Parched Rivers Smoking SkiesSalmon River Restoration Council a year of Drought & Fire on the Salmon RiverFall/Winter 2014July’s river temperatures peaked above 80°F, over the threshold for healthy fish survival. 8075706560Water temperature in Fahrenheit in the Main Stem above Nordheimer Creek from 5/31/14 through 9/23/14 We began the year on the Salmon with below average precipitation and a record low snow pack. The April snow report showed 12% of normal snow pack on Etna Summit, and by May it was gone. Through the late spring and early summer the river flows plummeted, never seeing a spring run-off and staying far below the 100 year average. As flows dropped and as the hottest July on record for our area progressed, conditions became critical for Salmon River fish. With our imperiled run of wild spring Chinook salmon hanging on for dear life in isolated pockets of slightly cooler water at the mouths of creeks, it became apparent how important water conservation (and particularly conservation of cold creek water) can be, even in relatively water rich watersheds like ours. Crews of SRRC fisheries techs worked hard through July to keep fish passage into creeks open wherever possible, but nonetheless more and more reports of fish mortality came in. During the annual spring Chinook count in late July, an unprecedented 55 dead adults and hundreds of dead juvenile fish were counted. Etna Summit 2003 by Nancy Thatcherafter the Last Fire &before the Next One 1 As fall comes to an end here on the Salmon River, we have many reasons to look back at the past year, and use its lessons to consider the future. We have been in the midst of the worst drought on record in California. During the past 3 years, California has had less accumulated precipitation than any period since record keeping began in the 1840’s. A combination of high temperatures and lack of precipitation has left the entire State reeling. Although the severity of the drought has varied in different regions, it has been a cause for concern everywhere, and our watershed is no exception.6/1/147/1/148/1/149/1/14Lessons from a year of Drought2Tanner Peak burning up in a pyrocumulus cloud behind SRRC’s Office. Just when it seemed possible that we’d lose an entire season’s run of salmon, a series of lightning storms began igniting wildfires throughout the region. On July 29th several fires started in the Salmon River watershed, including the Whites Fire, which grew to over 32,000 acres before it was contained. One of the things we’ve learned over the past few years of hot summers and frequent fires, is that the smoke caused by summer fires can be a blessing in disguise. When a smoke inversion sets in, temperatures drop rapidly. During the 2013 wildfires, water temperatures dropped 9° during the first 10 days of the fire. Although there wasn’t as strong an inversion layer during the 2014 fires, water temperatures still went down enough to help. On the other hand, with the on-going drought and 100 years of ac-cumulated fuel loading, large wild-fires are occurring with somewhat alarming frequency on the Salmon. Since 2006, 40% of the watershed has burned during the course of 5 major fire events. While we need fire to reestablish a more natural re-gime, the large sizes and increasing frequency of fires have huge impacts on all aspects of our ecosystems. Everyone from the rare endemic co-nifers surrounding our high moun-tain lakes, to the spotted owls and pacific fishers trying to survive in our diminishing old growth forest, to the Salmon River community, are feeling the weight of our second year running with major wildfire. Knowing that climate change forecasts predict a future with longer, dryer summers and less precipitation accumulating as snowpack in our region, makes me think that this year may have offered us a preview of what’s to come. We need to take the lessons learned to heart and use them to begin adapting to a changing world. Learning to live with fire, conserve every drop of cold water that we can, create more resilient habitats for fish, and continue educating ourselves, our children and our community, will be critical in the upcoming years. In the Salmon River, we will make this journey together, and hope that we make it successfully. -Lyra Cressey3Living With Fire on the Salmon RiverThe Community Liaison Program was born out of the ashes of the 2008 fires. The community, via the Salmon River Fire Safe Council (FSC), requested an After Action Review (AAR) of the fires. One of the main issues brought up in the AAR was the inadequate and inconsistent communication and information exchanged during the fires. Community members wanted accurate and current information, at a depth and breadth that teams weren’t used to providing. There was also a need for essential, local, place-based knowledge to be conveyed to IMT’s in a form that they could trust and use. Klamath National Forest supervisor Patty Grantham really heard to the community’s concerns and she and her staff worked with the FSC on ways to remedy these issues for future incidents. From these interactions and a lot of hard work and leadership by the FSC, the Salmon River Community Liaison Program, the first of its kind, was born.The purpose of the Community Liaison Program is to facilitate communication between the IMT’s, local Forest Service Districts and Forests, the Salmon River FSC, and local community members during wildfire events. The FSC has established a team of Community Liaisons who are prepared with accurate information that increases efficiency, and promote safety for everyone. The Liaison Program has a tiered structure, consisting of a core team (Tier I), made up of a lead liaison and a support team with diverse skills, who oversee the program and are the main contacts throughout a fire incident. Additionally there are designated liaisons for each town on the Salmon River (Tier II), and neighborhood (Tier III), who are brought in when their area is directly affected by the fires. Liaisons help coordinate meetings, build cooperation and information exchange, mediate tense interactions, and provide pertinent local knowledge.The 2008 Ukonom Fire, photo by Karuna Greenberg If you’ve lived on the Salmon River for very long, chances are you’ve lived through several large wildfires. The Klamath region and the Salmon River specifically, are particularly fire prone. There are many reasons for this: over 100 years of fire suppression in a century that started out wet and ended dry; the remote loca-tion and rugged terrain which make firefighting here very difficult; mid-summer dry lightning storms; and our climate, wet enough to produce lots of vegetation, but dry and hot enough to burn every summer, are just a few. Add drought and climate change to the mix and you have this summer’s fire season. The extreme fire behavior seen this year across the west has even the larg-est firefighting force in history scared. Here on the Salmon River we’ve been re-learning to live with large wildfires for decades, and likely we’ve only just begun. The 2008 fire season was a particularly hard one for the Salmon River and its residents. Wild -fires burned from summer solstice until October rains. Over 80,000 acres burned, neighborhoods were threat-ened, and the smoke was thick for months. Through this long campaign we endured a record number of changes in the leadership of the sup-pression effort. The Incident Management Team (IMT) transitioned six times in total before the fires were turned back over to the District. Every-one involved was tested by these fires – the agen-cies, the teams, and the community. During one tense community meeting, a well-intentioned Public Information Officer was trying to abate community concerns that the team was planning on backfiring the mountain from behind town. As this young woman, working on information she had been given, assured the crowd that no backfire was planned, several of us looked out the small windows at the back of the Community Club and noticed firefighters with drip torches lighting off the base of the mountain. The meeting quickly dissolved into mayhem, name calling, and frustration on all sides. I’ve always felt bad for this woman, caught between distrust on both sides. 4In the last two years, we’ve experienced more than our fair share of fire on the Salmon River; with over 80,000 acres burning, two towns, outlying neighborhoods, and numerous private parcels threatened, everyone on the river was affected. This year, under record drought, we experienced ex-treme fire behavior that even some of the most seasoned fire professionals haven’t seen. On August 11th, a huge pyrocumulus cloud from the fire’s run up Tanner’s Peak spawned a lightning storm that started fires from here to the Oregon border, and resulted in the devastating Happy Camp Complex!These two intense fire seasons gave the Liaison Program its trial-by-fire, and it has been hugely successful. Local Forest Service leaders set the stage for open, honest communication and mutual respect. Community liaisons worked with the various IMT’s to share current information, maps, and strategy as needed - acting as intermediaries between crews and local residents. For the most part IMT’s used more restraint than we’ve seen in the past with their firefighting techniques. There were glitches, of course, and there are many areas where improvement is needed, but this was a huge step in the right direction. We are encouraged by the Klamath National Forest requesting other Fire Safe Council’s within the forest to set up similar programs using our model. One lesson learned from these fires was the value of preventative fuels reduction and fire-safing around communities and residences before fires occur. The vast majority of the properties threat-ened by wildfire in the past two years had considerable fuels reduction work completed on them by SRRC and FSC crews within the five years prior to the fires. This work not only helped to protect the properties during these wildfire events, but also made the residences more defendable, allowing fire fighters and/or residents to remain on site safely during the fires to further protect the property. Much of this year’s fires burned in forests that hadn’t seen fire in over 100 years. When we suppress all the fires that we can, the only ones that do burn are those that we can’t control, thus maximizing the negative effects of fire on the landscape. It’s a vicious cycle that we desperately need to break. With further drought and climate change knocking on the door, the importance of landscape level fire planning, strategic fuel breaks, and extensive prescribed fire cannot be overstated. If we can get ahead of the next fires by creating and/or maintaining strategic fuels breaks along ridge tops and road systems, initially focusing around our communities, we can choose to bring fire back into these areas before they burn on a windy day in the middle of August. -Karuna GreenbergWe’d like to give a big thanks to the folks who served as Community Liaisons during this year’s fire season - Karuna Greenberg, Will Harling, and Brett Denight (above). The Salmon River Community Liaison team provides local intel-ligence and on-the-ground support to Incident Management Team’s. Each Salmon River community has designated Liaisons who step up to help make sure things run smoothly when a wildfire event happens. They take time out of their own lives and work to provide this service, and we really appreciate it. Photo of Sawyers Bar town liaison Brett Denight, by Michael O’Hare Much of our traditional cultural knowledge has been passed down through families by spoken word, stories, and place-based rituals. The accumulation of thousands of years of observation, practice, trial and error, ceremony and intergenerational exchange has resulted in an adaptive management model that up until just a few hundred years ago was perhaps one of the most sophisticated on the planet. The influx of western ideas of resource extraction had huge ramifications for land management. Our homeland was transformed from a place of abundant resources capable of providing for a people whose culture believed in active participation with our natural environment, to a place where the people have a lasting disconnect from our natural environment’s capacity to provide sustenance, and have lost much of the health and productivity that comes from active interactions with that environment.Historically, actively engaging in management practices such as selective fish harvest or cultural burning, gave our resources the resilience they needed in the face of changing conditions. In the case of land based food and fiber resources such as acorns, hazel, and medicinal plants, the prac-tice of regular burning, both cultural and natu-ral, encouraged these resources to be plentiful for both human sustenance as well as for animal populations that we depended upon for food, such as elk and deer. Other more indirect ben-efits resulted from the varied timing and location of cultural burning. As was demonstrated on the Salmon River this year when the spring Chinook population was on the brink ofCultural Insight on DroughtBurn at Ta-shun-ik cultural area in Orleans during Klamath TREX 2014, by Stormy Staats, Klamath-Salmon Media Collaborative5catastrophe due to elevated river temperatures, a summer fire and its accompanying smoke can lower river temperatures dramatically. While the Whites fire was naturally caused by lightning, if our cultural burning practices were followed, the cooling effect of a smoke caused inversion layer would provide a more consistent cooling period for river species in need. In the face of changing climate conditions, in-cluding the current severe drought, it is more important than ever that we reengage in cultural management activities that increase the environ-ment’s ability to adapt. While the majority of the restoration work in our watershed has so far fo-cused on anadromous fish, the main food source and backbone of our winter survival in lean years has always been the acorn. The effects of long term drought and lack of fire on tan oak, black oak, and white oak acorn production could be devastating to this vital resource through lack of water, increases in pests, and disease infection. This year, locals are having an extremely difficult time locating decent tan oak acorns in a forest reeling from lack of precipitation and high temp-eratures. Our predominantly Mediterranean climate is shifting and if we continue to ignore the signs our most basic food staples are show-ing us, we may be too late to build resilience into the resources that are so dependent upon human interactions like cultural burning and thinning. -Josh Saxon* This article is meant to inform the reader about general themes and historical observation patterns of local tribal people in the area of drought, it is not meant to be a scientific review or research of these occurrences on our landscape.6Ready for Fire?years of fuels reduction completed by the SRRC’s fuels reduction crews.In ten days this fall the TREX program burned 240 acres on 23 private properties, including the Karuk Tribe’s ceremonial area at Tishánik. That was the point of origin for the arson fire that strong winds swept through Orleans last year. The TREX burns protected an estimated 150 homes. In the past, agencies have been hesitant to issue permits for such burns but two inches of rain fell a few days beforehand and all the other resources including experienced trainers, crews, fire engines, mountains of supporting paperwork and other tools were all in place. More TREX campaigns are planned for the next several years. Will Harling said: “We need to come up with a plan that invests in defensible space around communities. Only then will the public feel safe enough to let fires burn on the edges of fire season and do some good work out there. Even though the science is clear that we need to let some fires burn for ecological benefit, there are no incentives, and many dis-incentives for land managers to allow wildfires to burn for resource benefits. Firefighters definitely pulled some heroics to stop all the lightning starts in 2013, but the level of heroic action needed to suppress all fires is getting greater, and something must give.” - Malcolm TerenceHomeowner involved in the prescribed fire on her Salmon River property, photo by Scott Harding Recent river history is answering the question of when is the best time to pre-pare for the possibility of wildfire. The best time is today, tomorrow at the latest. The 2013 and 2014 Salmon River fires were good illustrations. Places that had adequate defensible space in advance, achieved through a combination of me-chanical fuels reduction and prescribed burning, were more easily protected. The shaded fuel breaks, fire line and oth-er preparation that protected Butler Flat during the 2013 Butler Fire were accom-plished by years of projects completed by SRRC, and Fire Safe Councils from Salm-on River and Orleans/Somes Bar. The fire line was the re-purposing of a side-hill miner’s ditch from the 19th Century. It was six feet deep and eight feet wide in many places and it wrapped around the developed part of the flat. Crews had done most of the work, brushing and burning, in the previous two years so it was possible for agency hand crews and community volunteers to put in the fin-ishing touches and lay out fire hose when the Butler Fire actually approached. The homeowners and the crews were con-fident and evacuation advisories never needed to be issued. Not long after fire swept through Rain-bow Mine during the 2014 Whites Fire and burnt two of the 11 structures, the property owners invited a crew from the Fall 2014 Klamath River Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) to intention-ally burn off a 24-acre plot just below where fire had been excluded during the wildfire. The TREX was sponsored by tribes, agencies, and non-profits and over 50 people participated, 20 of them local. They also burned Salmon River private property at Horn Field and Bull Barn, both spaces that had been scorched by the 2013 Butler Fire. Both the protec-tion of most of the properties during the wildfire, and the subsequent prescribed burns, were made possible by numerous Malcolm is a writer for Two Rivers Tribune, a weekly published in Hoopa. See his articles about fire and other topics at: http://www.tworiverstribune.com/?s=malcolm+terence7Prescribed burn on private land in Forks of Salmon in October, photo by Scott Harding The Western Klamath Restoration Partnership (WKRP) is creating a path toward collaborative fire management in the Klamath Basin. It arose from a desire by the Karuk Tribe, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, the US Forest Service, area Fire Safe Councils, environmental groups and other community-based stakeholders to explore what collaborative fire management would look like.A hallmark of this effort was the intensive participation by individuals and organizations with diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives about how to shape fire management. Many feel the pain of a long history of devastating wildfire events, mistrust and failed attempts at working together. We used GIS-based fire modeling, an open and interactive planning process, and facilitation to get past some of these challenges. After multiple stakeholders and numerous ecological and social values were considered, projects were planned to create a model for how fire can be brought back in a good way to areas where it has long been excluded, instead of through a wildfire at the hottest, driest times. The primary outcome of the WKRP to date is a decision to pursue collaborative management on three project areas within the larger planning area. These projects include not only locations for prescribed fire and fuel treatments, but also a new way of designing, implementing and learning from them.2014 saw some of the largest and most intense fires ever experienced in the Happy Camp, Seiad, and Sawyers Bar communities. The WKRP process provided useful tools during these fires for organizing structure protection, sharing information developed in the WKRP planning effort (including the Fireline Mapping geodatabase and fuels treatment prioritization and risk maps), as well as strengthened relationships between local, tribal, and agency partners that had been established through the WKRP. The 2013 and 2014 fire seasons increased our commitment to creating more Fire Adapted Communities by pursuing the landscape level planning and treatment needed to begin to shift this paradigm.Collaborative Fire Management in the Klamath Basin8Sam Berry engaged in prescribed burning on his family’s property at Godfrey Ranch, photo by Will HarlingThere have been an incredible number of actions over the past year, both large and small, that have advanced fire preparedness in our area including community fire education, increased coordination between local, state, federal and tribal entities, and actual acres treated on the ground. •360 acres of prescribed burn on private land in the Orleans/Somes Bar/Salmon River areas- 240 of these acres were burned through the Klamath River TREX program this fall.•About 300 acres of manual fuels reduction on private lands in the WKRP planning area•Active Salmon River Community Liaison Program during 2013/2014 fires (article on page 3)•Community Sponsored After Action Reviews for 2013 and 2014 wildfires on Salmon River and Mid Klamath•2014 Klamath Fire Ecology Symposium in Orleans, CA•Salmon River Community Fire Awareness Week and Volunteer Fuels Reduction Workdays•The development of a Fireline Mapping geodatabase for the entire 1.2 million acre planning are using Fire Incident Mapping Tool symbology for inclusion into the Wildfire Decision Support System (WFDSS) and fire suppression operations. As an indication of the success and goodwill created by the WKRP planning effort, significant fund-ing has been made available through the Forest Service and Natural Resource Conservation Service. In total, approximately $2.7 million has been secured for projects around Happy Camp, Orleans, and Somes Bar, as well as for initiating project level planning on the Salmon River. These funds will be used to design fuels reduction projects around private properties and emergency access routes, and to allow for expanded use of prescribed fire in the Wildland Urban Interface. These funds will also pave the way for a new kind of project development, where a collaborative team uses zones of agreement in project identification, planning, implementation and monitoring.2015 will be spent assembling an interdisciplinary team and beginning pre-scoping planning for these projects. The focus will be on bringing our agreement in principle (the areas where we agree work needs to be done), to agreement in practice (the site specific prescriptions for these treatments that incorporate the shared values of all participants). This is an inclusive process and we encourage every-one who has an interest to get involved in the WKRP meetings that will be happening quarterly over the coming year. Watch for meeting dates on the Klamath Basin related Events Calendar: http://srrc.org/news-info/calendar/index.php - Will HarlingNext >