Prescribed burns spark debate, fear, excitement among stakeholders

BUFFALO — Bureau of Land Management fire personnel descended on a field of sagebrush off of Hazelton Road in the Bighorn Mountains on Oct. 19.
Dressed in yellow shirts, green pants and a red hard hat that make up the firefighter's uniform, 17 crew members gathered for a briefing that precedes each wildland fire situation. 
With assignments and orders, crews took off on foot and on utility terrain vehicles into the adjacent field with firefighting tools, as well as lighters and drip torches, which are cans of diesel and gasoline attached to a wick. The operator lights the wick and gasoline helps carry the flame from the drip torch to the ground.
Instead of suppressing a fire on that warm fall day, the BLM crew set fire to roughly 100 acres of land as part of a prescribed burn in the Beartrap Meadow area. Conditions were just as the BLM's burn plan for the Beartrap Meadow area dictated: warm, about 60 degrees, 14% humidity, winds less than 20 miles per hour, with fuels dry enough to ignite a fire but not so dry as to lose it. 
The agency has been writing this plan and waiting for a burn window for at least three years.
For Chris Sheets, a BLM wildlife biologist who has been the lead on this burn, it was worth the wait.
Each prescribed burn has objectives. This one, in particular, aims to remove 90% of the landscape's mountain big sagebrush canopy to create a mosaic and yield better nourishment for wildlife.
"Historically, we've been putting out fires for a very long time in the United States, especially here in the West, so this is one of those areas that just had so much fire off the landscape that these stands kind of come in overly thick, and they get decadent, and as they get older; they're less nutritious, less palatable to wildlife and they blanket and outcompete a lot of the understory that a lot of the critters eat,” Sheets said.
Before the U.S. Forest Service or the BLM administered public lands on the Mountain West's vast landscape, their first residents, Indigenous communities, carried out cultural burning to promote ecological diversity and prevent catastrophic wildfires, according to the National Park Service. 
That strategy changed in the 20th century, when land management agencies took over these lands and opted instead to extinguish fires rather than set them intentionally, a strategy known as fire suppression. 
Research shows that the wildfire danger that the West experiences today is likely due to that total suppression strategy. 
During a controlled ignition, according to BLM fire ecologist Jennifer Walker, fire burns at a lower intensity than it would during a wildfire. When fire is off the landscape, trees and plants grow naturally; some will die and topple over, causing a fuels buildup that aids the rapid spread of damaging wildfire. 
“When we exclude fire, those trees don't have the benefit of what a low severity fire can do," Walker said. "One of the reasons we'd do a prescribed burn is to burn in conditions when we can reduce those fuels and help those trees to potentially survive a wildfire.”
Managers acknowledge much of the public's concern with prescribed burns. 
Fire can be scary — in June 2021, a wildfire in Robinson Canyon led to some evacuations and threatened cabins and other structures. 
And despite the careful planning and execution during a prescribed burn, Mother Nature can always cause an accident. 
But as the Forest Service deals with the fallout of intentional, prescribed burns, the BLM's Buffalo Field Office is leaning in.
An escaped prescribed burn in New Mexico made headlines this past spring and put a black eye on the efficacy of prescribed burns. The Calf Canyon Hermits Peak fire burned 432 residences and nearly 530 square miles of mostly private land in what quickly became the state's largest wildfire to date.
As a result, the Forest Service paused its prescribed burn program in May. 
Ultimately, after a review of the prescribed burn protocol, the agency opted to allow the practice again, with some conditions.
For Matt Weakland, the Bighorn National Forest Powder River Ranger district's fire management officer, these additional steps are not all that different from what the forest has done in the past. The forest will examine its existing burn plans, which guide how it conducts a planned burn.
"We're going back through our burn plans and making sure that those are written effectively and actually capture the information and the correct planning to move forward with implementation," he said. "We may do some additional modeling; modeling is computer-based fire prediction expectations based on mathematical equations and inputs we put in there based on fuel moisture, fuel loading, that sort of stuff.”
The Forest Service is also emphasizing communication among crews, namely forest administrators, burn bosses - who are in charge of the entire burn operation - and line officers, who manage groups of crew members on different parts of the burn.
"We recognize that prescribed fire is a necessary tool for us to treat hazardous fuels across our landscape," Weakland said. "We're not going to catch back up on hazardous fuels treatment without it.”
These orders from the Forest Service are in addition to an already strict set of parameters that fire managers follow when setting fire to the landscape. These agencies' operations often overlap, whether in terms of their personnel or in terms of land ownership. 
At the Beartrap Meadow burn on BLM land, cooperation among landowners, federal and state agencies, and even Johnson County was crucial, said Craig Short, the BLM High Plains District fire management officer. 
The Beartrap Meadow burn includes 506 total acres that span across both private and public land. 
In these situations, the agency and the landowner write a memorandum of understanding about the burn plan, which details why they're burning, what areas they're focusing on, weather, contingency plans and more. The agency has had to be patient in planning this burn. 
For it to be effective and safe, the BLM waits until fire restrictions are lifted, which happened in Johnson County in early October. 
Fuels need to be dry enough to ignite, but not so dry that the flames escape. Temperature and wind speeds need to be high enough to carry the fire, but, again, not so high as to let the burn get out of control.
Craig Cope led the timber and fire management program in what used to be called the Bighorn National Forest's Buffalo Ranger District - now known as the Powder River Ranger District - during the forest's first prescribed burn in decades in the spring of 1986 on Hospital Hill, an area at the forest's southeastern entrance.
Cope said he remembers a small group of Forest Service employees walking the landscape, using drip torches to set the land aflame — a scene similar to that in Beartrap Meadow two weeks ago.
"There was anxiety surrounding the first prescribed burn," he said. "Forest management hadn't done it before." 
But the operation was a success. The following season, grass grew nearly 2 feet high, according to previous Bulletin reporting. "I guess you could say we've overdone the Smokey the Bear bit," Cope said in a 1987 Bulletin article referring to the Forest Service's most famous fire prevention campaign.
And so came more burns.
Cope attended a fire ecology seminar at Colorado State University for two weeks in April 1987 that "reaffirmed that fire has been part of the landscape since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago." 
"The only thing that's changed is we showed up," he said. "We decided that fire was bad.”
While Walker, the BLM's fire ecologist, studies fire and its effects - many of which are positive - on the landscape, she is sympathetic to landowners who worry when the BLM plans a prescribed burn in the vicinity of their properties. 
She's the one who calls them to notify them, talk with them about why the agency is burning and how it would control flames if they were to escape, and invite them to observe from the staging area.
And when two landowners pulled up in a truck to the Beartrap Meadow burn, somewhat soothed by Walker's phone call a few nights before but still worried about the fate of their property, she left the burn area to point out how things were going and how firefighters on the site would reign the fire in if it were to escape. 
The couple, whose cabin sat 1 mile from the burn area, left the site assured of their property's safety. 
Throughout the day, more landowners filtered in to observe.
Eventually, Short said, the BLM would like for landowners to reach out to the agency requesting prescribed burns on their property, rather than the other way around. 
Just one day before the Beartrap Meadow burn, the agency conducted a prescribed burn in Newcastle that was a landowner request. 
For Short, it signals a shift toward a public more tolerant of prescribed burns. He acknowledges that the agency's Buffalo Field Office hasn't relied on prescribed burns in a long time. That's partly due to stigma, and partly due to a lack of resources, including personnel and finances.
Despite the ecological benefits, those are often outweighed by fear. People won't soon forget the New Mexico fires.
Similarly, Cope remembers a prescribed burn on the south slope of Johnson Creek, north of U.S. Highway 16, that escaped onto Steerhead Ranch on March 15, 1994. 
At first, the burn went well, then that evening, a wind came from the south and took it across the landscape. It ended quickly and caused little damage, but there were consequences. 
A few months later, following a review of that escaped burn, Cope was assigned to work in the wilderness and prescribed burns were, for a time, no longer a tool often used, he said. 
Between 1986 and 1994, the forest attempted 14 prescribed burns, 13 of which were successful, according to Cope's activity calendars.
There haven't been any prescribed burns on the Bighorn National Forest this year, according to Jon Warder, the forest's fire management officer. 
Typically, he said, there have been an average of two or three prescribed burns each year for the past 20 years, since he's been working at the forest. 

Today, the Forest Service burns in the Buffalo Municipal Watershed, when conditions allow, as part of an ongoing wildfire mitigation project. 
In December 2021, the agency used a drone to drop "dragon eggs" - plastic balls roughly the size of ping pong balls filled with potassium permanganate and injected with glycol intended to spark a blaze when they hit the ground - to ignite fires on 260 acres of land just north of the forest's Middle Clear Creek drainage.
"Right now, on this district, our focus is the Buffalo Municipal Watershed project," Weakland said. "It's a big one for us, because it affects the community of Buffalo and we have a responsibility to keep that watershed functioning at tip-top condition."
At the Beartrap Meadow prescribed burn, fire managers in the staging area waited to see whether the test burn would take. To set the sagebrush aflame, fire crews walked with their drip torches tilted toward the ground.
In just a few minutes, a small plume of smoke rose from where the burn would begin. 
Soon, the fire moved down the slope, engulfing the sagebrush sea in bright flames and smoke that burned varying hues of gray. In the matter of three hours, from a fence to a row of conifer trees, the entire landscape was aflame up to the road.
To fire managers on the scene, it looked good, like a success. 
"We achieved a nice diversity of burn patterns across the whole unit that ranged from stand-replacement to unburned,” Walker said after the burn. "The duff and soil moisture was good, so we don't expect much, if any, mortality in resprouting plants like grasses and forbs.”
Crews mopped up the edges of the burn the day after, on Thursday, and monitored the fire on Friday. Over the weekend, the burn received moisture, which Walker called "a perfect ending."
But the real test comes in the spring, Sheets said, when they see how vegetation grows back after the winter months. 
If the BLM has its way, the mountain big sagebrush, which is well-adapted to fire, will eventually begin to grow back, grass and other forbes for wildlife will grow and duff, a soil layer of organic material that stokes wildfire, will be gone. 
"We're trying to change the culture of our program and educate the public and landowners and other agencies that fire can be bad and catastrophic and has some negative consequences, but it could also be a fantastic tool if managed correctly to help meet multiple resource objectives," Short said. "We're not just putting fire on the ground for the sake of it."
 
 
This story was published on Nov. 3, 2022.