Early Sunday morning, four Utah State University Fire Club students, two Alpine Forestry employees, one Utah State professor and retired-now-volunteer wildland firefighter and one Park Record reporter met at Pinebrook Park. 

Fog blanketed the hills and a misty rain welcomed the small crew, some who’d driven two hours to help with the morning’s project — pile burning.

Pile burning has become standard practice along the wildland urban interface as one of the few options for removing fire fuels from overgrown and dense forests, said Alpine Forestry’s Alan Spadafora. Without natural wildfires removing dead or dry limbs, trees and underbrush, the build-up of this material poses greater risks for high-intensity fires.

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Crews cut and gather this biomass, which can either be removed from sites, chipped or gathered into piles to be burned.

Burning, in many ways the cheapest and easiest option, is done during the fall and spring when snow and atmospheric conditions help manage the controlled fires and limit smoke. 

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In Pinebrook, crews from Utah’s Division of Natural Resources had gone through the hillside with chainsaws and other tools, gathering the material into piles. Now that winter is starting to arrive, fire crews came to finish the job.

On Sunday, the team signed the safety checklist, prepared the tools for the day and hiked up Pinebrook Trail to the piles.

Spadafora showed how to ready the drip torches, silver canisters filled with 70 percent diesel and 30 percent gas with a thin, looped spout and a “wick.” Light the wick, tip the canister and flaming fuel ignited the stacks of wet, frozen logs. That was the idea anyway. 

A dog barked from a nearby balcony as we lit the test pile. The initial smoke swirled slightly, then rose high into the air and spread. Quickly the fire got hot enough and the smoking mostly stopped. 

Spadafora brought up the day’s burn plan, 90% of piles to 90% completion. We split into pairs with our drip torches, and within a few minutes half a dozen fires were lit, sending small plumes of smoke and crackling flames up through three-foot-high piles. 

Though we were a stone’s throw from people’s homes, the communities in Pinebrook were expecting these fire-prevention measures. They knew all too well what would happen if teams like ours didn’t remove wildfire fuel.

A little over two years ago, 8,000 Pinebrook residents were evacuated from their homes as the Parley’s Canyon Fire threatened to spread over the hill.

Since then, the residents in Pinebrook have been receptive to efforts, said Brad Washa, a Pinebrook resident, retired wildland firefighter and Utah State University professor, but wildfire prevention measures began earlier than that.

In 2018, the Pinebrook Master Association was approached with concerns about beetle-killed dead and dying trees in the neighborhood, said the board’s president, Don Brown. 

“It was an aesthetic problem. They didn’t look good. There were questions as to why they were in that condition. And so we agreed as a board to investigate the dead tree issue. … We quickly came to realize that it was more about health of the forest and a fire risk, a fire safety issue, than it was about an aesthetic problem,” said Brown.

What started as the Dead Tree Task Force, soon became the Fire Safety Committee, co-chaired by Brown and David Geffen.

HOA dues were upped to create a small budget for the committee to remove some of the dangerous fire fuels. They became a Firewise community in 2020 and over time were given grants to help bolster their efforts, said Brown.

Brown said, “We hired very capable and experienced contractors. We worked with all the public, governmental entities — the Fire District, the county, the Fire Warden, Basin Recreation. And we asked them, ‘What should our priorities be?'”

They started working down the lists of suggestions with decent support from residents, said Brown. But when the Parleys Canyon Fire struck, the efforts saw even more support, said Brown.

“When people are seeing the fires in the West and around the world, and then we’re evacuated, it just drove the point home. … It’s given people something else to think about and to drive them in a positive direction,” he said.

One of the ways crews can help mitigate the risk of a wildfire is by creating a defensible space between homes and forested areas, where larger wildfires can be slowed by the removal of fuels like low, dead branches or thick and dry underbrush. This creates a shaded fuel break, said Spadafora.

In Pinebrook, there are 1,500 acres of land in need of management, with 600 acres under HOA care. Pinebrook, like many parts of the Wasatch Back, is also struggling with beetle-killed trees. Removing dead trees and managing the spread of the disease are both necessary elements of forest management, said Washa.  

In a Nov. 9 analysis of the Pinebrook area conducted by Ryan Davis, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Services Forest Health Protection Group, he collected observations regarding the concerns facing the forest. 

There were three species primarily discussed in his notes: White fir trees, Douglas fir trees and subalpine fir trees. Across the units visited, evidence of bark beetle activity was present for each species, with varying suggestions for control.

White fir trees were at risk of fir engraver beetles, his notes said, whose activity often increases after two years of successive drought. These beetles can colonize and spread even in cut trees if the wood is not burned, chipped, dried or removed from the site.

The best chance for reducing fir engraver-caused mortality, he said, was reducing white fir density.  

Subalpine fir tree species were at risk of balsam woolly adelgid, a different type of beetle first detected on the Wasatch in 2017.

“That’s kind of a scary one because that’s an exotic species. So it’s not native to here and we really don’t know what the extent of that’s going to be,” said Washa. Similar to fir engraver, there are few options for prevention other than removing subalpine fir, the host species, in favor of suitable trees like aspen, ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, limber pine and canyon maple.

Douglas fir trees are at risk of the douglas-fir beetle.

“Douglas-fir beetle prefers larger diameter, older trees, especially if they become stressed by drought/heat. Options to manage the Douglas fir in this area include using MCH repellents, or thin the larger trees to reduce overall stand density, average diameter, and stand age,” Davis said. 

In many cases, infected or at-risk trees were on private property, meaning homeowners were responsible for addressing the risks themselves. But according to Brown, Pinebrook homeowners have stepped up.

With the help of a state grant, the Fire Safety Committee launched a FLASH Program, offering reimbursement to residents who did fire safety work like tree removal or slash pile burning.

At least 50 landowners in the community participated in the FLASH Program, said Brown. One longtime resident, Mark G. Oraskovich, hired Alpine Forestry crews in early May to help thin and burn a portion of his property which was heavily forested and ran up to open space.

“It was so overgrown that it was hard to even walk through the forest,” said Oraskovich. Grant money was able to cover 46% of the total cost, he said, and crews also came to do work on the open space behind his property.

“We have a pretty nice fire break now,” he said, thanks also to efforts from his neighbors. “I think it made a big difference.”

As a physician, Oraskovich also said he’s been supportive of the pile burning efforts.

“I look at it as the lesser of two evils,” he said, explaining that a wildfire would have larger amounts of smoke as well as loss of property, livelihood and even life.

One of the main goals right now with the Fire Safety Committee is to get their forest back on a healthy track. 

“We’re going to continue the forest fire fuel work, we’re going to create more piles in the future, we’re going to have to burn those, and then once we’ve made this first pass through our open space, we’ve got to go back and maintain it. … The maintenance effort is in perpetuity. We need to be committed to this for the long run,” said Brown.

The Fire Safety Committee publishes updates to the Pinebrook Master Association website, pinebrookmasterassn.org, under the “community news” column, with details and maps regarding scheduled pile burning plans. You can also join their email list by contacting pinebrookfiresafety@gmail.com to be sent information regarding fire safety updates.