News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
John Pierce (left), Tom Roerick, Sara Erickson and Eric Korman survey the slopes of Cache Mountain for snags. The woods on the steep northern face of Cache Mountain echoed on Thursday, August 1, with the roar of chainsaws, the warning cries of sawyers and the rending crash of toppling snags.
The work is a vital part of the mop-up operation on the Cache Mountain fire.
"Pretty much all we're doing here is snagging, cutting out dead trees so they don't fall on the rest of the crew," said Tom Roerick, a sawyer from Minnesota.
The danger from falling snags is real. A firefighter was killed in Colorado last week when a tree with burned-through roots fell and struck him on the back of the head.
Roerick worked with his "swamper," Sara Erickson, who helped identify snags that must come down and kept an eye on the snag and the surrounding woods, looking out for potential danger.
Erickson's job was to keep Roerick safe while he cut into the snags with his 24-inch Stihl chainsaw.
If a snag breaks off, "she'll grab me and throw me out of the way," Roerick said.
With tall, dead trees, there is a serious risk from the "spiting cobra" effect, where a snag sways backward and the top whips forward to break off and crash down on the sawyer or on other crew members.
Brian Henry, a trainee crew boss, reported that the saw teams did not like the dead material they were cutting into.
"Sawyers have been telling me about how hard it is to fall these trees," Henry said. "There's no weighting to help tip them over."
That made predicting the fall line of the snags tricky. The sawyer hollers out an echoing warning cry before beginning his first cut, before beginning a final cut and before tipping the tree over.
Cries of "Down the hill!" sounded repeatedly, followed by a crackling r-i-i-i-p, then a boom! as the snags hit the ground amid smoldering stumps and brush.
The Minnesota Type II team had been working the back slope of Cache Mountain since Saturday, July 27. While the focus was on the head of the fire near Highway 20 and Black Butte Ranch, the teams on the other end of the fire were having trouble holding the blaze on the steep, rocky, rugged slopes that loom above Blue and Suttle Lakes.
On Sunday, as erratic winds hit the fire, spot fires kept rolling down the slopes, forcing the crew to dig and re-dig hand control lines to get around the spot fires.
"It was pretty exciting," Henry said.
The terrain was a challenge, especially for firefighters from Minnesota.
"We pace ourselves when we first get out here as far as charging the hills," Henry said.
The crew based their mop-up work from a small cleared bench looking out toward Mt. Jefferson. The area had been cleared to create a helicopter medivac landing zone during the weekend.
By Thursday a small square tank made of visquine stretched over a log frame had been built on the site to store water. Crew boss Rob Heavirland fired up a pump to send the water upslope through a network of hoses so that firefighters could douse smoldering fires that sent tendrils of smoke up through the fir and the dead white pine.
The mop-up work is arduous and tedious, but the crew went at it in good spirits.
As a Type II team, the crews from the Superior and Chippewa National Forests are not full-time firefighters.
"Most of us have day jobs," Henry said. "I'm a timber sale administrator."
They may not be full-timers on the books, but they've been hard at it all summer.
Roerick said he's been on fires in North Dakota, Colorado, Minnesota and now Oregon.
He has gone pretty much from one conflagration to the next, with little break in between.
"I was home for two days before I came here," he said, as he and Erickson started hiking up the steep slope of Cache Mountain, looking for snags to fall.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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