Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 at 9:56PM :
In Reply to: Re: OT Picture on the Fire Line in the Smoke & Flames posted by Mark S. on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 at 12:32PM :
It if was pre-white-man times, it would just be the Indians improving the deer habitat. That's what made the old Ponderosa pine forests so beautiful and open. The old timers said you could drive a wagon from Ft Colville to Okanogan over the Okanogan highlands just going through the open forests. One of the most difficult tasks of the early Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot was to get the Indians to quit burning the brush. After the loggers went through the Okanogan Highlands and logged out all those big old ponderosa pines, the bull pine and lodgepole grew up thick as the hair on a dog and now every fire's a crown fire. Look what happened up around Sherman Pass 10 years ago.
But outside of the Ponderosa pine forests that were kept open by Indian burning, there were lots of huge fires in the old days, especially when logging was messy, locomotives and donkey engines spewed sparks, and fire crews consisted of whoever the sheriff could round up that was sober enough to operate a shovel or an axe. The Tripod fire's big, but it's a campfire compared to the big fires of the early 20th century. The 1910 fire in North Idaho burned 10 million acres, and not lightly, but hot enough to burn off all the humus and sterilize the soil. The Tillamook Burn in Oregon in 1933 burned almost 12 BILLION board feet of the finest old-growth douglas fir and cedar there ever was. The Yacolt Burn in 1902 also burned 12 billion board feet, and it burned most of it in a day and a half, powered by 50 mph winds blowing down the Columbia gorge, temperatures in the 90s, and near-zero humidity. Even just north of Tripod Peak, most of what is now the Pasayten Wilderness burned back in the 30s. All the lodgepole that grew up after that fire is now dying and falling over and being replaced with firs. A lot of places you can't hardly walk because the dead lodgepoles are jackstrawed all over each other 10' deep for miles. It'll all go up again when we get another series of dry years.