Yellow-and-green-clad crews worked Wednesday along a hillside, feeding bits of shrubs into a chipper in the remote parts of the San Juan National Forest where the Ferris Fire burned more than 64,880 acres northwest of Dolores.
Now, firefighting is less about putting out flames and more focused on post-fire recovery.
Such work rehabilitates contingency lines, disturbed ditches, roads, trails or other landscapes affected by wildfire suppression tactics. Two percent of this work is on private lands, according to Ferris Fire Information officials, with the rest occurring on public lands.
On Wednesday, one division’s task involved a chipping operation at a historical guard station on the Ferris Fire’s northeast edge.
A chainsaw rumbled while the wood chipper swallowed large piles of scrub oak, small shrubberies and trees – the remnants of fuels cut away in this area.
The Ferris Fire started by three separate lightning strikes June 27 and burned through a variety of fuel types, including Ponderosa pines and Aspens.
The wildfire did not burn the guard station but it came close. The station was designated by the U.S. Forest Service early on as a value facing potential risk. Fire crews created a defensible space as the fire neared, clearing vegetation and prepping the old, white guard house – built with dilapidated and highly flammable timber shingles – for protection.
The crew led by Richard Morris cleared and processed left-behind branches across about an acre Wednesday, then spread the chips low to the ground to reduce any future fire hazards by changing the fuel arrangement.
“It's a team effort,” Morris said. “The whole area will decompose over a few years, two to three years, depending on the wood that's being chipped – it's all hardwoods.”
The Ferris Fire is now largely contained at 94% as of Thursday. The flames are mostly out except for smoldering logs and parts of the fire’s northwest perimeter.
Hundreds of firefighters have left, and many of those remaining – about 290 – are assigned to suppression repair or back-hauling operations, including chipping but also removing hoses and pumps and inspecting equipment. This includes hauling equipment back to the Rocky Mountain Area Cache so supplies can be sent elsewhere to other wildfires.
“The two camp crews near the Dove Creek area said they rolled – in the last four days – 20 miles of hose,” said Bethany Urban, a Ferris Fire public information officer as well as full-time paramedic and firefighter.
The work still involves hazardous conditions on the landscape, including risks of flash floods, fire-weakened trees and the challenges of working with heavy equipment.
Ferris Fire spokesperson Sara Michelson said those factors change day-to-day and are detailed in daily briefs provided by a safety officer.
“Weather is really one of the biggest concerns on this incident at this time,” Michelson said, noting especially the threat of blackened trees collapsing during thunderstorms, hail or rain.
Michelson said as the fire dies down, situational awareness among personnel can lessen and people can become complacent.
“The dangers of suppression can include a series of unknown hazards, and crews are encouraged to practice training scenarios and brush up on their training guidelines,” Michelson said.
According to an incident meteorologist, drier and warmer weather is expected for the weekend. San Juan National Forest still has closures in place for the fire area and affected recreation areas in the Glade area, the Glade guard station, Dry Canyon, and to the southwest at the Bradfield Campground.
“The goal for the San Juan National Forest is to have the closure orders lifted by the start of archery season in Colorado,” Michelson said.
On the east side, the fire continually pushed and then went out short of Forest Service Road 514, which Michelson said likely served as a contingency line at one time.
If fire behavior is wind-driven, it can surpass infrastructure like roads, usually if embers blown from the wind ignite fuels on the other side of the road. For example, there were plenty of roads on the Ferris Fire’s interior.
Deeper in the forest, large swaths of burned areas show a “mosaic” pattern. The term is used by fire officials to describe a patchy appearance where a fire burned at different intensities, showing a mix of scorched earth, some brown and even greener parts of untouched grasses.
Urban said a major concern with high-intensity burn scars is the development of hydrophobic soil, which occurs when the soil is burned so hotly that it will no longer absorb water.
“If you have a high-intensity and very hot burn on soil, you can dump a bottle of water on it and it will just roll off,” Urban said.
This leads to dangerous debris flows, mudslides and flooding because the damaged root systems and rocks can no longer hold the soil in place.
U.S. forest specialists with Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams come much later to assess soil burn severity and to predict long-term wildfire impacts while overseeing landscape restoration.
In some areas, new sprigs of vegetation and grass are seen poking up only three to four weeks after the fire.
Animals have already been observed hanging out in the burn scar, including a prairie dog spotted running by. There were plenty of sightings Wednesday of livestock grazing on Forest Service allotments and an additional sighting of a mother black bear with her cubs.
Nationally, fire crews and resources are heavily committed at the highest level of preparedness – level five – according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
According to the fire center, 41,377 fires have burned more than 3.9 million acres across the country this year. Crews are actively working to suppress 70 large fires in the U.S.
awatson@the-journal.com
