What did the 2021 Dixie Fire teach us about our public lands and how they are managed? What are we doing well, and what could we do better?
In reflecting on the lessons learned from the Dixie Fire, The Lookout spoke with Danny Cluck, a biologist with U.S. Forest Service working in the Modoc, Lassen, Plumas and Tahoe national forests, and the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.
We talked about the need for forest managers to strike a balance between tending areas recently burned by wildfire and tending those that have not burned and need attention in order to reduce the possibility of high-severity fire tearing through them.
We also talked about expanding the use of prescribed fire, and using dozer lines created during fire suppression efforts to aid in prescribed fire projects.
The Lookout’s Zeke Lunder first got to know Danny Cluck in the mid-’90s, when they were both working for the Forest Service. Zeke was on a tree-marking crew and Danny was a biologist. Since then, Danny has become one of the west coast’s experts on forest insects and forest health in general. He worked as a resource advisor during the 2021 Dixie Fire and was assigned to help manage the cleanup and restoration of lands damaged by firefighting activities.
This week, we’re sharing our interview with Danny, recorded in the Lassen National Forest shortly after the Dixie Fire. Watch the interview, here, or read it, below.
Zeke Lunder
So you and I started working together here in ’94, maybe ’95. That’s when I was here. How long have you been on the Lassen?
Danny Cluck
(Since) 1993.
Zeke Lunder
All right. And is your job now more regional, or are you still pretty much focused on this area?
Danny Cluck
I cover northeastern California. I’m a regional employee. I cover the Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Tahoe and Lake Tahoe Basin.
Zeke Lunder
So, since we worked together, like half your territory has burnt up.
Danny Cluck
Well, right around Susanville, that’s a pretty true statement. But yeah, there’s been a lot of fire in northeastern California, especially over the last decade.
Zeke Lunder
I find myself surprised by the ferocity of some of these (fires). After working here for a long time, I’m still kind of shocked by what I’ve seen over, say, around Chester, in the flats there. I’d gotten used to thinking that the flatlands here, just because we haven’t had fire history, that maybe it just meant the risk was lower, because we’ve done so much biomass thinning, and because we had such good access. So I was pretty surprised to see how that big run on the 5th of August really took out areas of Westchester. Were you surprised by that? And what about these fires has blown your mind?
Danny Cluck
Well, working in these forests for the last 30 years, definitely the fuel loading is just incredible. The stand density is incredible. Some of these places haven’t burned in 150 years, maybe.
We know that, based on some fire history studies, that in some of this drier mixed conifer and pine country, the fire return interval pre-settlement was probably 5 to 15 years or something like that. So knowing that these places have missed maybe 10 fires, and you walk around these stands, and there’s tree mortality, because there’s too many trees, and we have frequent drought in California as part of the Mediterranean climate, all that fuel continually piles up on the ground. There’s no fire to clean it up periodically. And so when I walk around the forest, you’re stepping over logs, you’re crunching on just tons of fuel. And so, to me, seeing the type of fire, we knew that potential was there. As soon as we had the real dry drought, the next drought, and you get an ignition and winds, anything’s on.
I didn’t think that we’d see it all happen in one year. And I’ve seen where we’ve done a lot of good thinning and prescribed burning, and some of those places kind of got swallowed up in this fire. And when I see that, it’s just, the depth wasn’t there maybe. This fire just got such intensity on some of these areas, and the places I saw were areas that haven’t really been treated in a long time. And so the canopy was dense and there was a ton of fuel. And it seemed to me — and I’m not a fire (scientist), I’m an entomologist — but the fire really picked up in those areas and got ahead of steam and that seemed like, with the wind pushing or whatever, you got preheating of some of these areas where we did a lot of good work. These trees are dry already from drought and then they get that preheating from just an incredible heat plume pushing on them. I think when the head of the fire finally hit them, it just, what we did there wasn’t enough, and you saw it ripped through a lot of these areas that were relatively open. It didn’t seem like the fuel loading was too extreme, but yet the fire moved right through them and caused nearly 100% tree mortality.
Zeke Lunder
Across all sorts of different species, right?
Danny Cluck
All different species, yeah. I have found some places where we did some recent thinning, we still had ground disturbance, so we really had the fuels broken up on the ground — this was south of Janesville area — and so a big crown fire came down and it hit that big treated area and it penetrated about 100, 200 yards and then dropped to the ground and we had almost 100% survival in the rest of the stand.
It’s hard to say all the factors that go into that. But certainly having a very open canopy and having the surface fuels broken up by recent activity in there played a role in not allowing that fire to keep going in there. Maybe the preheating wasn’t as extreme the way the fire came in, I don’t know. So there are some good examples out there of where we did see some lower fire behavior based on our treatments. But there certainly were other areas where it seemed like the fire just went right over the top of them.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, I think it’s easy to forget that a lot of this thinning work we were involved with, it’s been over 20 years now and it hasn’t been maintained. So one question I had is, if the answer is to do bigger thinning projects and to try to treat a larger proportion of the landscape, are there dozer lines out here that would be useful for doing large-scale prescribed burning? And are you guys prioritizing leaving some of those tactical lines in a state that makes it easier to open them back up to use them?
Danny Cluck
Yeah, we certainly have identified some lines as definitely tactical lines, and I think Colby Mountain is an example of that. … The lead resource advisor has had meetings with some local fire staff and fuels people to discuss which lines would be very beneficial for future fire suppression or potentially facilitating some prescribed burning on larger acreages. And so we are maintaining some of those lines. We’re not not repairing them. We’re still putting in the water bars, we’re still bringing in (vegetation) to a degree, but just like we’ve done on the side of these roads here, we want to have just enough ground cover to stop erosion. We don’t want, you know, a hundred tons per acre of heavy fuels on the ground that will make it very difficult for us to use that as a line in the future. I think the Dixie Fire probably has provided us with an opportunity to put some fire back on the landscape. I’m not involved in those discussions right now, but it certainly seems like if we ever had an opportunity that this might be the beginning of it.
Zeke Lunder
So, when I first met you, you were a wildlife biologist. And so I’ve been hearing a lot of people have questions about the wildlife impacts of the fire. Can you speak at all to the impacts of the fire, or what you know so far? Impacts on the deer herd, impacts on bears, other mammals.
Danny Cluck
Just being on the fire since the beginning of August, I definitely know that a lot of animals have been displaced out of high-severity patches of the of the Dixie Fire. They’re congregated in high numbers around the perimeter.
Just driving around and working, walking line, I’ve encountered more bears and more deer in some areas than you would normally see. So certainly there’s been a shift, pushing populations into the remaining unburned areas. We have seen some animals that were directly killed by fire. We’ve seen a bull elk and we’ve seen a mountain lion. So there’s definitely the direct take from the fire.
We also have areas of habitat for something like California spotted owl, and northern goshawk, and some of these core areas where they have nests, and we’ve protected those, and we designate those on the landscape and give them special treatment, and a lot of those burned in a high-severity part of the fire, and they no longer are habitat or exist. I don’t have all the tallies on that. But I do know a lot of those areas were impacted by the Dixie Fire.
Zeke Lunder
I guess it brings up that question, if what we call protection, which is hands-off management of some of these areas, is really — or if keeping fire out of these stands in general — is really protecting the resource.
Danny Cluck
So protection is like … we’re not necessarily excluded from those areas, but we certainly wouldn’t, we don’t want to do excessive thinning in some of those areas. So we tend to try to maintain a higher canopy cover. So it could potentially leave them more vulnerable.
But, you know, a lot of places got burned high-severity. I think this landscape wasn’t meant to be this dense, regardless of what status we gave it. So I think we need to look at the bigger picture and what kind of residual stocking out here, not having prescribed burning everywhere, we just need all of that. We need some thinning, we need prescribed burning, and we need to do it on a bigger scale, and with more depth and more frequency.
Zeke Lunder
So in light of these massive impacts we’re seeing on the landscape, I heard that there’s a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process starting, to look at restoration for the fire. And my question is, should we be talking about a forest plan amendment, or about fundamental changes in how we see this landscape? Because when we’ve got large areas of this landscape designated for timber production on our land resource plan maps, then we end out snagging roads and doing maintenance on a system that was really built for a previous landscape.
This landscape that we saw through the 1900s as primarily timber production, I think we’re seeing private timber companies in the foothills moving out of areas where they know they’ll never get a rotation of trees to survive fires in the future. And is that something, as a landscape-scale person working at the regional level, do you think there’s a need for us to fundamentally re-imagine how we’re going to manage these national forests in light of climate change and in light of new realities, such as that maybe we’ll never be able to grow a 100-year-old tree here?
Danny Cluck
Yeah, I think a lot of folks are going to have to have those discussions for sure. If last year’s fires didn’t convince you, then this year’s fire should, that we really need to look at what we have left out there, what we’ve been doing in the past, and how these fires have impacted those areas. And if it’s not working, we certainly need to have the discussions of, “What’s our next step?” And whether that be coming up with new forest plans, or I don’t know what the answer to that is. But certainly you would have to look at this land with a new eye after this kind of an event and come up with some new thinking on what’s the most appropriate way to go forward. And it’s, what do we do with the remaining green stands? Where do we put our reforestation efforts? All that stuff. Where do we start coming back in with fire again? And how soon? All that stuff needs to be on the table and discussed in my opinion.
Zeke Lunder
One of my concerns with the amount of energy we’ve been putting into post-fire restoration and rehab and snagging and everything else, is just that we have such limited capacity outside of fire season to get things done in the forest service anymore. And I worry that we really should be expending our energy to maintain the good forests we have left. And we spend so much time cleaning up after fires, but in the meantime we’ve got an area here of green trees that really could use all of our attention right now.
Danny Cluck
I agree. And that’s a balance that is made. We have a restoration team being formed at the region. I don’t know who all is involved. But that is one of the things that I’ve heard them mention, it’s trying to strike that balance. The first thing you’ve got to do is just go fix what got beat up. But you do have to balance that with, you can’t get so involved with that, that you forget about these remaining green stands that are still in this high-risk condition, high-risk of catastrophic, stand-replacing wildfire and at high risk, in some cases, to bark beetle outbreaks. So yeah, it’d be nice if we had resources just to go at both as fast as we could. But we don’t have that, and until we do we’re going to have to figure out a way to prioritize and make sure we’re addressing both.