The Shoe Fire is burning in timber on Fenders Ferry Road, between McCloud River and Pit River, north of Lake Shasta. It has been building steadily since about 1:45pm, in an area with very little fire history, poor access, and heavy fuels.
ops.alertcalifornia.org/cam-console/15
The area where the Shoe Fire is burning is remote, with very few structures, and a lot of wild landscape covered with oaks, brush, and some timber. There aren’t many roads. Very little logging has happened on the public lands here in the past 30 years. This wildland is great wildlife habitat, and fire is one of the best tools we would have to manage this landscape. However, the ownership patterns here are what is known as ‘checkerboard’, where private timberland owners control every-other section of land, and the US Forest Service has the other half. This makes using fire for land management basically impossible, as the private timberlands are largely covered with a mix of dense second-growth timber and young plantations in the areas which have been clearcut in the past 30 years. The private lands generally are not fire-resilient, and the timber companies exert a great amount of pressure on the state and federal agencies to keep all fires in the area as small as possible.
The checkerboarded ownership is the legacy of the railroad getting built thru the Sacramento River Canyon / I-5 corridor back in the day. Railroad companies were given every other square mile of land within the first six miles of their rail line as a subsidy and to encourage them to build out the rail network of the West, but sometimes, they were given much more land. In Shasta County, the checkerboard areas extend up to 20 miles on either side of I-5 in some places.
The red lands in the map below are privately owned, and the checkerboarded areas are evident. Over time, the railroads sold these lands to private industrial forestry companies. Sierra Pacific Industries and New Forests own or manage much of the checkerboard land in Shasta County.
This ownership pattern ends up standing out pretty starkly when you look at the aerials of what the Bagley Fire area looks like on private vs. public lands (private lands were clearcut salvage logged and sprayed with herbicides to kill all of the resprouting hardwoods before replanting with conifers).
Many of the 10 year-old plantations on private timberlands in the Bagley Fire area may have significant loadings of pre-commercial thinning slash, as the plantations are often thinned in the first 10-12 years after planting. One view from a webcam in the Bagley Fire shows quite a bit of slash in the young stands.
For more context on how checkerboard land ownership relates to fire management, check out this presentation I made to the NorCal Botany Symposium on this topic in 2020.
Powerpoint on how land ownership patterns affect options for landscape-scale fire management.
There is a lot of black oak in this area, and the conifer forest is not very continuous. Fire severity and rates of spread, while significant where slope, fuels, and winds align, aren’t going to be as severe as you’d expect if it was continuous mixed conifer. But the difficult access and position of the fire on the landscape mean the fire will chew steadily til the sun goes down, and unsecured parts of the fire are likely to make decent runs tomorrow for a few hours in the afternoon.
Forecasts
The forecast is for much better humidity recovery and lower nighttime temps. These weather conditions are actually similar to what we’d aim for if we were planning a prescribed fire in this fuel type. Due to lack of suppression resources across the west (namely hand crews) we will potentially get a lot of good fire effects if the fire continues to grow, especially once it runs to the top of the hills, and backs down the other sides. Also, we’ll get good fire effects in places where the fire is flanking or backing into the wind.
