As snow begins to accumulate along our mountains, pile burning is ramping up before winter fully arrives. The task, while perhaps a not-so-glamorous part of a wildland firefighter’s job, could make all the difference for a town in the wake of a wildfire. 

Slashing, stacking and burning forest waste is essential to wildfire mitigation and forest health, and these piles burned manually now will lessen fuels to unexpected fires brought on by a fickle Mother Nature.

Homes, businesses and ski resorts nestled among these forests make the task all the more essential, but also more challenging. The role of wildland firefighters has grown increasingly complex as communities began urban development in forested areas, said Alan Spadafora, an Alpine Forestry employee who has worked on pile burning projects in Summit County. 

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In 1987, the Forest Service coined the term “Wildland-Urban Interface,” areas where “‘large urban areas are adjacent to state, federal, and private forest lands, the intermixing of city and wildland has … brought about major problems in fire protection, land use planning, and recreation impacts,'” William T. Sommers, a wildland fire researcher who served as director of the EastFIRE Laboratory at George Mason University, wrote in an article for Forest History Today in 2008.

As more people settled in forested areas, increased fire suppression efforts were made in areas that would originally see wildfires as part of the natural health of the land, said Sommers. With homes now built in the way, fires were stopped, and the wildland-urban interface only grew.

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One “problem” stopped, five more created.  

“Decades of aggressive fire suppression had resulted in vegetation changes that put many fire dependent western wildland ecosystems at increased risk from catastrophic fire,” said Sommers. The land that relied on seasonal cleansing — fires to burn away dead and dying vegetation, bring nutrients back to soils and, in some cases, promote seeding — now had excess biomass, therefore excess fire fuels.

This distortion of this natural order was especially prominent in California and remains true in any wildland-urban interface — the Wasatch Back of Northern Utah, for example. 

So, what to do now?

Brad Washa, a wildland firefighter of 35 years and now Utah State University professor of wildland fire science, said the inherited issues of the wildland-urban interface are without a doubt big concerns for residents of the Wasatch Back.

“Whether you hike, ski or view from afar, one can see the serious forest health issues being experienced in the mountains and forest around Park City,” wrote Washa in a June article published in The Park Record. “With the removal of fire, our forests have become overstocked with trees competing for finite resources complicated with a 20-year drought and enhanced by climate change.”

In some ways, wildland firefighters are now required to do the work that natural wildfires would have done — clearing out the build up of biomass which can serve as wildfire fuel.

One way to remove the fuels is through prescribed burns, where crews intentionally light fires and monitor its path and intensity. But when this method is too risky, pile burning is the primary method of enabling a healthy forest ecosystem and removing fuels for high-intensity fires. 

Understanding the fire regime of a particular area is crucial to plan and understand the need for dedicated management, said Spadafora.

“Our fire regime here in this part of the state is a roughly 80- to 100-year event, a wildfire, for this forest time. And it’s generally a stand-replacing event. Which means that all the trees go, which is indicative of a high-intensity wildfire,” he said.

“In the last 80-100 years, we haven’t seen a wildfire in this area, and we’ve also built a ton of homes in the wildland-urban interface. So that creates a very bad problem,” said Spadafora. 

The nuances of forest ecology have led to misinformation, said Spandafora, where research regarding other forest types is incorrectly applied to the Wasatch, or forest ecology in wildland areas don’t account for the intersection of urban areas. 

“I’ve talked to people who’ve said, ‘The forest should manage itself.’ And that’s a fine stance, but you also live in the wildland-urban interface, so you have to be OK with your house burning, too,” said Spadafora.

The increase of non-native beetle species, which have killed large swaths of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, is also a concern for forest managers as the threat of a stand-replacing fire looms. 

“While holes are poked at attempts to mitigate the wildfire risk along the Wasatch Back, little is provided for alternatives to prevent the next Parleys Canyon Fire,” said Washa.

For now, wildland firefighter teams in the wildland-urban interface are focused on protecting homes through clearing and pile burning efforts.  

“What we’re doing here is not preventing a wildfire. What it’s doing is mitigating the effects of wildfire. We’re not going to stop a high-intensity fire. What we’re going to do is lower its intensity as it gets close to homes, and give first responders a chance to defend these homes,” said Spadafora.

Prescribed pile burning will continue in the area until there is too much snow for efficient burn efforts, said Spadafora, and then will continue in the spring. 

Visit Alpine Forestry’s website at https://www.alpineforestryutah.com/ for updates on burn plans and other resources. They also post updates and videos of crews at work on their Facebook and Instagram @alpine.forestry.