Many Hands Tippin’ Torches

Benjamin Cossel
Stanislaus National Forest
July 3, 2023

For a month in early summer 2023, firefighters, caterers, medics and other support personnel flocked to a section of California’s Highway 108 near Pinecrest, California, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Known as Little Sweden locally, since May 25 it has served as fire camp for more than 1,000 firefighters taking up temporary residence, rotating in and out, on the Stanislaus National Forest.

But why are they pulling their iconic forest-green crew buggies and fire engines off Highway 108 to park and gather around a 16-foot-wide map board? It’s not for the meatballs! Indeed, from across the Forest Service, crews are there to lend a hand for the 4,000-acre planned prescribed fire. They turn to the four separately defined burn plans unfolding around them.

At one point, Mother Nature — being a capricious caretaker of heat, rain and hail — pushed crews out of the strictly defined prescription. Firefighters turned their axes and shovels to prepping an additional 5,000 acres within a similar footprint – if all goes well, they’ll burn these acres in the fall.

As part of the Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy, the Stanislaus National Forest is one of 21 western landscapes  identified to receive additional funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. On the Stanislaus alone, these funds will help treat more than 300,000 acres over the next 10 years. Those treatment methods include mechanical shredding, hand thinning, and the reintroduction of low-intensity prescribed fire on a fire-adapted landscape. The same landscape where fire has been excluded, at all costs, over the last 100 years.

“The Sierra Nevada is a fire-dependent ecosystem,” explained Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Jason Kuiken. “For too long we’ve excluded that fire and are now dealing with the consequences of those decisions, in the form of unhealthy forests and catastrophic wildfires.”

While the number of acres achieved is impressive, it wouldn’t be possible unless the Stanislaus National Forest piloted a Prescribed Burn Implementation Team program. Unlike traditional prescribed fires, the burn taking place is guided by an Incident Management Team with the full suite of Incident Command System support behind it.

“What we’ve essentially been tasked to do is break the system,” said Incident Commander Shaun Craig. Craig normally serves as the Summit/Mi-Wok District fire management officer and assumed the position of a Type 3 incident commander for the project.

“If we are to operate at the pace and scale needed to address the wildfire crisis across the West, we must find a way to work through institutional barriers, past policy and procedures that hinder us from doing this work.”

With the National Incident Management Organization (NIMO) Team, Craig and his management team identified roadblocks and adjusted accordingly or found ways to change, modify or further evaluate current policy by working with the Forest Service’s Washington Office.

“We’ve been asked to chart a new path forward for how we get this work done,” Kuiken said. “And that’s what we’ve accomplished. I couldn’t be prouder of all the folks who came together. We’re not just talking firefighters here – the incident management team, resource specialists, the incident weather folks, the air quality advisors who helped us with smoke messaging, public information officers and many others - this was truly a whole team effort.”Kuiken noted he was especially proud of the work done around the community of Strawberry, California, where fire professionals brought fire nearly to the back yard of some residences.

“We couldn’t do this work without first having laid a groundwork of trust with these communities — we talked to the residents, we talked to their fire professionals, we brought them out to tour the burn units and show them how we’re doing this work,” Craig said.

That foundation of trust paid dividends when members of the Strawberry Volunteer Fire Department drove their engines along the town’s backroads in a show of support. They even stopped to answer questions from locals, sharing with what they learned.

And while the burn window may have closed due to increasing temperatures for this area, Craig looks to the 5,000 acres prepped.

“What we’ve been able to accomplish in just three weeks would have taken the staff on my district nearly ten years to accomplish,” said Craig. “So when the fall burn window comes around, we’ll be able to go out there and get to work almost immediately. That’s seriously exciting.”