The smell of wood-burning stoves seems to permeate this gateway to the Grand Canyon and pit stop on the legendary Route 66. In this corner of the state, trees, wood and fire have an ever-evolving relationship. Surrounded by the Coconino National Forest, this northern Arizona town sat at the edge of the 2010 Schultz fire, which burned 15,000 acres.
While the Schultz fire visibly marked the landscape, the damage was relatively benign compared with the floods that came a month later. The fire had stripped the hills of trees and vegetation, and soil erosion left a smooth slope allowing the summer rains to push an avalanche of mud, rocks and other debris down into the community. A 12-year-old girl was killed. Millions of dollars in damage ensued. The vulnerability left by the fire was unearthed — literally.
The fire, plus the floods that followed, had a net economic impact between $133 million and $147 million, according to a recent report. It was one in a series of megafires that have ignited Arizona over the past 25 years, including the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire and the 2011 Wallow fire, each around half a million acres. Since 1990, nearly 1.2 million acres of Arizona’s timber has burned.
“A big fire used to be 1,000 acres,” Dick Fleishman said as he walked alongside the fire-scarred boundaries of the Schultz fire on a snow-covered mountain range. “Now, it’s in the tens of thousands.”
Fleishman is the assistant team leader of the Four Forests Restoration Initiative, called 4FRI, a program developed by the U.S. Forest Service. It is the largest forest stewardship project in the country. The plan is to restore 1 million acres over 20 years, from the Grand Canyon to the New Mexico border, by thinning small ponderosa pines — the dominant species in the region — and making the forest less dense. 4FRI covers the Kaibab, Coconino, Apache, Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests.
From Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-starts-massive-forest-thinning-project