Its funny Sytes referenced that Bill Williams project, I just spent 10 or so days (last December) camped right near where the photo in the article was taken.
The one thing that everybody forgets, in particular BHR and Sytes, in their rush to point out the "great" forest practices when they reference articles like this: We $#^#ed ourselves as an opening move 100 years ago.
For 100 years, we've suppressed fire for, largely, social reasons rather than anything to do with science or proper management. That has come at a gigantic cost to the taxpayer, both in direct funding to support a massive fire suppression industry, and now to reverse the impacts of what fire suppression causes.
This area near Bill Williams mountain is a classic example...you look at historic photos of the forests in that part of the world, and they don't look a thing like they do now. In Ponderosa dominated forest types, like those found in the Flagstaff/Williams area, tree densities historically were probably less than 40 trees per acre. I bet fire frequencies were once every 8-10 years for low intensity understory burning...if not more often than that.
Now, enter fire suppression...fire frequencies are totally out of whack, and again, from actually being on the ground there, fire suppression has caused unnatural tree densities. Tree densities (exceeding 500-1000+ stems an acre) that perpetuate crown fires with intensities never seen on the land-scape in that area.
Now we defend "fixing" this by trying to replicate, at a huge cost to the taxpayers, what we could have done for nothing if we hadn't "done the right thing and suppressed fire"...
Paying, and paying big on both ends of a colossal cluster-shag via a complete and total misunderstanding of forests, forest health, and letting public opinion, rather than science, influence forest/land management.
Of course, the other thing that isn't discussed in the article, is the private property around there that IS NOT being treated. That property is mostly located in the bottoms of the watershed that feed the reservoir for the town water supply. Nobody can compel a landowner to "treat" their private land, and they largely aren't. I can totally see, even with treating the surrounding public lands, a low intensity grass/brush fire crowing when it hits the untreated surrounding private.
Could have saved a lot of money, time, and effort by just not doing anything...classic case of "having to do something", being the absolute worse thing to do.
