Mt. Graham firestorm: Anniversary brings plans, reflection on safeguards

MOUNT GRAHAM - We'll probably never know for sure what sparked the Clark Peak fire last April 24 in the pines half a mile south-southwest of Riggs Lake campground.

Maybe it was a carelessly tossed cigarette or an untended campfire.

But this much we do know: The fire charred 6,716 acres of timber and at one point threatened to roar right over Mount Graham's 10,720-foot summit, which last burned about 300 years ago.

The flames imperiled 14 summer homes and twice burned within 200 yards of two multimillion-dollar University of Arizona telescopes. Flame heights of 250 feet were reported.

It took more than 1,100 firefighters two weeks and $7.9 million to stop the Clark Peak, one of several wildfires that blackened the Southwest last spring in an unusually early fire season fueled by drought.

At the height of the Mount Graham fire, nine helicopters, 19 fire trucks, five bulldozers and an air tanker were in use.

``I've been on lots of bigger fires, but as far as intensity goes, this was an intense fire,'' said Richard Streeper, the fire, timber and lands staff officer for the Coronado National Forest's Safford district. Mount Graham is in the Coronado National Forest northeast of Tucson, near Safford.

A year has passed, and Streeper is walking through a stand of Southwestern white pine and towering, centuries-old Douglas fir - all of them dead. Like giant blackened matchsticks, standing dead trees stretch to the horizon.

Beneath them, aspen sprouts push through patches of snow and a beige carpet of barley planted last year to control erosion after the fire.

``Some fires are wind-driven. But this was primarily a fuel-driven fire,'' Streeper said. ``There's an unnaturally high accumulation of fuels, and the root cause is (fire) suppression.''

Changing course

After aggressively suppressing wildfires for nearly a century, the Forest Service has changed course and is now searching for ways to bring low-intensity, controlled fires back into the forest to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fires like Clark Peak.

Tree-ring records show that until about a century ago, low-intensity fires crawled along the ground in Mount Graham's ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests every three to seven years, said Christopher Baisan, a senior research specialist at the UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Although they frequently burned tens of thousands of acres, those ``understory'' fires weren't as traumatic as the Clark Peak blaze.

Understory fires, usually sparked by lightning, would clear dead wood from the ground without harming mature trees. Seedlings and young trees would be killed, however, which kept tree density low.

The three- to seven-year cycle recorded in the fire scars of tree rings disappeared in the 1880s, when cattle and sheep were brought into the Mount Graham area from Texas, Baisan said.

The livestock ate grass that enabled the ground fires to spread through the wide-open forest.

The Forest Service was formed in 1904, and forest fire suppression began on the mountain a short time later.

Decades of fire suppression have enabled dead wood to accumulate to unprecedented levels on the ground - a problem called fuel loading - and has allowed the forest to become unnaturally dense.

Fuel loading is a problem throughout the West, including the ``sky island'' mountaintop forests of Southern Arizona.

The sky islands, which are prized as biological cornucopias, include Mount Graham, the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson and the Chiricahua Mountains of eastern Cochise County.

Recipe for disaster

Today Mount Graham has the highest fuel-loading level in Southern Arizona, according to Richard Kvale, fire and aviation staff officer for the Coronado National Forest.

In some places, more than 100 tons of dead wood per acre are on the ground - about four times what's considered natural, Streeper said.

And because seedlings are not killed off every few years by understory fires, the forest is now crammed with trees of various heights that act as a ``fuel ladder,'' carrying flames from the ground into the crowns of the trees. At high elevations on Mount Graham, many of those understory trees are Engelmann spruce and corkbark fir.

Once the flames reached the tree crowns during the Clark Peak fire, the unnaturally high forest density allowed them to burn through the treetops in ``crown fires'' that killed large numbers of trees - sometimes entire stands several hundred acres across.

The fire's perimeter covers 6,716 acres. But within those boundaries, the fire swept up and down canyons and hillsides to create a black, brown and green mosaic of burned and unburned areas.

In Forest Service jargon, a ``moderate'' wildfire is one that kills 40 to 80 percent of the trees, while a ``hot'' or ``intense'' fire is one that kills more than 80 percent of the trees.

About 44 percent of the Clark Peak fire burned either hot or moderate, according to a biological assessment written by Genice Froehlich, wildlife staff officer for the Forest Service in Safford.

The fire ranged in elevation from 6,500 feet to 10,000 feet. It burned about 3,200 acres of coniferous forest, including piñon pine, Chihuahua pine, alligator juniper, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, white fir, Southwestern white pine, Engelmann spruce and corkbark fir.

It consumed about 3,300 acres of broadleaf woodland, which includes emory oak, Arizona white oak and junipers.

Mother Nature pitches in

The top of Mount Graham is much wetter today than it was a year ago - thanks to several winter snowstorms - and a repeat of the Clark Peak fire is unlikely this spring, Streeper said.

In the short term, the Clark Peak fire ate up some of the fuels that contribute to Mount Graham's fuel-loading problem.

But within a decade, most of the standing dead trees killed by the fire will be on the ground, he said.

``The fire did not solve the fuel-loading problem, and in many areas it increased it,'' Streeper said. ``It's a problem that will have to be addressed.''

``Salvage'' logging of some of the dead trees could help ease the problem in burned areas, Froehlich said.

But salvage timber sales are ``politically unpopular,'' and none are planned on Mount Graham, she said.

The only way to reduce the likelihood of future - and possibly much bigger - catastrophic wildfires on Mount Graham and other sky-island forests is to reduce the amount of dead wood on the ground and to thin the forests, the Forest Service says.

And that's exactly what the federal agency has proposed for a 189-acre demonstration project around the Old Columbine summer homes on Mount Graham, at an elevation of about 9,500 feet.

The main goal of the Pinaleno Ecosystem Demonstration Project is ``to restore fuel loading to natural levels so fire can be allowed to resume its natural maintenance function,'' George Asmus, the head ranger for the Forest Service in Safford, wrote in a letter sent this month to Safford-area residents and other interested parties.

Chain saws and drip torches would be the main tools of the demonstration project, which could begin as early as this fall.

Reducing dead wood

Engelmann spruce and corkbark fir trees less than 24 inches in diameter would be cut down, and intentionally set fires would be used to reduce the amount of dead wood on the ground.

In addition to the summer homes, the demonstration zone includes campgrounds, a visitor information station and the Forest Service Columbine Work Center. It is a few miles west of the Mount Graham International Observatory.

By reducing the amount of dead wood and cutting some trees, the Forest Service also hopes to create a buffer zone around Old Columbine that would slow a wildfire and make the area more defensible.

The agency is using a similar strategy along the Coronado National Forest boundary next to the town of Oracle, north of Tucson.

The Pinaleno Ecosystem Demonstration Project must be approved by John McGee, supervisor of the Coronado National Forest.

Since just about anything that Coronado National Forest officials do or fail to do is criticized by somebody, the Mount Graham demonstration project proposal is likely to stimulate lively debate.

Public comments should be mailed by May 15 to: District Ranger George Asmus, U.S. Forest Service, Safford Ranger District, P.O. Box 709, Safford, AZ 85548-0709.

Critics cry out

``This proposal is just another Forest Service scam,'' said Robin Silver of the Maricopa Audubon Society, a longtime opponent of the UA observatory on Mount Graham and a frequent critic of Forest Service management practices.

``If this were about `forest health,' the last place that a thinning and fire project should be undertaken is in the Columbine area,'' he said.

The real goal of the project is to protect summer homes that don't belong on the mountain, Silver said. They should be torn down to reclaim habitat for the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel, which lives within the boundaries of the Pinaleno Ecosystem Demonstration Project, he said.

Another longtime Forest Service critic said he supports the idea of thinning the forest and deliberately burning some of the dead wood. But he questioned the need to cut 24-inch spruce and fir trees.

``We would have no objections to them going in there and thinning some of the smaller trees and reintroducing fire. That needs to happen,'' said David Hodges of Sky Island Watch, a Tucson-based group formed recently to monitor activities in the Coronado National Forest.

Hodges, like Silver, is a longtime Mount Graham observatory opponent with ties to the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, which went to court to block a small ``salvage'' timber sale in the Chiricahuas after the 27,500-acre Rattlesnake fire in 1994.

``But a 24-inch corkbark fir is a big tree,'' Hodges said. ``They make this appear benign by saying those trees don't belong there, but I think it's just a way to get a timber company to come in and do a thinning project.

``There's always something thrown in to make the sale more appealing to a timber company,'' he said.

Complicated plan

The Forest Service has asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department to help design the Mount Graham demonstration project.

The plan is complicated by the fact that the area includes habitat of both the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel and the threatened Mexican spotted owl.

The Clark Peak fire burned about 3,240 acres of Mount Graham red squirrel habitat, and the entire fire perimeter was within an area considered critical habitat of the owl.

While Mexican spotted owls can be found elsewhere in the Southwest, the endangered red squirrel is a sub-species found only on Mount Graham, so any loss of red squirrel habitat is considered significant.

According to Forest Service estimates, the Clark Peak fire and associated suppression activities killed 26 or 27 Mount Graham red squirrels. Last fall, a census led to an estimate of 348 to 414 remaining red squirrels.

In his April 17 letter outlining the Mount Graham demonstration project, district ranger Asmus acknowledged that cutting and burning would occur in red squirrel habitat.

But in the long run, the project would reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, including the kind of hellish, summit-consuming firestorm that could cause the extinction of the Mount Graham red squirrel.

Environmentalists who have opposed the 8.6-acre observatory project for more than a decade sued the Forest Service after the Clark Peak fire, claiming the agency should have suspended construction at the telescope site until the fire's full effects were analyzed.

A federal judge in Tucson rejected those arguments, and last month a federal appeals panel upheld that ruling. Construction of the UA's $60 million Large Binocular Telescope resumed March 7.

A University of Arizona astronomy page has a breakdown on "http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/graham/fire.html" fire-fighting resources for the Clark Peak fire.

Photos by Benjie Sanders, The Arizona Daily Star

A lone oak, above, survives a prescribed burn in Coronado National Forest near Oracle, which was ordered by the Forest Service; nearly 7,000 acres on Mount Graham look like this, right, after last year's intense, fuel-driven Clark Peak fire that took more than 1,100 firefighters two weeks and $7.9 million to stop.

Ranger Carrie Templin checks out what's left of a forest giant after the Clark Peak fire, the worst such disaster in three centuries.

Wildlife staff officer Genice Froelich checks aspen seedling that sprouted after holocaust.

A whitetail deer, right, peeks from amid signs of new growth at passers-by on a dirt road on Mount Graham; wildlife staff officer Genice Froelich, below, checks some of the damage wrought by the Clark Peak fire last year that charred nearly 7,000 acres. Officials, environmentalists and residents all have their own ideas about what happened and how to prevent such a holocaust again. Page 1A.

Photo by David Sanders, The Arizona Daily Star

Map by The Arizona Daily Star