Heading west up Kimball Creek Road northwest of De Beque into the near-heart of where the Pine Gulch Fire burned, visitors see charred and denuded slopes that extend for miles. It’s a scene arguably starker than what is visible driving on Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon, where the Grizzly Creek Fire shut down the interstate for two weeks in August.
The nearly contained Pine Gulch Fire is far bigger — at about 139,000 acres, the biggest in Colorado history — and it appears to have burned with a vengeance, as if it would have ignited even rocks if given the chance.
As it turns out, it did. Motorists driving up a steep road leading to the Kimball Mountain ridge at one point notice an acrid smell that can immediately stir fears that their engines are on fire, but it turns out they’re passing oil shale outcrops still smoking from the blaze.
The Pine Gulch Fire was a transformative event, even when looked at through the eyes of experts trained to evaluate fire impacts, such as the Burned Area Emergency Response team that has been doing just that.
“Visually, when you come out here, you go, ‘wow, it looks terrible,’ ” said Shauna Jensen, a team member who also is a hydrologist for the San Juan National Forest.
Mapping that the team did as part of its assessment only reaffirmed that gut feeling. Using pre- and post-fire aerial imagery, it shows widespread swaths of red indicating high vegetation loss, especially on north-facing slopes that had been home to greater growth of species such as Douglas fir. Much of the remainder of the map shows moderate vegetation loss, with fairly little of it depicting minimal losses or areas that went unburned.
“That’s really alarming, that’s frightening,” Chris Holbeck, leader of the BAER team, said of the amount of red on the north-facing side of the Kimball Creek Valley part of the map.
But fortunately, vegetation loss isn’t all that matters when it comes to assessing fire damage and its implications for post-fire flooding and debris flows and revegetation of landscapes.
Like good gardeners, BAER team members know to think about not just what’s going on above-ground, with vegetation, but below-ground, with soil.
THE SOIL’S STORY
In the case of the Pine Gulch Fire, said Anna Lincoln, an ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management’s Grand Junction Field Office working with the BAER team, “we have a lot going on under the soil surface that’s really encouraging.”
The fire “was high-intensity,” Jensen said. “But there’s a different story to be told when you look at soils.”
That story is told by a second map that the team, with the help of partners with the local BLM office, produced after field visits to test soil damage in 86 site areas within the fire perimeter.
Teams looked at what percentage of duff and other fine vegetative material still covered the soil; the color of ash, which indicates how hot the fire burned; ash depth; whether roots remain and were damaged; whether the soil continues to have clumps and structure as opposed to being reduced to fine grains that are easily erodible; and how fast or slow water soaks into it.
The resulting soil burn severity map the group produced shows low to moderate impacts as depicted in blues and yellows, and a noticeable absence of red when compared to the vegetation map.
Jensen said the discrepancy between vegetation damage and soil damage levels may reflect in part how quickly the fire moved through some areas, not burning that long in them, particularly in south-facing slopes where there are fewer needles and other ground-level duff to sustain burning for longer.
One reflection of the healthier soil and roots is that green grasses already are growing on the burned terrain. Scrub oak and other mountain shrubs also are beginning to resprout, promising new and nourishing browsing for animals such as deer and elk.
It’s a reminder of the beneficial effects fire can have, something Erin Kowalski, a BLM rangeland management specialist in Grand Junction, compares to the results of local farmers burning their fields.
Kowalski works with local ranchers with grazing permits, and thinks the long-term impacts on their allotments could be good, such as through more forbs growing in areas that had been dominated by piñon and juniper trees.
Still, the shorter term may continue to be difficult for ranchers, as it has been since the fire first forced them to evacuate their cattle. Some areas may need to be given a rest from grazing, perhaps for a couple of years, especially if reseeding is done to help boost regrowth.
“Permittees, those folks are going to be affected by the fire,” she said.
Some federal aid programs may be available for permit-holders affected by temporary access to their allotments.
AVOIDING A TRAGEDY
The fire’s impacts, both short- and long-term, are the new focus for public-lands officials now that the fire itself is mostly contained. As the Burned Area Emergency Response team’s name suggests, its focus is on immediate threats.
The seven team members came from outside the area — Holbeck is a biologist working for the National Park Service out of its Midwest regional office in Omaha, Nebraska — and they are assisted by about the same number of local field office staffers who specialize in various resource areas.
Jensen said BAER teams “are primarily concerned with emergency stabilization, and we consider risk to life, property, critical cultural and natural resources.”
She said more people die from post-fire deaths related to fires than from the fires themselves.
Said Holbeck, “We want to avoid a tragedy, knowing that post-fire conditions can be fatal.”
Fires create immediate dangers involving flooding, debris flows and other hazards such as falling trees and, as a result, BAER teams work quickly to assess the dangers and make recommendations.
“They come in quick, get the job done fast because they’re worried about that first event” that can threaten things such as life and homes, said Kevin Hyatt, a BLM hydrologist in Grand Junction who is working with the BAER team.
Holbeck said the team will be issuing a report on the Pine Gulch Fire in a few more days.
Even before its issuance, crews have seen minor debris flows as a result of the fire in the Kimball Creek drainage because of some brief but hard rain.
Based on the vegetation and soil assessments the team has done, it has prepared maps that indicate where potential for debris flows exist in the fire area, and what level of increase in peak streamflows might be expected from a storm of a given size, post-fire compared to pre-fire.
Such modeling can help in identifying threats to homes and infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and result in measures such as working with the National Weather Service on alerts being issued when storms threaten that could impact the fire area.
“It’s arming the public with some knowledge and arming our cooperators with that knowledge, too,” Jensen said.
Some measures such as deploying mulch can help protect resources in localized areas, but for such a large fire, she said the best thing that can be done is warning people when a danger arises.
LOOKING LONG-TERM
While short-term threats are the BAER team’s focus, its work also will help local officials with long-term restoration efforts. Flooding and debris-flow maps might help point to the need to do culvert or related work to protect county roads.
Maps the team already has created indicate how the fire overlaps with deer and elk habitat.
Weed threats, range management and recreation impacts will be some of the other longer-term impacts officials will be dealing with for years to come, particularly when it comes to the BLM’s Grand Junction Field Office.
About 80% of the fire burned on BLM land. Wayne Werkmeister, the office’s associate manager, said it affected about a tenth of the acreage in the office’s jurisdiction, and he expects the office could be kept busy for the next decade dealing with the fire’s impacts.
Among his concerns are what impact there may be to mule deer from the loss of sagebrush that serves as a critical food source for them on winter range, and the need to let the landscape rest before grazing resumes so plants can regenerate.
“If we turn (livestock) out too soon, we’re going to set it back for a long period of time,” he said.
Speaking from a viewpoint some 8,000 feet in elevation on Kimball Mountain, Werkmeister said the fire burned through some beautiful higher-elevation country within the local field office’s jurisdiction. What has burned is “not going to be the same in our lifetime,” he said.
Still, Lincoln, the local BLM ecologist, has been happy to see the regrowth that’s starting and the promising soil conditions, and learning that the fire’s impacts aren’t as bad as she first feared.
“Practically 140,000 acres (burning) is a lot to wrap your mind around,” she said.
For Kowalski, who is early in her career with the BLM, the Pine Gulch Fire already is becoming a significant part of her career and it could continue to be so for years to come.
She’s 32, grew up in the Grand Valley, went to Fruita Monument High School, got her undergraduate degree at Colorado Mesa University and went on to Colorado State University.
She was on the scene shortly after the fire’s start, having been looking to get some more firefighting experience and ending up on an initial attack crew for the fire.
“By the time we got up here, it was already up on the first ridge, unsafe at that point” to fight, she said.
She said pretty quickly a crew supervisor decided more firefighting resources were needed.
Now she’s helping the BAER team with its work, and soon she plans to be meeting with ranchers about the status of their grazing allotments.
Kowalski describes the fire as an “eye-opener” given its size, and is thinking about the role the local BLM will be playing over the long term in dealing with the rangeland, recreation, vegetation and other issues associated with it.
“I’m a local, too. We care about this land because we grew up with it, and we want to see it function well. We know that fire is a part of the ecosystem, but we want to do what we can to help with that,” she said.
