Chiricahua fire leaves legacy of forest scars

It was the largest fire in the Chiricahua Mountains in 77 years, and the 200-foot flames were visible at night nearly 40 miles away in Douglas.

The monthlong Rattlesnake fire covered 27,500 acres, cost $6 million to fight and reduced vast expanses of biologically rich high-elevation conifer forest to ``moonscape.''

It consumed big chunks of prime black bear habitat, devoured nesting sites in an internationally known bird haven and killed all the rainbow trout in the upper South Fork of Cave Creek, said Brian Power, district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service in Douglas.

Rehabilitation of burned areas will cost about $500,000 and take several years. Some steep slopes at high elevations may be scarred for several thousand years, Power said.

``We would be pretty upset to see a 500-acre clear-cut in a logging operation, but that's pretty much what we've got in some areas because of this fire,'' Power said. The Chiricahuas are in eastern Cochise County near the New Mexico border.

``It took out whole canyons, and that's stand replacement on the kind of large scale I don't like to see,'' he said. ``The problems outweigh the benefits.''

Less intense fires crawl along the ground and burn dead wood and grasses without killing large trees, thereby reducing the likelihood of a catastrophic fire and nourishing the soils. Even severe burns are beneficial in small doses, promoting a greater variety of plant types and age groups in the forest.

But the Rattlesnake was, at times, a firestorm.

It severely burned about 5,000 acres of mostly ponderosa pine, leaving behind a black and barren ``moonscape'' with ``everything green consumed,'' said Les Dufour of the Forest Service.

Some of the severely burned areas were reduced to ``white ash,'' which kills everything in the top 2 inches of soil. White ash is produced in fires that burn at 1,200 degrees or hotter, Dufour said.

In addition to the severely burned areas, about 3,000 acres were scorched. Those brown-tinged trees probably won't survive, said Dufour, a member of the recreation and lands staff at the Douglas District.

Large regions within the fire's boundaries were untouched. From the air, the 27,500 acres are a patchwork of green, brown and black swatches.

Lightning sparked the conflagration June 28 on 7,900-foot Rattlesnake Peak. Twenty firefighters were sent out the first day.

The fire swept uphill and to the southeast, burning most intensely in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer on steep south- and southwest-facing slopes.

It surged over the top of 9,795-foot Chiricahua Peak, the highest Arizona peak south of 10,720-foot Mount Graham.

By the 11th day, 420 firefighters from several states were working on the blaze. Three helicopters, six air tankers, six fire engines, and four large water trucks were called in.

About halfway through the monthlong fire, 200-foot flames could be seen from Douglas at night, and giant mushroom-shaped clouds rose tens of thousands of feet into the sky.

``On the 12th or the 13th (of July) it blew up big time, and you could see the flames from this office,'' Dufour recalled. A blowout occurs when the fire is moving through the tops, or crowns, of the trees at high speed - up to 30 miles per hour, according to Dufour.

``It's burning 130 to 150 feet off the ground when it's crowning out like that, and then the flames above the trees are going 200 feet into the air,'' he said.

``Some of the firefighters had been on the Yellowstone and said it was as impressive, or more impressive, than anything they saw there,'' Dufour said.

The great Yellowstone fires of 1988 blackened nearly 800,000 acres, about a third of the national park.

``When it blows up into a crown fire, digging a fire line doesn't do much good, and airplanes can't get close enough to do anything,'' Dufour said. ``You just get out of the way and hope it's not coming your way.''

Crown fires often occur as a wildfire moves up steep slopes. Heat from the burning trees rises up the hill and ``preheats'' unburned trees ahead of the advancing fire. Pines and other conifers contain the flammable resins used to make turpentine; when the fire reaches those preheated evergreens, they explode into flame.

Excessive ``fuel loading'' increases the likelihood of a catastrophic crown fires. Fuel loading refers to the amount of burnable material on the ground, and ranger Power said the Chiricahuas have ``some of the largest fuel loading I've seen in the Southwest.''

``That's what creates the heat that rises up the slope and causes pre-drying,'' he said.

The excessive fuel loading in the Chiricahuas is linked to the longstanding policy of suppressing wildfires there. The federal government has managed the Chiricahuas since 1905, and fire suppression ``goes back to the beginning,'' Power said. The mountain range is within the Coronado National Forest.

Prescribed burns - fires intentionally set to reduce fuel loading - have rarely been used in the Chiricahuas.

``If you continue to fight fire without doing more prescribed burns or letting natural fires go, every 50 or 60 years you're due for a big one,'' Dufour said. ``This was the big one.''

``It was a very large fire, equivalent to a 100-year flood,'' said Gerry Perry, regional supervisor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. ``It was probably a lot bigger than it would have been if we hadn't been putting fires out for the last 100 years.''

The Rattlesnake was declared ``contained'' on July 23 and ``controlled'' on July 29, but some embers may continue to smolder for weeks or months.

The Chiricahuas are one of Southern Arizona's rare ``sky islands,'' isolated mountains on or near the border, surrounded by desert or grassland, with conifer trees on the summit.

Sky islands are renowned for their biological diversity, and the Chiricahuas boast a bountiful mix of plants and animals - the southernmost extension of some Rocky Mountains species and the northernmost occurrence of some organisms from Mexico.

Birders have flocked to the Chiricahuas for years, and the American Museum of Natural History established its Southwestern Research Station on the eastern edge of the mountain range, near the town of Portal, in 1955. The fire came within 1.5 miles miles of the research station and directly affected four or five long-term research projects, said director Wade Sherbrooke.

``I'm not blaming the Forest Service, but here we have the sky islands of southeast Arizona, which are very valuable in terms of their biodiversity at a national level, and we don't have a fire policy that addresses that uniqueness,'' Sherbrooke said.

``This isn't just timber burning. This is the biodiversity of North America burning,'' he said. ``There should be a plan in place that says, `This is a unique area, and we need to address it as such.'

``Now the vegetation has been greatly altered, and we need to ensure that the unique communities in this area have every chance of recovering,'' Sherbrooke said.

The Forest Service rehabilitation plan for the Rattlesnake fire is expected to be completed this month. Management of Arizona's sky islands will be discussed next month at a Tucson conference sponsored by the Forest Service and the University of Arizona's School of Renewable Natural Resources.

The highest elevations in the Chiricahuas are cloaked with the southernmost spruce forest in the United States. There were no more than 200 acres of Engelmann spruce in the Chiricahuas before the fire, and most of it escaped serious damage, Dufour said.

Ecologist Paul Martin flew over the burned area recently to check on the spruce forest, a remnant from the last ice age, when those evergreens were much more widespread and at lower elevations in Southern Arizona.

``The impression I came away with was that the spruce on top of the Chiricahuas has certainly been damaged, but not to a truly alarming degree,'' said Martin, professor emeritus of geosciences at the UA. He first visited the Chiricahuas in 1956.

But other parts of the mountain range weren't as lucky.

The Chiricahuas host one of the largest black bear populations in Southern Arizona, and big chunks of prime bear habitat were destroyed, ranger Power said.

Particularly hard-hit were the upper reaches of Cave Creek and its South Fork - at least 500 acres were lost in the South Fork alone, he said.

``That was probably some of the best habitat around, and the fire moved the bears out into other areas,'' Power said.

Even before the fire, there wasn't much for bears to eat this summer at higher elevations in the Chiricahuas. Lack of winter rains caused a failure of the acorn crop and a scarcity of berries, said Perry of Game and Fish.

The fire further reduced the resources available to the 75 to 100 black bears in the Chiricahuas and forced them to seek food - such as prickly pear fruit and human food - found at lower elevations, Perry said.

``The bears down there are having a hard time making it right now, and they're coming off the mountain looking for something to eat,'' Perry said.

Reports of human-bear interaction are up sharply throughout the state this summer, and Game and Fish has relocated seven Chiricahua black bears since the Rattlesnake fire, he said.

In the long run the fire will benefit bears because large areas will be transformed from closed-canopy forest into mountain meadows with plenty of berry bushes, Perry said.

Deer, turkey, songbirds and other creatures that prefer more open conditions and mixed vegetation also should benefit. Insect-eating birds should do especially well because beetles will invade dying trees scorched by the fire.

Losers include animals that need closed-canopy forest, said Forest Service biologist Randall Smith. In the Chiricahuas, that includes the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the northern goshawk, a bird of prey that is particularly sensitive to disturbances in the forest.

``We like to see fire and use fire to modify habitat and maintain it in good condition,'' Smith said. ``But we would prefer to see cooler understory burns, not large-scale stand-replacing fires where the canopy is completely burned and the trees are killed.

``With an understory burn you can provide for more of a mixture of wildlife conditions in one area,'' Smith said. ``But with stand replacement you're only allowing a single type of habitat to occur in an area.

``You're taking it from old-growth back to basically a forest opening, which is detrimental to those species that rely on mature forest,'' he said.

The Rattlesnake fire ``radically transformed'' the upper Chiricahuas, said Bryant Smith, who is coordinating rehabilitation efforts for the Forest Service. Hillsides of mature ponderosa pine forest - some of the trees were around 350 years old - will now become meadows and aspen groves. On steep slopes where rains wash away most of the soil, rock slides will occur.

``The biggest impact will be the long-term effects of soil loss and erosion on a large portion of the Chiricahuas,'' said Power, the district ranger.

``Some of those steep slopes won't be back in pine for several thousand years,'' he said.

Between 75 percent and 80 percent of the fire occurred in designated wilderness, and little will be done to rehabilitate those areas, Bryant Smith said.

``In wilderness, the policy is not to reseed unless there are threats to life or property outside the wilderness,'' he said. ``Generally we try to let nature take its course in wilderness.''

Rehabilitation efforts will focus on reseeding some 20 miles of fire lines and restoring the hiking trails that crisscross the burned region. It is the biggest rehabilitation effort ever for the Douglas District, and it's expected to cost up to $500,000, Smith said.

All the developed campgrounds outside the wilderness area were saved from the flames - the only structure that burned was an outhouse.

There are no restrictions on hiking and camping in the Chiricahuas, but backpackers are advised to select campsites with care: Wind can topple dead trees, and flash floods are more likely to occur in some of the burned areas.

Photos by Brian Winter, The Arizona Daily Star

Ecologist Paul Martin flies over Chiricahuas to survey the spruce forest, a remnant of the ice age

The 27,500-acre fire left broad expanses of charred terrain