CARBON COUNTY, Wyo. — As white smoke wafted from the northeast edge of the Beaver Creek fire on Tuesday — the 66th day of the massive blaze — a group of firefighters stood by and watched the Wyoming wind fan lingering flames in beetle-killed trees.
Instead of chasing down and snuffing out hot spots, crews in Colorado and across the state line used their most valuable tool to safely keep the fire at bay: patience.
It’s a change in approach for the scores of firefighters from across the country who have been summoned to battle the fire, but one that officials say is necessary to fight and learn from an unpredictable blaze. Officials are using the burn as an educational tool as its flames spread across the dead and dying, orange-brown forest, where limbs and entire trunks are prone to falling.
The Beaver Creek fire stands apart from other wildfires and is so difficult to harness because of its 37,000-plus acres of mostly beetle-kill timber, a volatile fuel that forces firefighters to rethink the way they can safely approach such large burns. The U.S. Forest Service hopes the fire provides a blueprint for how to fight blazes in the millions of acres of forest in Colorado and across the West that have been ravaged by insects.
Officials say the public can learn from the fire, too, by recognizing that the changing tactics take more time and by bracing for more blazes like Beaver Creek.
“What we’ve found on this fire is let it come to us on our terms,” said Dennis Jaeger, supervisor for the Routt and Medicine Bow National Forests, where the fire is burning. “Let it come out of the timber and catch it in the sage (grass) and put our focus on protecting the resources at risk where we can do it safely, effectively and not be so worried about acres.”
#BeaverCreekFire Daily Update for 8/18/2016 is now on Inciweb: https://t.co/zcuKCvwcjY pic.twitter.com/lZ0P9rEtxe
— Medicine Bow-Routt NFs & Thunder Basin NG (@FS_MBRTB) August 18, 2016
Since 1996, mountain pine beetle outbreaks have burrowed through about 4.3 million acres of forest in Colorado and southern Wyoming, according to the U.S. Forest Service. During that time, spruce beetles have hit more than 1.5 million more acres of forest in the state with varying degrees of tree mortality.
The damage is easy to see around some of the state’s most popular high country areas like Summit and Grand counties, where dead and dying trees in some places dominate the landscape.
“I think we’re realizing that we’re not out of the woods with the beetle kill, that we might actually be entering a new few years here,” said Ich Stewart, acting fire management officer for the Routt National Forest. “There’s the potential for all the forests in the (Bureau of Land Management) and the state to have more long-term, beetle-kill fires. We’re starting to understand the potential for fire behavior and we’re learning a lot of hard lessons in terms of what kinds of strategies and tactics work in the beetle kill.”
The Beaver Creek fire has made it clear that most direct tactics — hand lines dug by firefighters and crews rushing in to knock down flames — likely won’t safely work when fires ignite in those areas. Instead, commanders are waiting for fire to emerge from the danger of weakened forests to engage it, relying more upon heavy machinery and air resources. The fire ignited June 19 in a sparsely populated area of Jackson County northwest of Walden.
A great deal of the reluctance to send firefighters into bug-killed forests stems from a renewed Forest Service emphasis on protecting firefighters after the 2013 death of 19 Hotshots in Yarnell, Ariz. Incident commanders are told to put firefighter safety first and carefully weigh risks against the probability of success when sending crews into dangerous situations.
“You put people into these and you go aggressive, people are going to get hurt,” said Jim Pitts, Salida district ranger for the Pike and San Isabel national forests. “And that’s happened. At some point in time, tactics have to change.”
From the first moments of the Beaver Creek, despite their best efforts to quickly put it out, first-responders realized they were battling a new beast. Flames were following beetle-killed trees in the area like a wick, both with and surprisingly against the wind, sending radiant heat hundreds of feet out and causing spontaneous combustion of other fuels.
The Beaver Creek has also stubbornly resisted cold and high altitude, igniting in an area that was covered by snow just weeks before and being highly active July 4 when the low temperature in the area was just 27 degrees.
“Do I wish we had this thing out on day three?” Jaeger asked. “Yeah.”
While there has been debate about whether beetle-kill forests are more likely to burn, officials on the Beaver Creek burn say the behavior of the blaze is proof of the challenge dead trees pose.
Standing dead trees, tilted timber and lifeless trunks on the ground created a ladder of fuels — paired with the needles of still living evergreens — for what one forest official called a “perfect Boy Scout campfire.” Sixty to 85 percent of the forest in the area is considered beetle-kill.
“We have to look at it out of the box with a fresh set of eyes,” Stewart said. “No one’s an expert on the fire behavior in the beetle kill. We’re in the process of learning and trying to understand.”
Every forest fire is drastically different, from the fuels involved to the weather, terrain and structures at risk, but the sheer length and cost of the Beaver Creek fire speak to the difficulty in battling it.
The 2002 Hayman fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado history, burned more than 137,000 acres and took less than a month to fully contain. The Beaver Creek fire, less than a third as large, was 53 percent contained as of the end of the week and had already cost more than $23 million to fight.
The Beaver Creek fire might not be fully contained until Oct. 21 — 121 days after its ignition. On Tuesday, 250 firefighters remained assigned to the incident. The blaze’s growth, mainly limited to the rugged terrain in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness where it is not being actively fought, is expected to slow and eventually end with the first sizable snowfall.
A similar burn this summer is the Hayden Pass fire, southeast of Salida, which consumed dead spruce over about 16,562 acres. Crews used similar tactics to the Beaver Creek fire: keeping firefighters out of dangerous dead trees and engaging flames indirectly by building bulldozer lines far away — sometimes a few miles — from flames.
The Hayden Pass fire, too, is still burning and was last listed as 60 percent contained.
“We just cannot be putting our people in an area where all these dead trees could fall on our people or compromise their escape route,” said Jay Esperance, who served stints as incident commander on Beaver Creek and then Hayden Pass just after. “Putting line directly on the fire was just not an option.”
Esperance, who is based in South Dakota but serves on a national incident management team, says he has worked beetle-kill fires across the country, including a fire near Cody, Wyo., that he was assigned to earlier in the week. Tactics he used on the Beaver Creek fire were the same ones he harnessed at Hayden Pass.
“We’ll do the best we can to provide protection to the communities and structures that are in harm’s way,” he explained. “Our firefighters’ mentality is keyed to go in and put fires out. Direct is the way we’ve been doing it for so long. It’s difficult for them.”
In both cases, officials point to the lack of serious firefighter injuries and the two cabins — one on each fire — lost to flames as proof that the new strategy works.
The trend was first really utilized in Colorado in 2013 during the massive West Fork complex fire in the southwest corner of the state.
“We need to treat dead and dying and beetle kill trees as a fuel type,” said Dan Dallas, supervisor of the Rio Grande National Forest, which took the brunt of the volatile West Fork blazes. “We were one of the first, I’ll say, to experience it on an extensive basis. It did make us change our objectives and the strategy we used to address the fire.”
Moving forward, officials say they are trying to reduce the fire risk posed by beetle-kill forests. U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., visited the Beaver Creek fire last week and said he is committed to working on legislation to fund efforts to tackle the problem across the West.
“We’ve tried for so long to provide dollars, mitigation, prevention efforts to stop the spread of the beetle or the moth or whatever it may be,” Gardner said as he sat in the back seat of an SUV as it rumbled away from the Beaver Creek fire’s containment lines. “But now we’re to the point where you’ve got fires in the 70-80 percent bug-kill areas. And so, what policies are going to incentivize management of areas that have suffered the bug-kill? And how can you use that as a way and an opportunity to prevent something that turns into a big catastrophic fire?”
Bill Hahnenberg, the latest incident commander on the fire, said if beetle kill trees in the burn area had been harvested before the fire broke out, it would have “100 percent” changed how large and how intense the blaze became.
“We wouldn’t have a $23 million fire,” Hahnenberg said.
In the short term, fire managers say Beaver Creek is simply a sign of things to come.
“If you look at the scale and the extent of the problems and the available budgets,” said Vaughn Jones, sections chief for the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, “there’s not much we can do to reduce the threats statewide.”
