People

Will Harling Speaks on Burning at the Landscape Scale

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If you’ve followed our work, you’ve probably heard about my friend and colleague, Will Harling, who is a leader in bringing community-based prescribed fire back to the Klamath River after a century of fire exclusion and criminalization of native burning by local tribes. Locals on the River have been through a lot of fire, and … Read more

US Forest Service Partnerships Under Fire

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As the US Forest Service has lost internal capacity to get projects planned, awarded, and managed, it has become increasingly reliant on ‘partners’ – NGO agencies – to do a lot of the work Forest Service employees used to do. Until she was fired as a part of sweeping workforce reductions being carried out by … Read more

The Park Fire Explodes in Size- Near Chico, California

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Here is a really rough map of where the Park Fire might be at midnight, 7/24/2024. Red lines are camera azimuths, where heat was apparent. Crosses in the red lines are potential places the fire has reached. The red, yellow, and orange squares are satellite heat detections, and the blue polygon is Cal Fire’s (6,000 … Read more

Will Harling on Fires in the Klamath

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Will Harling and I are sort of like brothers from different mothers. Both of us were raised up by the long-haired wolves, timber fallers, mechanics, railroaders, gold miners, and other outlaws who populate the hillbilly sticks of far Northern California. First opening day fishing trip with the grown-ups, Mill Creek, California, 1985. Not surprisingly, as … Read more

Firing Operations During the 2021 Dixie Fire

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This article was written as the million-acre Dixie Fire neared its conclusion, in September 2021. Many bad things happened during the two months of action during this firefight, and much of the fire’s growth was affected by fire put on the ground during firefighting. Firing operations are one of the main tools firefighters have at … Read more

The Fish Abide – Forging Hope After the Camp Fire

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A note from the editor/Zeke: Last week part of a hydropower flume in Upper Butte Creek, near where we live, in Chico, California, collapsed, sending millions of gallons of water down a steep forested slope, and causing a landslide of mud and soil which poured into Butte Creek. This has caused many days of extremely … Read more

An interview with Wolfy Rougle

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We sat down recently with Wolfgang (Wolfy) Rougle to talk about prescribed fire, and efforts she is helping lead to increase local capacity for citizen-led prescribed burning in Butte County, Califorina. The Butte County Prescribed Burn Association has been running for several years, and has helped landowners to safely burn on private property around Forest … Read more

McKinney and Yeti Fires – August 6, 2022 – WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES OF MASSIVE FISH KILL ON KLAMATH RIVER

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McKinney and Yeti fires Maps and Captions: Ryan Stephens and Zeke Lunder Yeti photos and on the ground Yeti fire info: Jamie Allen WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES OF MASSIVE FISH KILL ON KLAMATH RIVER   Table of Contents: Zeke’s Video Briefing on YouTube Debris Flows and Fish Kill McKinney and Yeti Fire Weather Forecast McKinney … Read more

PyroFiction Hopepunk Biketopia

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My friend Paul Price runs Paul Component Engineering — a world-class manufacturer of high-end bike parts, here in Chico, California. After the Dixie Fire, I did an interview for his newsletter and they asked some funny questions that let me run wild with a fantasy of how things could be different in our relationship with … Read more

Interview with Veteran Wildland Firefighter Jim Klump

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Zeke sat down with Jim Klump, a veteran wildland firefighter and old-school Redding smokejumper who was the District Fire Management Officer on the Plumas National Forest for 25 years. They talked about the intersection of fire and forestry, land management, people, leadership, and history. The interview took place in May 2022.

 

They also talked about PTSD, firefighting tactics, landscape-scale backfiring operations, climate change, immigration, the culture of the Forest Service from the 60s to the present, and the survival prospects of our wildfire-threatened rural communities.

This video features Google Earth map animations, historic aerial photos, historic photos from UC Davis and Chico State and aerial video from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center.

 

 

Workshop Therapy – Forging a Butte Creek Wild Chinook Salmon

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What does a metalwork have to do with wildfire? It takes a lot of welding and wrenching to run a mobile wildfire mapping operation, and I built up a pretty good shop during the years we started and ran Deer Creek Resources. When I sold DCR to Firestorm, in 2017, I kept the shop. The … Read more

Structure Losses in the Camp Fire

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A Conversation with Eric Knapp and Yana Valachovic Eric Knapp, of the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, and Yana Valachovic, from UC Cooperative Extension, came by The Lookout in November to talk with me about their new paper on home losses in the Camp Fire. Our talk is live on Amanda Monthei’s Life … Read more

A Conversation with Sue Husari

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Lassen Hotshots, 1977. Zeke: Okay. We have a visitor today, Sue Husari, legendary wildland firefighter, one of the first female Hotshots, and leader in American wildland fire with a fire career spanning 5 decades. Welcome to The Lookout, Sue! When did you know that you were going to have a career in fire? Sue Husari: … Read more

Dixie Fire – 8/30/2021

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8/30/2021 – 10:30pm A huge run on the southeast side of the Dixie Fire today, a smaller run north of Silver Lake, and some activity in Genesee Valley. This post is about events that didn’t go the way firefighters wanted them to over past couple days. The intention here isn’t to trash firefighters who are … Read more

Dixie Fire – Ongoing Updates

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UPDATE: 8/29/2021, 9:00pm Only got IR mapping at 3pm today, so here is where the fire was at that time. White line is last night’s perimeter. Blue is 2019 Walker Fire, Purple is 2020 North Complex. UPDATE: 8/29/2021, 8:00am Fire continues to spread toward Walker Mine, north of Greenhorn Ranch and south of Genesee Valley. … Read more

Mountain People

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I wrote this piece a couple days after my hometown of Westwood narrowly missed being burned up by the Dixie Fire. We had spent the previous week watching closely as the fire moved steadily, and sometimes rapidly, toward town. Everyone up there was evacuated, and a lot of old friends were leaning on The Lookout … Read more