We’ve created much of the mischief ourselves. Ne Oregon, the Blue Mountains has been logged since the first pioneers built corduroy roads. More modern efforts targeted the best timber and we replanted to monoculture. Then there was fire fighting. Quite a bit of the Northern Blue Mountains was on a 25 year fire rotation naturally and with a little help from the Native Americans I imagine. Kept things thinned out, fires stayed on the ground kind of thing. Obviously now fires can get out of hand pretty quickly. A theory I like is sparse replanting after the fire instead of high density planting and then, say 25 years from now, let it burn or prescribe burn it.
We have quite a group of 90 year old cowboys in our town. Love to sit down and have coffee with them. They all pushed live stock through the blue mountains as summer jobs when they were kids. Routinely things would burn but wouldn’t typically get out of hand. They all agree much of the area they worked as kids is too thick to be good ground for livestock.
I’m not a fan of Oregons Govenor and following the massive fires we had in Oregon in 24 she was under a lot of pressure to get on fires aggressively. 25 was a remarkably light year for fire, in part because the state really got after them.
That is how this years fire season started out. Prior to mid July there were a few fires, Anthony, Olive Lake, Salmon a couple more that would have been mega fires had they not been hammered from the begging. Then about the 12 or 14th we had a lightning storm that ignited something like 70 or 80 fires that took off. We’ve had a few more start since then. Resources are spread pretty thin right now. There are two separate fires in Britany Chukermans back yard that burned 30,000 acres over night. They are not contained yet.
The current situation in central Oregon could see another fire start down there on a windy day and it could literaly burn clear through the northeast corner of the state. Pretty spooky.
