Ooops, Bea,
That low elevation fuels should be more than normal and will DRY out by the end of July.
If not this year, trust me, next dry summer will be a hundred-year event. Lodgepole mort, ya know.

Me thinks the Piss Fir Willy has it bass ackwards: the First People burned WHAT THEY LOVED to protect it from stand replacement fire, or what we think of as catastrophic fire. The First People actively burned for ten thousand years, and when they were extirpated by disease, and by directed warfare and genocide, the active management of the landscape ceased. So what we have today is unmanaged forests and fuel loading, which was recognized as deadly to the hunter gatherers and farmers who were here before the new experts from the USFS and their minders at the NGOs.

So, we are mired in public policy based on some 17th and 18th century European literary movement that celebrated the "noble savage" and the "wilderness" in which he lived. Pure bunkum that is alive and well in public policy today, and provides a shit load of romantics with an endless stipend and raison d'etre. The loser, of course, is the forest itself, and all the species that evolved since the end of the last Ice Age to colonize and pioneer land newly vacated by glaciers and perpetual snow fields. Those species were culled and selected for what they could do to provide for First Peoples, and to that end serve them in their attempt at survival. It did all work out, you know, and for over ten thousand years people lived here, overused some landscapes and had to move, flourished in others, and all in all, did what humans have been doing across the world for a long, long time. And gee whiz, they did it without the USFS nannies and minders, and arsonists. They did it without Wilderness Whiners and bully boy enforcers. And did it well. That is the joke. What they produced left when they did. This verdant mess we have today is the result of ignoring ten thousand years of landscape management, and is now physically ready to burn to bare rock. That is what happens when your management agency is up to their necks in hubris, and reality left with the revolving doors of NGO to Agency and back, all in a Washington DC conga line of entitled twerps running from Interior or USFS to lucrative NGO jobs and back, depending on the outcomes of elections. The system broke three decades ago, and all it is now is a money pit supported by taxpayers, and a wastrel of resources because they can. They are entitled to waste them because they know better than you, went to a better university, and have better genes. Oh, and a trust fund to pay for their trysts with Ma Nature, and keep the NGOs awash in treasure and T-Bills.

Setting fires to burn without good reason is arson. Allowing fires to burn at the apex of fire season, in red flag conditions, is patently insane, and shows a shallowness of education and attention to all the academic disciplines that describe how we got here from before. AMR was not a part of the experience. Nor was WFU. You can't create "old growth forests" by destroying the very trees that compose an older forest. Let a 500 year old tree die by fire, or expose it purposefully to insects and disease by not fighting, not limiting the damage of fires, does mean you will not see another old growth on that spot for at least 500 more years. Or as is the case in so many fires, those relic trees cannot be replaced because they are there as a result of prior climatic conditions, and those conditions no longer are present. Cloud forests, some temperate forest old growth, come to mind. The "fire for resource use" in actuality consumes the resource that the land was reserved for, and after the fire, becomes just another Federal liability, another obsolete asset, another closed air base, research facility. But, when the left embraced Earth First! and directed arson, and then fawns over the likes of a Bill Ayers, a terrorist bomber, you do get that Change and Hope. And Rope a Dope.

Aboriginal fires were set seasonally for a purpose. Some for beneficial purpose, and others just because it was the easiest way to deal with people who threatened you. Burn them out. The Tennessee Williams approach. But fire the landscape at times when you did not run the risk of losing all that you needed to survive took some smarts that has yet to show up in our national Wildland Fire policy makers. They have yet to acquire aboriginal instincts and imperatives to how fire is correctly set and used to maintain the landscape for the benefit of man. Yep. For the benefit of man. That is what an old growth forest is. A place that feeds you, secures your safety, and provides all that you need to survive, even down to your spirituality. All done by set fires at specific times and conditions. That old BLM saw "Wise Use." Not perfect use. Not infallible use. But use just the same. Use it or lose it. And we are losing it. All this article is about is actuaries of fire hedging their bets on fire severity and landscapes lost. Some would claim that success is now measured in black acres, and lost resources. Sort of like the McNamara US plan in VietNam of destroying the village to save it. Destroy or allow the destruction of, the forest, so that we can save the planet by growing new trees that will sequester carbon. Makes sense, no?

So now we hear and see that Carol Browner at EPA is going to cast the lot of biomass burning into the same air quality morass as coal. If EPA is officially telling us that burning vegetation under controlled conditions in a furnace, heating water, and making electricity, is to be regulated for air quality harm in the same way as coal is regulated or will be regulated, how in Jimmeny Cricket's name can you not have EPA regulating controlled burning and the decision to NOT fight a forest fire on public land in the very same manner as coal fired power generation is regulated? Allowing a forest fire to have its way, to run its course, is a distinct and direct decision to pollute the atmosphere with green house gases, and in so doing, the USFS or any other branch of Government must file the appropriate NEPA documents to gain approval for the proposed or directed action. A forest fire has to be out of compliance with EPA burning of biomass and woody debris standards and parameters. If not, then the law as now interpreted and enforced or so they say they are going to, is not only an ass, but we, citizens, are being subjected to arbitrary and capricious administration of law by an unlawful Administration. If the toady we have for Attorney General does nothing, all the while supporting three Western teams of US Attorneys whose sole purpose is to gain financial and monetary remittance from fire of private origin that trespasses on the Federal Estate and burns public timber, which when it gets fired and burned by fire from the private side of the line suddenly gets monetary value, even down to loss of "grandeur of the landscape" which is evidently now a compensable loss in a tort claim, we have allowed our governance to get out of control. OH, and by the way, the Feds have tort claim limits, and there is no way to sue them when their frigging "fire for resource use" leaves the Federal Estate and trespasses onto private land. It is a "tough titty" deal, pard, and you have to just suck it up and take your losses like a man or woman. You have no recourse with the roaring ass who made the decision to allow the fire to burn "for resource use" and then it made a run and burned you out. I have a very good friend who lost the entirety of his vegetation on his two sections due to a mismanaged and poorly designed Federal backburn set three miles ahead of the fire front, by an overhead team from somewhere east of the Mississippi that didn't know sour owl poop from a good grade of mush. The wind created by the backfire drew the fire to it, alright, and the both burned in the same direction, and when they got close together, the flame heights got to two hundred feet and everything turned to ash. Even the northern goshawk wintering habitat, all the yellow belly ponderosa pines, and every piece of reprod from the last 75 years. Burned it all, and no recourse, not even a "sorry about that."

Of course there will be big fires. That is the plan. Burn it so man can't use it. Burn it so wolves can run free. Burn it so it might renew itself. Burn it because smoke in the atmosphere is better than people working in mills or driving log trucks. Burn it so there is no organic material left in the soil, and even the top inch or more of soil fines leaves on the plume. Just burn the living shit out of it, because in some vapid and perverse way, the protectors of the forest have become the burners of the forest, and you damn well had better not be in their way because they have the moral imperative to burn you out, and anyone living within 30 miles of public land deserves to be burned out. That is what their nannies and minders in the NGOs preach today. We live with a government of double standards: one for them, and another for you. Encourage wildfire on public lands and fine you for creating electricity by burning thinnings from private land. There is war on, folks, between the zealots of the Federal and state government, and you schmucks who are supposed to pay their way. You are not winning at this time. You are losing every day. Rights, access, personal treasure and the rewards of hard work. The people who run GMC, Chrysler, the people who kept the banks they need to borrow from solvent with your money, so they could print more that you can someday pay back, or your far distant future kin can pay back, are hosing you and not the burning trees. But would you expect different?

The battle for "Sustainable Catastrophic Wildfires" is ON!!! Yep, that'll boost local economies, in the short term, leaving "natural" barren moonscapes, "resilient" brushfields and "diverse" snag patches along roads, powerlines and property lines (and backyards!).

The US Attorney special units nailed the UPRR for $102 MILLION on a fire in the Feather Rive canyon, for burned timber that never, ever could be logged due to land use prohibitions. How can timber have value if you can't make a product out of it. POTENTIAL value, but that is what teachers told people like me: you are not living up to your potential...Gawd!!! The US Attorneys last year got Pacific Gas and Electric for $11 MILLION due to a PPine falling onto their powerline and starting the fire. The negligence was the PGE should have known the PPine (yellowbelly) had an old fire scar and was rotten in the middle. Yeah. So is the Congress. What are my damages there? The UPRR fire was from a track gang fixing a broken rail and their chainsaw powered rail cutter shot sparks out of the r/w and caught some brush on fire, and the notsogood English speaking crew was confused on what to do, and therefore the RR was negligent. How about letting a WFU, an AMR fire, a "let 'er burn" fire, go viral and incinerate many square miles? No negligence there, and nobody has to take responsibility. That is government. During the 2008 election, there was a US Attorney led trial in Spokane against a black guy whose dereliction of duty on a fire dispatch and his job as the IC, got a bunch of Type Two USFS fire fighters killed. But you don't prosecute anyone but white men in election years, and the Bush Admin US Attorneys opted to not have a trial in an election year for obvious political reasons, and we will never know if you can burn up people and be held responsible. The guy got off with some non-felony wrist slap and the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton types didn't show up in Spokane. We are a nation of wimps. And people literally do get away with murder.

As for those "diverse mosaic of burn types and intensities" that leave something living now are "islands of fuel being burned by XXX Hot Shot crew in a controlled burn out", as so many fire reports now illustrate. Gotta git it all black!!!

And then the BAER teams come through with their credit cards and buy seed mixes that cost $100 or more a pound, applied at a rate of 15 to 20 lbs per acre, all native seed and a diverse mixture, to recover the fire trails and cat lines. And that is the extent of the recovery for that fire. I can do a better job and get a lot more bang for the buck with a grass and forb mixture domestically grown that costs less than $5/lb. I have done it several times on private land. The PIssFirWillys do have to be embarrassed to see those private green islands of recovery in a sea of black, grey, silver and white, with some died this year red, and a hint of green here and there after five years, as the cows mingle with elk and deer on the private side of the fence, slick and fly covered, and not even wanting to eat across the fence because there is nothing green across the fence. The people haters of the NGOs, and the USFS want the moonscapes, the ash blackened streams, the mudslides, the culvert plugs and washouts. All the more reason to close more roads.

Someday, sometime, a more and more knowing public is going to revolt against this subprime mortgage our government managers are giving the next generation's access to resources and forests, and there will be a sea change on how public lands are treated and nurtured. This Stalinesque scorched earth retreat to the devolved hovels of combined ranger stations and hand holding seminars on how to talk to each other in a non-hostile workplace will no longer be tolerated by the public and there will be a demand for proactive management and protection of what is left, if any. These things develop their own inertia, and the public land management by neglect and purposeful denial of man as an integral part of forests and their being will someday come to an uphill part of the trail and be stopped. Then there will be a decade or ten of reinvention of the forestry wheel, again, and maybe before the ice covers it all once again, we will have the means to really have the diversity that a hundred thousand years later will populate and propagate the land as ice and snow once again retreats.