News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
The Milli Fire burned some swaths of terrain severely, while others were lightly touched or left intact. photo Ceili Cornelius
Sisters' landscape will be altered by the 18,000-plus-acre Milli Fire. Areas of the forest will be deeply scarred by the flames that have roared across it for more than two weeks now.
But the effects of the blaze are not uniform. Some areas burned very hot and are severely damaged; others saw low- to moderate-intensity burning that may prove ultimately to be beneficial. Firefighting strategies to introduce low-intensity burning to prevent high-intensity fire will leave portions of landscape burned over - but not too severely.
Reports and observation from a distance indicate that Trout Creek Butte - a central swath of green on the Sisters skyline - burned in a classic "mosaic" pattern. That means that despite appearing to have been consumed by the ravenous fire, there will be areas of green trees left intact and relatively undisturbed by the fire's passage.
Fire information officers Jinny Reed and Stacey Lacey took The Nugget on a tour of some of the areas where the fire had passed through during a hard run to the east lasting from Wednesday afternoon, August 16 through Friday, August 18, when the fire forced several residential areas to evacuate.
Along the west side of Pole Creek Road (Forest Road 15), there was substantial scorched earth, partly from burnout operations that tried to stop the storming advance of the main blaze.
"I see a lot of mortality and a lot of scorching all the way to the tops of trees," Reed said, surveying the west side of the roadway.
Such hard-hit areas will likely be replanted. Hazardous snags along roadways will be felled. While the Forest Service will likely attempt to plan for salvage logging, such plans are often held up in litigation until the trees lose their value. Most of the dead trees will eventually fall.
On the east side of the roadway, in an area that had been treated with prescribed fire, the fire burned with much lower intensity when it jumped the road, burning along the surface, consuming pine needles and underbrush, but leaving most trees only lightly scorched. Such fire is actually beneficial to the forest.
What creates high-intensity fire with high levels of mortality "just depends on a lot of environmental factors," Reed explained.
Fuel load is one of them. If trees are close together, a firestorm can race quickly from tree to tree. And weather conditions - hot, dry and windy - were primed for the fire to make a run on those mid-August days.
"It came around Trout Creek Butte," Reed said. "It came through here as a crown fire (up in the crowns of trees, moving tree to tree) with a lot of steam behind it. It was really hot on the south side of the butte."
The fire wasn't like that everywhere. Viewed from the Whychus Overlook off Road 16 (Three Creek Road), an observer can see where fingers of fire reached out to the east. Some strips of terrain are heavily burned; others are relatively untouched. Along Road 16 are swaths of dull red, where retardant was dropped to try to give firefighters on the ground time to build lines to stop the fire's advance.
Luckily, the fire approached Whychus Creek Canyon late in the day on Friday, August 18, as temperatures cooled and winds started to die down. The fire reached tendrils into the canyon, but burning there was minimal, and subsequently firefighters were able to head off the fire from further travel toward the east.
It was a near-run thing.
"We were saved by the time of day," Reed said. "That's it."
That's good news to people who hike the Whychus Trail or enjoy looking down on the creek from the overlook. They will look out on a landscape marked by nearly 20 years of big fires - but one that is far from being destroyed.
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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