this time last year, the Ross Fork Fire wouldn’t have happened, and Abe’s Chair would be mostly green instead of mostly black, and Julie and I would have had a lot fewer meals featuring morels this summer.
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Right now, when the rain is soaking the valley, is a good time to talk about the fire policy of the U.S. Forest Service. We won’t have to worry about a big fire this year, so the discussion is a little less prone to panic.
Next year is a different story, and so are the years after that. The record temperatures that the world has seen this summer have largely spared the Pacific Northwest, and the drought has moved north of us, to burn Alberta and British Columbia. But the world’s climate, due to an inexorable warming, has entered a period of unpredictable extremes. Headlines describe weather that goes from drought to flood and back again, and it’s reasonable to expect that here in Sawtooth Valley, the drought of the past few summers and the rain of this one are part of a climatic whipsawing that will eventually leave the whole valley looking a lot like the lower reaches of Sawmill Canyon.
The U.S. Forest Service is a bureaucracy, which means that it’s deeply resistant to change. Given the choice to adapt or die, it will usually choose retirement, which is not good news for those of us who live in a valley that it administers.
Last summer, the Ross Fork Fire burned for a month before it turned into a monster. It was a small, controllable fire in the wilderness in the Fairfield Ranger District, lightning-caused, burning in sparse forest on high rocky terrain. The first snows were expected to put it out.
But it was a live fire in the middle of a drought. When a dry cold front came through it blew fire down into thick timber, and within days tens of thousands of acres were burning, threatening tens of thousands of acres more.
An army—and an air force—of firefighters invaded the valley. They managed, because of changes in the wind, to save most of the houses at Smiley Creek and the campgrounds at Alturas Lake. Changes in the wind also kept the flames from going over Galena Summit and down into the Wood River Valley. But it was luck that allowed backfires to work, and luck that kept Galena Lodge, Easley Hot Springs, and all the church and 4-H camps from Alturas Lake to the SNRA headquarters from burning.
The problem is structural. Small ranger districts like the one in Fairfield are starved financially. If they spend money putting out lightning-sparked snags on top of peaks, they lose money for forest projects and summer employees, and, worst of all, permanent positions. When a fire starts, they won’t fight it until it can command the attention and resources of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise (NIFC).
By that time, in a dry and fuel-loaded forest, you can attack the fire with helicopters and planes and maybe save some buildings. But clouds and wind and humidity and the daily high temperatures will determine how much of the forest the fire burns, how long it will burn, and whether people in the urban/forest interface will have homes in October.
The amount of money spent on the Ross Fork Fire would be enough to support permanent fire crews on poverty-stricken ranger districts all over the West. But in itself, this is a problem: NIFC has become an arm of the fire-industrial complex, and huge numbers of people depend on it for a living. It needs big fires to happen every year.
Fortunately for NIFC, we live in a warming world.
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The old Smokey Bear posters that used to decorate Forest Service offices, the ones where Disney-character bunnies, squirrels, deer, and bear cubs fled the flames that were burning their homes, are gone. In their place are pamphlets explaining controlled burns and new let-it-burn policies for wilderness areas. The badly burned cub that became Smokey the Bear isn’t mentioned much, because the new policies destroy habitat and the animals and plants in them. Fungus, though, benefits unless the fire cooks the ground to below root level.
The old policy used to dictate that a fire, once reported, was to be out by ten a.m. the next day. It worked well enough that fuels built up higher and higher, until the fires that did escape control sterilized the areas they burned.
So forests came to be seen as liabilities for the agency charged with their preservation. Where possible, fires were allowed to clear piles of deadwood when they didn’t threaten humans. A substantial portion of Idaho—the Payette Forest is a good example—has been blackened by this new policy. When human structures, corporate-owned forests, or municipal water sources have been threatened, NIFC has been called in.
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The brutal realities of climate change haven’t had much effect on Forest Service policy in Sawtooth Valley. Bureaucracies have reptile brains: sluggish, cold, and deeply conservative. They don’t like change, and they make decisions primarily in the service of self-preservation.
But it’s time to acknowledge that the green valley that I can gaze at out the window is a transitory phenomenon. Drought will come again, even though it seems far away right now, and our forests will burn. The mechanism is simple: forests dry out, they catch fire, rains erode topsoil, the blackened and creased ground dries and becomes intolerably hot in a new drought in a hotter world, and new growth is dehydrated before it has a chance to root deeply. Rains will move everything that’s loose, and everything will be loose. Over time, national forests will become national arroyos, full of rock and charcoal.
A let-it-burn policy in this new climate regime is reptile-brained madness. The devastating fires that were blamed on fire suppression needed drought and heat to perform their dark transformations, and in the absence of controlling the climate, we need to start controlling fires before they get out of hand. Reviving the ten o’clock policy would not be a bad place to start, along with permanent fire restrictions for campers and recreationists. It would save money to fund small fire crews on every ranger district in the west. It will mean that fuels will continue to build up, but it’s important to remember that many of the forests that do burn are not coming back. A living green forest, especially one full of deadfall, is a pain to administer. But it’s better than a black and dead one.
Such a change in policy will save lives of cute animals, and maybe the lives of some of the ugly two-legged ones that have caused this mess in the first place.