How We Lit Our California Homestead on Fire
We just burned 45 acres of forest to protect it from burning. I’ve heard for years that setting match to the forest in a controlled way could ultimately protect it against a catastrophic fire—and that decades of wildfire suppression have ironically bequeathed us especially unhealthy and fire-vulnerable lands. But the degree of protection didn’t fully sink in until a career Cal-Fire battalion chief told me: “If you burn the fuels on the forest floor, there’s close to zero chance of a later fire spreading through the canopy—it just won’t have enough heat to sustain it.”
Living in the Sierra Foothills, sandwiched between two of the largest fires in the state’s history, it’s hard not to feel a little inevitability to the coming of a big one here, too. But what if we have some control over what happens when it comes? Because there’s a monumental difference between an all-consuming canopy fire that kills 95 percent of the mature trees and ground-based fire that kills maybe a tenth of them.
We’re endeavoring to reach and maintain a state of forest that’s inclined much more towards the latter. Below are some details about our burn and how we prepared the forest and ourselves for it.
We began about 6 years ago, thinning the understory and brush and limbing remaining mature trees up to 10', all according to NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service, a division of the USDA) prescription standards and in consultation with their local forester. This work was done exclusively by hand (as opposed to with machines like bulldozers or masticators), with chainsaws, pole saws and loppers, piling and burning the slash. We did use a chipper very minimally. All of this work was supported by EQIP and CIC grants from NRCS, a burn plan grant from Sierra Nevada Conservancy (as part of the planned Hoyt-Purdon Fuel Break with American Rivers) and did not generate out of pocket expense.
We did the same treatments on approximately 150 additional acres that we haven’t burned yet. We did about ten percent of this work ourselves and hired out the rest to two local contractors. I was careful to choose contractors who understood our values and objectives and showed high sensitivity and thoughtfulness in their work (I would be happy to refer them to you)—you can’t uncut down a favorite tree. The twenty or so acres that we cleared ourselves was done exclusively with battery operated saws, in which I’m now a true believer.
This land is between 2200' and 2700' elevation; we have a mix of mature conifers, mature oaks, madrone, old-growth manzanita and chaparral at all exposures. There is no known burn history in the past 100 years and 90 percent of the acreage was extremely overstocked when we began.
In the beginning, we cut pretty much everything smaller than 4" or so. The next season we realized that cutting things that stump sprout ultimately just makes more work as they transform from crowded trees to more-crowded bushes, so we stopped cutting small oaks and madrones in future treatments. Where we have already cut them, we are hoping that the bushes will be killed by multiple years of burning. Where they aren’t killed, we will manually thin them, leaving one stem per bush in hopes that they send all their energy in a single direction. (We don’t use herbicides for ecological and ethical reasons.)
We wanted to conserve many of the old-growth (6–24" diameter) manzanita because of their stature and beauty. This turns out to be easier said than done, for a couple of reasons. First, when you thin a big patch, many of the ones you leave tend to fall down without the branch support of their buddies, especially with our recent historic snow loads. Also, they are extremely heat vulnerable, so hot burn piles of the stuff you just thinned can kill the remaining ones, and ground burns can, too. Despite these challenges, we’ve managed to save hundreds through careful treatment.
Some folks maintain that elderly manzanita are not a natural part of a landscape with frequent fire return because they can’t withstand it. I won’t argue with this, but I do deeply appreciate their magnificence and am interested to see how we can care for them over the coming years while also realizing our other objectives.
We left scattered areas of wildlife habitat that we didn’t thin but did burn, including dense stands of manzanita. With a gentle backing fire and a guardian with a water sprayer to douse heat around trunks, we found that we were able to burn these untreated zones with ~20 percent mortality of the brush.
Although it can be tempting to optimize for a clean, park-like aesthetic by burning or chipping everything, I’ve been drawn to experiment with a method I think is better for the environment, both locally and atmospherically. In practice, this means that most woody debris over 3" in diameter we do not pile and burn, but rather leave on the ground or gather for firewood.
After burning the finer fuels, there generally isn’t enough heat capacity left to sustain burning these bigger pieces, so they aren’t much fire hazard, and we’re keeping carbon out of the air longer by letting them decay over years or decades instead of burning them during treatment. Similarly, chipping or masticating greatly speeds up decomposition; as does inoculation with fungus (though this may have other benefits) and cutting all big logs to make sure they’re in contact with the ground. I believe there’s a misconception about best practices in this regard, with received wisdom and standard practices (including within NRCS) unfortunately promoting faster decay. But at landscape scale, whether this carbon stays on the ground for shorter or longer has climate consequences, and longer is better. Let the wood stay wood.
Across the West, we need to be figuring out ways to reduce available fuel load and competition for water and sunlight while also not just sending all that overstocked biomass skyward. Biochar seems like a potential solution, but I’m not yet sure how to gather and process all the biomass on steep terrain and haven’t found any in situ biochar processes that seem tenable for large treatments. We have begun laying these thinned logs on contour with the idea that they will accumulate organics and become little dams that slow down runoff and cause more of it to percolate into the aquifer. Lately, I’m thinking it might even be more advantageous to put these logs in drainages, as a way to mimic what the beavers used to do here.
I’ve wondered if it would work to lop and scatter and then ground burn, as a way to save the two steps of piling and burning the finer fuels. We tried this on about 1/4 acre. It really looked like a mess after burning and left quite a bit of fuel. I think it could work in some areas (and a couple of burn bosses confirmed this) depending on conditions and the amount of slash. But aesthetically it’s a no-go for me, and generally seems like it complicates the ground burn.
We burned about 5 acres last Feb-Apr, and that gave us a good introduction to taking on a larger burn this year. There are so many things you learn just by doing little burns and getting more comfortable understanding fire that moves. The conditions were much drier last year, and that meant higher consumption (good) and (a lot) more work keeping the fire feeling controlled. I much prefer a little less consumption and a lot more chill burn day. I knew ahead of time that we were going to have more tree mortality this year just because you can’t be attentive to every tree in a 45 acre expanse. I find it easy to develop emotional attachment to trees; and I also know that there are too many of them here for them to all thrive. This helped me let go before the day of the burn so that I wouldn’t be traumatized when we lost one (or many).
I wasn’t up for leading such a big burn myself, yet, and looked to our neighbor Tim Van Wagner from First Rain Farm. He led a bunch of burns in the neighborhood last year and has continued to accumulate knowledge, experience, and gear, as well as build out his crew. He seems naturally suited to this work and gave me a lot of confidence that we could pull it off together. He and his crew did a wonderful job from start to mop up and were all such a pleasure to work with. They prepped the units by putting in some hand line, blowing off a perimeter road, laying hose and felling some potential danger trees in the weeks before the burn (we cumulatively spent 100 people hours directly preparing for the burn, or about 2 hours/acre—this doesn’t include the time we spent thinning over the past few years). Some of this was spent excluding the big manzanita by pulling fuel away from their bases in about a 3 foot radius. We also pulled fuel away from cat-faced oaks and big pines and cedars in the drier parts of the units.
It takes some getting used to but you eventually learn that in the right burning conditions the fire climbing 30 feet up the trunk of the 100-foot cedar is going to stop and not torch the tree. Or at least I think you learn that. I’m still in the phase of pulling fuel away from the bases.
On the 12-acre day our crew was four strong. For the 33-acre day, Tim had a crew of ten and we also had about 5–15 volunteers coming and going. We had a mobile water tender as well as a mobile tank backup and domestic well hookup to firehose. The conditions were as hoped. The wind was light with occasional 10 mph gusts that improved consumption, and it wasn’t blowing towards Nevada City. A couple folks came out representing the air district and let us know that they want to be very proactive in supporting this work.
We ignited about 11am and back fired all the way down the hill with 3 torches, finally reaching the bottom about 5pm. Consumption wise, there was a wide range, given the south to north exposures and shaded to open canopy. I would say 20 percent to 90 percent on the fine fuels across those environments. Probably similar on ten hour fuels, too. 100 hour fuels was probably less than 10 percent on the north but maybe up to 40 on the south?
We reburned the five acres from last year, or I should say tried to. There wasn’t enough available fuel in most of it to really carry the fire. In the future I think we’ll wait at least two years before trying again, and then moving to 3–5. But this is just a guess.
It seems clear that we’ll all benefit when more people do this work at their place. I know a lot of folks are intimidated, either by the grant process or by the work itself. As far as the grants go, it’s way simpler than the idea one generally conjures when you hear that word. The EQIP process begins with a phone call to the local NRCS office and is followed by filling out a simple form. If you’re a good candidate, the forester will come for a visit and make a treatment plan with you and then they’ll submit the grant on your behalf. Our NRCS forester is extremely knowledgeable and flexible — he’s dedicated to helping more of this work get done and is a pleasure to work with. (I had a much less satisfying experience with the Cal-Fire CFIP program and recommend that we do some collective advocacy to improve it.) As far as the work itself goes, you don’t need much expertise to begin or hire a contractor, and there are lots of people around to ask for advice.
A final note about a burned landscape: it’s an acquired taste aesthetically and one we’d do well to cultivate loving. How hard can it be to change our preferences? Most of us learned to like beer…
Last, but not least, this work descends from and is deeply inspired by the historical and contemporary practices of the Indigenous peoples of this bioregion. They were the original fire and land tenders. This particular stretch of land we’re now caring for is in the territory of the Nisenan.
We acknowledge
These are the ancestral homelands of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. This land was taken repeatedly with no compensation or regard for the lives and ways of the original people, until they had no land left. We are settlers here— we live, love and work on land the Nisenan never ceded. We acknowledge the sovereignty of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, despite lack of federal recognition. Together we can amend the tragic legacy of the past. We can’t change history but we have the power to change our future. The Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program is a way to begin.
