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First cut: Fire danger in his Grant Creek neighborhood prompts longtime environmental activist to log for safety
By PERRY BACKUS of the Missoulian
A decade ago, Jake Kreilick was willing to go to jail to save a forest.
Back then, Kreilick was a field leader of the environmental group Earth First!. The group was well known for its sensational tactics, which included chaining members to bulldozers and inhabiting trees in the middle of proposed timber sales.
Kreilick's own passionate nonviolent efforts to protect old-growth forests put him behind bars in Idaho and in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak.
To this day, he remains proud of the role he played in bringing attention to the loss of old-growth timber.
Then, two winters ago, Kreilick found himself on the other end of a chainsaw.
After a small outbreak of mountain pine beetles killed a patch of lodgepole pine on his 25-plus acres in Missoula's Grant Creek drainage, Kreilick helped remove close to 40 trees.
“I did my first logging job when I took out those lodgepole,” Kreilick said.
Last winter, loggers cut another 50 green trees around his home in an effort to open up the canopy a bit to both enhance fire protection and let some sunshine in. Trucks filled with logs from his land went to a small local mill.
Living in a home surrounded by trees has changed the way Kreilick looks at the woods.
Wildfire is now a very real part of his world.
With only one road up the relatively narrow valley, he knows that his escape route could end up blocked by a wall of flame on any hot summer day. The threat is real enough that Kreilick developed a contingency plan with his family.
“We'll go to the creek,” he said. “There's a vapor barrier there. As a family, we talked with the kids about that possibility.”
Kreilick has become a vocal advocate of fuel-reduction work along the wildland-urban interface. He serves on the steering committee of the newly created FireSafe Montana Council, which advocates a variety of methods to create defensible space around homes.
He's also the restoration coordinator for WildWest Institute - an offshoot of the Native Forest Network, which Kreilick founded.
In 2000 - the year wildfires swept across the Bitterroot National Forest and made national news - Kreilick moved his family from town up into the trees in Grant Creek.
The drive through the heavily wooded valley was beautiful and serene, but even then firefighters saw the threat in amongst homes tucked neatly here and there.
A Forest Service national firefighting class used the Grant Creek area as an example of the dangers facing firefighters in the wildland-urban interface. Its single access, heavy timber and smattering of homes could be a trap just waiting to be sprung.
When Kreilick moved into his new home, he noted the previous owners hadn't done much to reduce the thick underbrush, saplings and larger trees scattered across his acreage.
“It was a powder keg waiting to be lit,” he remembered.
That first summer - while the Bitterroot burned - Kreilick's neighbors set up roadblocks at the base of the mountain to keep an eye on strangers. Long-timers to the canyon said they'd never seen the area so dry.
With the smell of smoke in the air, the neighborhood was nervous.
Soon after that long, hot season ended, Kreilick and his neighbors began working with the local fire district and Forest Service to start thinning some of the thick forest near their homes and along the roadside.
Over the next two years, crews helped homeowners remove 17 semi-loads of fuel from Grant Creek. Even reluctant landowners eventually signed up for fuel-reduction work on their property after seeing the finished product on their neighbors' lands.
“Once people saw the benefits on other people's properties, they decided it looked OK,” said John Waverek, the Lolo National Forest's fire management officer. “We were able to at least get started in an attempt to make the area safer.”
Upward of 80 percent of the neighbors have now done some thinning and other fire prevention work on their properties, Kreilick said.
“Some have done more than others,” he said. “We, as neighbors, still probably haven't done enough to protect our own little places, but it's certainly a lot more firesafe now than it was in 2000.”
Awareness can be a fleeting thing.
“Every year that we don't have a fire builds complacency,” Kreilick said.
People need to understand that national wildfire policies are changing, he said. “There are a lot of places were fire departments aren't going to go. They're not going to put themselves in the same position as they have in the past. The onus of creating defensible space around homes is very much back on homeowners.”
Reducing forest fuels isn't a one-shot deal.
“All fuel reduction happens in stages,” Kreilick said. “You can't just go in and take everything out at one time. It takes time and lots of hard work to make it happen.”
On his property, Kreilick started by reducing fuels around his home to create a buffer. Since those initial efforts, he's moved deeper into the woods to cut down brush and remove some smaller saplings. He's also removed some of the larger trees to open up the canopy to reduce the potential for a crown fire.
“We've left some denser areas here and there for hiding cover for wildlife,” Kreilick said. “We're essentially trying to create a mosaic similar to what fire would naturally do.”
His efforts didn't stop at his property line.
Kreilick and other members of the Grant Creek Homeowners Association worked with the Forest Service to come up with a plan to reduce fuels on federal lands surrounding the valley.
The result is the Lolo National Forest's Grant Creek Fuel Reduction Project, which proposes to thin fuels using both commercial logging and a variety of non-commercial techniques.
After years of fighting over appropriate timber management, Kreilick hopes that collaborative efforts like the ones occurring in Grant Creek may lead to a new era of cooperation between environmentalists and the Forest Service.
With the agency's timber management turning away from the remaining stands of old growth, Kreilick said there's an opportunity to find common ground for projects both in the wildland-urban interface and in the “working landscape” where logging has already occurred.
The debate over forest management is turning a corner that couldn't have happened a decade ago, he said.
“I really can see the end of an era where everything has to be settled in a court of law,” Kreilick said. “Everyone is tired of the conflict. Everyone is sick and tired of the polarity.”
“It's all part of recognizing you can manage the forest without harming it, particularly in areas with second growth,” he said. “You have more flexibility in second growth as compared to old growth. We need to focus our efforts more on that stuff in the middle.”
Environmental groups like WildWest will certainly continue their forest guardian work, but Kreilick predicts the larger focus will shift toward collaboration with local forest communities.
“We're not going to change our principles, but we're definitely going to change our tactics,” he said.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at [email protected]
Thinning project could be showcase of teamwork
Wildfire isn't a stranger to Grant Creek.
Sometime back in the 1910s, a small fire got away from a farmer down along the lower meadows of Missoula's Grant Creek.
The fire exploded into an inferno that burned over thousands of acres, all the way to Seeley Lake.
It's a story oft-repeated by people worried about the potential for wildfire in the narrow upper reaches of the heavily timbered valley.
Members of the Grant Creek Homeowners Association have been working with local, state and federal agencies to reduce fuels around their homes since 2000. Many in the neighborhood urged the Forest Service to do some fuel-reduction work on adjoining federal lands.
So the Lolo National Forest's Maggie Pittman and other agency officials started talking with local residents and others a couple years back about doing just that.
“Right from the beginning, I thought it was critical to develop a partnership with people interested in the area,” Pittman said. “The area is certainly part of the urban interface and there is quite a lot of infrastructure there, including Snowbowl and the TV Mountain electronics site.”
After some discussion with a number of folks, Pittman said the message from the public seemed very clear.
“In my mind, there was lots of public support for getting something done here,” she said.
The agency recently completed the environmental analysis for the Grant Creek Fuel Reduction Program, which includes 1,600 acres of noncommercial thinning, 600 acres of commercial logging and a 365-acre ecosystem-maintenance burn.
When it's completed, the agency will have decommissioned about 12 miles of road, completed upgrades on another 8.5 miles of road and relocated a half-mile of road to a better location higher on the hill in order to remove a pair of culverts.
WildWest Institute restoration coordinator Jake Kreilick lives in the Grant Creek area. He's worked closely with the agency to help develop the project.
Once it's completed, Kreilick believes the fuel-reduction effort could be a showcase project for the Forest Service.
“This should be a flagship for the Forest Service,” he said. “It is a good example of how the agency can collaborate with groups like WildWest to accomplish worthwhile projects. We found Maggie and her staff willing to go out of their way to work with us.”
The Forest Service has already completed some fuel reduction in the area and the hopes are this additional effort will provide firefighters with an opportunity to stop any blaze before its blows into the narrow valley.
The agency's challenges, though, don't stop when the environmental analysis is signed.
For the Forest Service, money is in short supply for anything outside of fighting wildfire.
Thinning the forest isn't a cheap endeavor.
The agency expects to have to pay somewhere between $800 to $1,000 an acre to do the 1,600 acres of noncommercial hand thinning, said John Waverek, the Lolo National Forest's fire management officer. The road upgrades are expected to run anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000.
The timber harvested in the 600-acre commercial sale won't bring in anywhere near that much money, he said.
Years ago, the Forest Service's timber program generated funds for projects similar to this one. Environmental concerns have nearly stalled the program and that source of funding has almost dried up.
Because of the funding dilemma, Waverek said there isn't a timetable on when the work might actually be completed.
There's always a chance that funding could come from an unexpected source. Sometimes other national forests aren't able to use money set aside for fuel reduction and it's turned back. Or there might be a special appropriation or an unexpected surplus.
“If you have an approved NEPA project on the shelf, then you have a chance at obtaining that funding,” Waverek said. “You just never know where it might come from.”
By PERRY BACKUS of the Missoulian
A decade ago, Jake Kreilick was willing to go to jail to save a forest.
Back then, Kreilick was a field leader of the environmental group Earth First!. The group was well known for its sensational tactics, which included chaining members to bulldozers and inhabiting trees in the middle of proposed timber sales.
Kreilick's own passionate nonviolent efforts to protect old-growth forests put him behind bars in Idaho and in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak.
To this day, he remains proud of the role he played in bringing attention to the loss of old-growth timber.
Then, two winters ago, Kreilick found himself on the other end of a chainsaw.
After a small outbreak of mountain pine beetles killed a patch of lodgepole pine on his 25-plus acres in Missoula's Grant Creek drainage, Kreilick helped remove close to 40 trees.
“I did my first logging job when I took out those lodgepole,” Kreilick said.
Last winter, loggers cut another 50 green trees around his home in an effort to open up the canopy a bit to both enhance fire protection and let some sunshine in. Trucks filled with logs from his land went to a small local mill.
Living in a home surrounded by trees has changed the way Kreilick looks at the woods.
Wildfire is now a very real part of his world.
With only one road up the relatively narrow valley, he knows that his escape route could end up blocked by a wall of flame on any hot summer day. The threat is real enough that Kreilick developed a contingency plan with his family.
“We'll go to the creek,” he said. “There's a vapor barrier there. As a family, we talked with the kids about that possibility.”
Kreilick has become a vocal advocate of fuel-reduction work along the wildland-urban interface. He serves on the steering committee of the newly created FireSafe Montana Council, which advocates a variety of methods to create defensible space around homes.
He's also the restoration coordinator for WildWest Institute - an offshoot of the Native Forest Network, which Kreilick founded.
In 2000 - the year wildfires swept across the Bitterroot National Forest and made national news - Kreilick moved his family from town up into the trees in Grant Creek.
The drive through the heavily wooded valley was beautiful and serene, but even then firefighters saw the threat in amongst homes tucked neatly here and there.
A Forest Service national firefighting class used the Grant Creek area as an example of the dangers facing firefighters in the wildland-urban interface. Its single access, heavy timber and smattering of homes could be a trap just waiting to be sprung.
When Kreilick moved into his new home, he noted the previous owners hadn't done much to reduce the thick underbrush, saplings and larger trees scattered across his acreage.
“It was a powder keg waiting to be lit,” he remembered.
That first summer - while the Bitterroot burned - Kreilick's neighbors set up roadblocks at the base of the mountain to keep an eye on strangers. Long-timers to the canyon said they'd never seen the area so dry.
With the smell of smoke in the air, the neighborhood was nervous.
Soon after that long, hot season ended, Kreilick and his neighbors began working with the local fire district and Forest Service to start thinning some of the thick forest near their homes and along the roadside.
Over the next two years, crews helped homeowners remove 17 semi-loads of fuel from Grant Creek. Even reluctant landowners eventually signed up for fuel-reduction work on their property after seeing the finished product on their neighbors' lands.
“Once people saw the benefits on other people's properties, they decided it looked OK,” said John Waverek, the Lolo National Forest's fire management officer. “We were able to at least get started in an attempt to make the area safer.”
Upward of 80 percent of the neighbors have now done some thinning and other fire prevention work on their properties, Kreilick said.
“Some have done more than others,” he said. “We, as neighbors, still probably haven't done enough to protect our own little places, but it's certainly a lot more firesafe now than it was in 2000.”
Awareness can be a fleeting thing.
“Every year that we don't have a fire builds complacency,” Kreilick said.
People need to understand that national wildfire policies are changing, he said. “There are a lot of places were fire departments aren't going to go. They're not going to put themselves in the same position as they have in the past. The onus of creating defensible space around homes is very much back on homeowners.”
Reducing forest fuels isn't a one-shot deal.
“All fuel reduction happens in stages,” Kreilick said. “You can't just go in and take everything out at one time. It takes time and lots of hard work to make it happen.”
On his property, Kreilick started by reducing fuels around his home to create a buffer. Since those initial efforts, he's moved deeper into the woods to cut down brush and remove some smaller saplings. He's also removed some of the larger trees to open up the canopy to reduce the potential for a crown fire.
“We've left some denser areas here and there for hiding cover for wildlife,” Kreilick said. “We're essentially trying to create a mosaic similar to what fire would naturally do.”
His efforts didn't stop at his property line.
Kreilick and other members of the Grant Creek Homeowners Association worked with the Forest Service to come up with a plan to reduce fuels on federal lands surrounding the valley.
The result is the Lolo National Forest's Grant Creek Fuel Reduction Project, which proposes to thin fuels using both commercial logging and a variety of non-commercial techniques.
After years of fighting over appropriate timber management, Kreilick hopes that collaborative efforts like the ones occurring in Grant Creek may lead to a new era of cooperation between environmentalists and the Forest Service.
With the agency's timber management turning away from the remaining stands of old growth, Kreilick said there's an opportunity to find common ground for projects both in the wildland-urban interface and in the “working landscape” where logging has already occurred.
The debate over forest management is turning a corner that couldn't have happened a decade ago, he said.
“I really can see the end of an era where everything has to be settled in a court of law,” Kreilick said. “Everyone is tired of the conflict. Everyone is sick and tired of the polarity.”
“It's all part of recognizing you can manage the forest without harming it, particularly in areas with second growth,” he said. “You have more flexibility in second growth as compared to old growth. We need to focus our efforts more on that stuff in the middle.”
Environmental groups like WildWest will certainly continue their forest guardian work, but Kreilick predicts the larger focus will shift toward collaboration with local forest communities.
“We're not going to change our principles, but we're definitely going to change our tactics,” he said.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at [email protected]
Thinning project could be showcase of teamwork
Wildfire isn't a stranger to Grant Creek.
Sometime back in the 1910s, a small fire got away from a farmer down along the lower meadows of Missoula's Grant Creek.
The fire exploded into an inferno that burned over thousands of acres, all the way to Seeley Lake.
It's a story oft-repeated by people worried about the potential for wildfire in the narrow upper reaches of the heavily timbered valley.
Members of the Grant Creek Homeowners Association have been working with local, state and federal agencies to reduce fuels around their homes since 2000. Many in the neighborhood urged the Forest Service to do some fuel-reduction work on adjoining federal lands.
So the Lolo National Forest's Maggie Pittman and other agency officials started talking with local residents and others a couple years back about doing just that.
“Right from the beginning, I thought it was critical to develop a partnership with people interested in the area,” Pittman said. “The area is certainly part of the urban interface and there is quite a lot of infrastructure there, including Snowbowl and the TV Mountain electronics site.”
After some discussion with a number of folks, Pittman said the message from the public seemed very clear.
“In my mind, there was lots of public support for getting something done here,” she said.
The agency recently completed the environmental analysis for the Grant Creek Fuel Reduction Program, which includes 1,600 acres of noncommercial thinning, 600 acres of commercial logging and a 365-acre ecosystem-maintenance burn.
When it's completed, the agency will have decommissioned about 12 miles of road, completed upgrades on another 8.5 miles of road and relocated a half-mile of road to a better location higher on the hill in order to remove a pair of culverts.
WildWest Institute restoration coordinator Jake Kreilick lives in the Grant Creek area. He's worked closely with the agency to help develop the project.
Once it's completed, Kreilick believes the fuel-reduction effort could be a showcase project for the Forest Service.
“This should be a flagship for the Forest Service,” he said. “It is a good example of how the agency can collaborate with groups like WildWest to accomplish worthwhile projects. We found Maggie and her staff willing to go out of their way to work with us.”
The Forest Service has already completed some fuel reduction in the area and the hopes are this additional effort will provide firefighters with an opportunity to stop any blaze before its blows into the narrow valley.
The agency's challenges, though, don't stop when the environmental analysis is signed.
For the Forest Service, money is in short supply for anything outside of fighting wildfire.
Thinning the forest isn't a cheap endeavor.
The agency expects to have to pay somewhere between $800 to $1,000 an acre to do the 1,600 acres of noncommercial hand thinning, said John Waverek, the Lolo National Forest's fire management officer. The road upgrades are expected to run anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000.
The timber harvested in the 600-acre commercial sale won't bring in anywhere near that much money, he said.
Years ago, the Forest Service's timber program generated funds for projects similar to this one. Environmental concerns have nearly stalled the program and that source of funding has almost dried up.
Because of the funding dilemma, Waverek said there isn't a timetable on when the work might actually be completed.
There's always a chance that funding could come from an unexpected source. Sometimes other national forests aren't able to use money set aside for fuel reduction and it's turned back. Or there might be a special appropriation or an unexpected surplus.
“If you have an approved NEPA project on the shelf, then you have a chance at obtaining that funding,” Waverek said. “You just never know where it might come from.”
fuggn tree huggers.
