August Fire/Ruth Lake Campout, May 2022

Matt Simmons of EPIC addresses the group

For the second year in a row, ISF members and friends gathered for a campout near Ruth in May to look at the aftermath of the August fire and learn about how wildfire is managed.

Saturday morning, Matt Simmons of EPIC covered the laws that apply to national forest loggng and how EPIC looks at post-fire timber harvest. There was a lively discussion afterward.

That afternoon’s field trip drove through the largest area of severe damage in the whole August Fire, to visit Jones Ridge. Natural recovery was well underway. Although conifers mostly died, oaks, grasses (native and otherwise), forbs, bulbs, and shrubs such as the one below were sending up fresh shoots.

Liz Harwood and Kyle Keegan consider a re-sprouting Prunus shrub unknown to them, later identified as Prunus emarginata, bitter cherry, by attendee and Forest Service employee Jeff Jones

Sunday morning began with a bird walk led by Fred Bauer. Later, Doug Bevington’s presentation on “Myths of Prescribed Fire” was so compelling I forgot to get a photo. Several people in the audience had long involvement with prescribed burns, so the following discussion was especially rich. You can read Doug’s article here https://rewilding.org/myths-of-prescribed-fire-the-watering-can-that-pretends-to-be-a-river/ for a really worthwhile consideration of the appropriate use and weaknesses of this increasingly popular technique.

That afternoon we went to Mad River Ridge, between the Mad and North Fork Eel, a lovely and little-visited place. Again, conifer mortality was very high, but almost everything else was coming back strongly. We found oaks stump-suckering, and older oaks that had clearly been shaped by the same process in some previous fire.

Speculating about just what happened where a big stump burned out

Despite the loss of tens of thousands of acres of Douglas-fir, the ecosystem is healthy enough to support apex predators such as coyotes or mountain lions.

There’s enthusiasm for next year already. Presentations, field trips, good times learning together. Emphasis on pyrodiversity, natural recovery, how fire works in natural systems. You might pencil in the weekend before Memorial Day 2023.

Iris growing under fire-killed Douglas-firs