Eric Roussel and colleagues were working down in the Sweetwater Range a few months back when they noticed something unusual. The Nevada Division of Forestry crew, conducting a fuels reduction project in a thick stand of pinyon-juniper, felled trees that normally discharge a thick soup of sticky sap.
“Typically when you cut them down they’re a pretty sappy mess,” Roussel said. “We noticed that consistently, there just wasn’t any sap.” These pinyon and juniper trees were remarkably dry, showing the compounding impacts of three dry winters that have left them stressed and sickly, prone to insect attack. And ready to burn.
It’s one of the more worrying consequences of the Western drought now withering western Nevada and the Sierra. From the pinyon-juniper stands in the Sweetwaters and Pine Nut Mountains south of Reno to the pine forests higher in the Sierra to the west, drought-stressed forests are in particular danger from wildfire during the summer of 2014. The danger is said to be notably severe in the timbered high country.
“The conditions are right. We could have a rough go of it this summer,” said Russell Bird, fire management officer for Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
It was in the Humboldt-Toiyabe, in steep and rugged mountain terrain west of Reno on the border of the Mount Rose Wilderness, where the danger was made plainly clear early on. On the night of May 7 in an event connected to human activity, a wildfire erupted and quickly chewed through more than one square mile of kiln-dry wooded terrain.
From the Reno Gazette-Journal: https://www.rgj.com/story/tech/environment/2014/06/23/drought-forests-ready-burn/11181721/