Training program in Central Oregon aims to develop prescribed fire techniques and best practices

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Forty certified firefighting professionals from the US and Canada are finishing up a two week-long program to learn how to do prescribed burns. They’ve gathered in the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon as part of The Prescribed Fire Exchange Training Program, or TREX.  TREX was started about 15 years ago by the Nature Conservancy and the US Forest Service. It’s now taken place in more than a dozen states and grown to include many more partners.

Thomas Stokely helped coordinate this particular installment. He is a forest ecologist with the Nature Conservancy in Central Oregon. Kaci Radcliffe has been taking part. She is a Northeastern Oregon forest restoration project manager for the Nature Conservancy, and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Thomas Stokely: Thank you, Dave, thanks for having us.

Kaci Radcliffe: I appreciate the invitation.

Miller: Thomas Stokely first, what was the big idea behind TREX when it started 15 years ago?

Stokely: The key focus of TREX is really promoting the spread of effective cooperative burning. Basically taking in a lot of different collaborators, including both federal government, private [and] non-governmental organizations to get more prescribed fire out in the landscape to help address some of the issues that we’re facing when it comes to the wildfire crisis and reducing the likelihood and the risk of fire burning to communities. But also trying to achieve some ecological benefit for the forest because many of these forests have been adapted to fire. And TREX actually started in grassland ecosystems as well. So it doesn’t just cover forest but also prairie ecosystems throughout the Midwest and some of the forest prairies of the Eastern United States.

Miller: What role, historically, did low-intensity fires play in ecosystems like Central Oregon’s?

Stokely: That’s a great question. Many of these systems are fire adapted, meaning fires burn pretty frequently throughout these forested systems and also non-forested rangelands. In the Ponderosa pine system where we’re at right now, those systems burned naturally, or due to human ignitions from a cultural burning of Indigenous communities every 10 to 20 years - in this system we’re in right now. I think the average is about every 12 years. So that fire would help to maintain more open stands, with large old growth trees that are adapted to fire and can withstand those low-intensity surface fires. These forests wouldn’t have necessarily looked like a complete open park, but they also wouldn’t have looked like the very dense forest that we see today. You would have had quite a mix. And there would have been a lot more space for those trees to grow and become really large and those large trees are more resistant to fire. And you would have had a lot more diversity of the understory vegetation and a lot more wildlife variability and wildlife habitat.

Miller: Kaci Radcliffe, can you give us a sense for the range of people or groups who have been taking part in this particular training?

Radcliffe: Coming in new to fire, I wasn’t sure who would be here and the level of expertise. What has been great about this program is that it intentionally is bringing people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives and fire. It could be long-time professionals who have been doing wildfire response or prescribed burning for 40 years. People that are new, that are focused on cross boundary prescribed fires. Not only fire practitioners, those on the ground, but those that understand fire on the ecological or landscape level. What I really appreciate about my first couple of days at TREX is I got to see not only the multiple ways that people come to fire, but what drives them, what they’re passionate about.

Miller: And what about you? What drove you to take part in this?

Radcliffe: In my role at the Nature Conservancy in Northeast Oregon, we’re building a cross boundary, all lands partnership approach to forest restoration and what I’m hearing from partners there is that they’re really ready to scale up. They’ve been using principles like ecological thinning, [and] prescribed fire for a while now, but we’re ready to go bigger. They need more people who have the expertise and the experience, have that scientific knowledge base and then the on-the-ground best practices. I was hearing from that community that they would like to build the community and the best practices, so that they can bring fire to Northeast Oregon in a really intentional way.

And then this is pretty personal to me, because both of my families in Washington and Alaska have had wildfires that have threatened their homes and they both want to increase their preparedness. Fire is becoming more frequent and so I wanted to know how I could help, how could I help them reduce their risk? Help give them good information about what to expect and then also connect them with this really broad community of practitioners and experts that are available. We see a lot of people like, prescribed fire councils, certified bird manager programs, [and] private and community leaders who are stepping up to say, ‘We wanna be part of this work, we want to steward our lands, we wanna have resilient and healthy landscapes and I wanna do that close to home with my own family.’ And then be part of the fire community and this is a really good place to get started.

Miller: Kaci, there’s a lot more to dig into there about your professional and your personal stories. But Thomas, I wanna go back to you. Can you give us a sense for the decision to do this in the Deschutes National Forest in particular? Why do this there?

Stokely: That’s also a great question. The Deschutes National Forest is actually currently one of the priority landscapes for federal funding to help address the wildfire crisis strategy. We’re seeing throughout the West more and more very intense, severe fires that end up being catastrophic to not only forests but the communities that surround them. With the Deschutes National Forest, TREX has been going on since 2015 and every year they’ve convened in the spring time to get different practitioners from all over in order to learn, and then also to burn. We’re addressing not only the training aspects but getting more ecological fire on the ground to protect these forest ecosystems and also the communities. There’s a lot of work being done by the forest service and by private landowners. And as some of what Kaci mentioned, some of that cross boundary work as well, cooperating to get more of this restoration done across property ownerships.

Miller: Meaning federal land, or state land, or private land, or tribal land?

Stokely: We kind of call it “all land.” So yeah, the tribal partners are huge private landowners. The federal government, state lands, you name it. We’re trying to get more of this restoration across the boundary because with this increasing risk of wildfire, we can’t just do little pieces of land at a time and expect it’s going to make big changes to the risk that’s threatening communities in the forest. So we’re really trying to foster this cooperative burning so that we can get more of that burning done across different lands. For the Deschutes National Forest we’ve had over 100 years of fire suppression just like most of the Western United States, and also intensive logging.

Back in the early 1900s unregulated grazing, that’s all contributed to very dense forests. Those dense forests are more prone to drought and especially more prone to severe wildfire, because you have sort of multiple layers of vegetation and dead materials that contribute to the spread of fire throughout the landscape which ends up creating these catastrophic fires that we see on the news. So we’re really trying to get more of this restoration on the ground so we can set up the forest to be able to accept and adapt to fire, especially in a changing landscape that we’re experiencing now.

Miller: Can you describe some of the places where you actually have, in the phrase that many of you use, ‘put fire on the land’ over the last week and a half? I mean, what’s an example of an area where you have done a prescribed burn this week?

Stokely: A lot of our burning was thanks to the Sisters Ranger District of the Deschutes National Forest. They have these units they call the safer burns, SAFR, and those safer units, a lot of them have received some ecological thinning removal of the fine diameter, the small diameter trees and shrubs. That’s sort of prepping these units so that we can actually get fire on the ground so they don’t burn really hot, they burn in a controlled manner, which is really what we’re going for. Those units, some of them are located just outside of Sisters, very public facing.

So we have these individuals that we call public information officers, that can help convey the message of what we’re doing out there for the public. And then also further up away from town and [in] areas that we’ve seen a lot of wildfire in the past. So there was the Milli Fire, there was the Pole Creek Fire and there were other fires before that, that all burned from the higher up in the Cascades down towards town. Unlike many areas of the West, our fires actually burned downhill because of the westerly winds and they sort of pushed towards town. So a lot of those units that we burned were strategically placed in order to protect communities. And in the case of the Milli Fire, they actually used some of these past burn units to stop that fire from getting close to town. They can be quite effective and they’re very strategic and where they’re placed so that we can get the biggest bang for our buck.

Miller: How many burns are we talking about? How many acres are we talking about here, just for this exercise?

Radcliffe: So I was doing a little tally, being that this is my first time being part of an organized burn. And I think as a group, we’ve been able to treat over 1,000 acres. And then as an individual I think I tally that I’ve been on the ground, so actively got to work, on about 500 of those acres, across a half-dozen locations. My pedometer says that I’ve walked over 50 miles. And those landscapes… what is really nice about this as a training opportunity, and I appreciate this place being chosen because visually, with the Ponderosa pine, you can see through the unit a little better. I could see where the engines were [and] where my other crews were. Some of these areas have some topography and some brush which gives you a challenge and an opportunity to learn to work on those landscapes.

Stokely: I would like to add that we got real lucky with the burn window leading up to TREX. I think a week before TREX started on April 24th, we actually had snow at lower elevations and there was the lingering snow pack, which is great for the forest but a challenge for prescribed burning. And then now as we talk to you, we have some rain outside. So we ended up getting a good solid five days straight of burning done which is a big lift and is quite a challenge, but our participants were up to the task. We got lucky with a good five-day burn window.

Miller: Kaci, what were you doing as you logged those 50 miles over the last two weeks? What jobs were you being trained in?

Radcliffe: I think the first, most important thing the training provided was what they call “readiness.” Spending time with the training participants to make sure that we all had an equal understanding of how to operate in this environment. There’s a lot of language and terminology that’s specific to fire and that’s really important. When you’re out there everyone agrees on what terms mean, what directions mean. Spending some time making sure that we’re all communicating together. And that’s also really important because we come from different backgrounds, different regions, different countries. It was actually kind of fun to do some matching to say, hey, do you call this the same thing as I do or when I give you this direction, do you really clearly understand what I’m asking you to do?

And then along with personal safety, making sure that we have our personal protective equipment so that we can operate in a fire safely and comfortably. I had friends help me make sure my pack fit correctly, help me break in my boots for those 50 miles I had to walk. There’s some preparation there, that you come in and make sure that before you’re even out on a fire [that] you’re feeling ready to go and making sure you have that support, people to ask questions.

And then there’s a huge planning team, that they’re looking at weather, they’re looking at organization to make sure that all these people coming together who have different experience, different organizational and operational methods, that we all can operate as a seamless unit together. And then even public information, [such as] what are we communicating? Why are we here? Do we understand the values and the passions that we all have? So that’s all that planning. And then for prep things like digging hand line, I had never used these specialized tools like a Pulaski, which has what they call a grubbing end that helps you dig through the duff to get to soil. And an axe end, how can I operate that effectively? How do I use that tool? Also efficiently you could be digging line for hours, so how can I do that in a way that I can make it through the full day?

So there’s a lot of planning and preparation that lets you then go to the next stage which is what they call firing, which is purposeful ignition or putting fire on the ground sometimes. There’s a common tool called the drip torch. And as a Type 2 kind of first firefighter that is a tool that’s commonly used, but I don’t know that I would have got the chance to become familiar with that without the training program because I had people coaching me.

Miller: Thomas Stokely, so now 1,000 acres in the Deschutes National Forest have been treated in this way, reducing fuel load [and] helping forest health, bringing it closer to the way forests might have been thousands of years ago. And not to say 1,000 acres isn’t a lot, but can you put that in perspective in terms of the rest of this one national forest, and forests in the Western United States?

Stokely: Yeah, it’s a great point, we are way behind in terms of the need to restore some of these systems back to a state where they can accept fire. I’ve heard many different numbers and they have different back of the envelope calculations of how much we need to get done, but we need to implement an order of magnitude more. We’re talking getting thousands of acres done a year in order to catch up to the need in terms of fire risk. While we had just 1,000 acres for this particular burn, we’re sending folks back to their home bases so that they can spread the message and help to foster more of a culture of getting proactive ecological fire on the ground. And that’s a big shift from the model of fire suppression. Many of these folks that are here are coming from that background of wildland firefighting, which is excellent because those are the exact folks that we need to be messengers. We need to be practitioners for getting more of that good burning on the ground so that they can learn how to better use fire in a very safe manner. So we can get more acres treated across the landscape.

Miller: That is the sort of pipeline, of more people who have the experience and knowledge to do this work. Just briefly, I’m curious about the public side of this. Have you seen a change in the public desire for, or understanding of, the need for prescribed burns?

Stokely: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s generally mixed feelings with the public because some folks will see us doing what we’re doing and they think we’re putting out a wildfire and don’t quite realize that what we’re doing is actually trying to treat some of those acres so that they can be better set up to not only fight fire, but allow those fires to burn in areas where we can get more desired benefit for the ecosystem.

And I think more and more as we go through this process, we’re getting better information out to the public because we’re also learning at the same time. And as we learn, we can become better messengers. More and more I think the public is being exposed to this and some of the units that we burn, we’re really publicly facing right next to Sisters, Oregon and some close to La Pine, Oregon. And when we were out on the Sisters burn, a lot of folks would ride their bikes or were jogging by and were cheering us on and were very thankful for the work we are doing because those people that live in those communities really understand the threats that are facing those cities and those little houses that are spread throughout the forest. We’re gaining a lot of traction, but we have more and more people moving to these communities. There’s an increasing need to keep with the messaging and to keep providing the public more information about why we’re doing this burning so that we can get more public support, because that’s a major limiting factor is that sort of social license to be doing these restoration activities in the forest.

Miller: Thomas Stokely and Kaci Radcliffe, thanks very much.

Stokely: Yeah, thank you, Dave.

Miller: Thomas Stokely is a forest ecologist with the Nature Conservancy in Central Oregon. Kaci Radcliffe is the Northeastern Oregon forest restoration project manager for the Nature Conservancy.

Forty certified firefighting professionals from the U.S. and Canada are participating in a two week-long program to carefully ignite fires and burn roughly 1,000 acres of the forested understory in the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon. Since its launch 15 years ago by the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of the Interior and The Nature Conservancy, The Prescribed Fire Training Exchange Program, or TREX, has taken place in more than a dozen states and grown to include international participants and the involvement of Tribal nations, state and local agencies, private landowners, universities and NGOs. After more than a century of fire suppression activities, prescribed burning is increasingly being used as a fire management tool to improve forest ecosystems and protect communities in an era of catastrophic wildfires driven by climate change. Joining us to talk about prescribed fires and the training program is Thomas Stokely, a forest ecologist with The Nature Conservancy in Central Oregon, and Kaci Radcliffe, the Northeastern Oregon forest restoration project manager for The Nature Conservancy.

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