HELENA — Sometimes seeing smoke billowing out from our public lands is a good thing because it means the U.S. Forest Service is out there, hard at work, fighting fire with fire.
At first, that might sound counterintuitive. We, as the public, are taught to keep fire out of the forests, but with a lot of planning and with skilled professionals like Mike Kaiser with the US Forest Service, a fire now prevents fire later.
Especially like in the area of the Old Shooting Range Trailhead just outside of Helena.
“We don’t want to keep fire out of the environment, because we live in a fire-adapted ecosystem, and we’ve tried taking fire out of that ecosystem, and we’re very successful at that, we’re very good at suppression," Helena Fire Management Officer Mike Kaiser told MTN. "But we’ve seen, across the west, that the repercussions of that are, when fires season hits — and it hits every year — we get those bigger wildfires that are harder to control because of our past suppression efforts."
To put it simply, fires in Montana are a natural occurrence, but us living in cities surrounded by wilderness is not. So, the tactics that have been used in the past to prevent fires from spreading have promoted overgrowth and deadfall, just waiting to turn into fuel for a raging wildfire.
It’s Mike and his crews’ job to clean that up, with prescribed burns.
“That is by design, when we come through and we do these under-story burns we want to come through and we want to, it’s called raising the canopy height," Kaiser said. "What that does is, we got those live branches, which during an active wildfire are the carriers into the crowns of the trees. So if during a prescribed burn we can kill those lower limbs, but the tree themselves are still healthy, so in the event of a wildfire coming through here that fire is going to have a lot harder time coming through and getting into the canopy. So it will stay on the ground and make suppression much easier."
With projects like this, so close to private property and the city, planning is everything.
“The timeline of what it kind of took to get to this point of doing the prescribed burn of Rodney Ridge was, there was a lot of the planning process. And then we had to come out and do some thinning, and piling, and we had to burn the piles, and then we had to come out and do some more thinning and some more pile burning before this area was ready for the broadcast under-story burn that we accomplished last spring. So, in total, that was about a six-year process to get to this point where we would be successful to burn this area and retain the over-story. So, it’s a lot of time and effort for an afternoon of prescribed fire."
