The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

A tour of the B&B Complex Fire was held on August 25. Over 65 people spent the entire day looking at the impact of the fire on both thinned and unthinned forests from where it started to where it burned the hottest.

After stops at Corbett Sno Park and Mt. Washington viewpoint to look at displays, the group toured the Suttle Lake recreation area.

“From the air, we call this the green doughnut,” said Mike Cloughesy, Oregon Forest Resources Institutes’s director of forestry. “You have the blue lake surrounded by a ring of green timber with everything burned outside of that ring.” The area around the lake was saved from destruction both by major fuels reduction work done before the fire and extraordinary efforts by firefighters during the fire.

After lunch, the group drove to Round Lake at the edge of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness where the fire burned the hottest, leaving a field of blackened snags. “This is the ‘belly of the beast,’” Cloughsey said.

But even here, lodgepole pine seed from cones not damaged by the fire has produced a scattered crop of small two-year old seedlings. “It will be a race between the growth of these seedlings and the return of brush and other vegetation as the area heals,” Fitzgerald explained.

Final stops on the tour were in the Metolius Basin and included logging areas where work was underway at the time of the fire and the Metolius Heritage Demonstration Project. Here the Sisters Ranger District, in cooperation with the Friends of Metolius, has created examples of varying levels of thinning trees to improve forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire.