After the Fire
Last September the Archie Creek burned thousands of acres and destroyed treasured recreation sites and scores of homes, sending an array of public and private stakeholders in search of the best route to recovery.
Story by Jennifer Grafiada Photos by Robin Loznak
Labor Day weekend of 2020 unfolded like many before in Douglas County, with residents and visitors enjoying the dozens of miles of fern-fringed, family-friendly trails that lie east of Roseburg along the North Umpqua Highway (Oregon Highway 138).
Favorite spots such as Susan Creek Falls, Toketee Falls and Fall Creek Falls were busy with a variety of folks taking in the last days of summer. Couples walked their dogs. Parents did their best to keep up with energetic children delighting in nature. Silver-haired retirees with binoculars took in the spectacular diversity of trees and wildlife. People gathered to skip rocks, take selfies and relax with picnics. A bride and groom said their vows under a waterfall then gamely navigated the dirt and rocks back to the trailhead in their wedding attire.
Few of those trail-goers could have imagined that late on Labor Day and early the following morning a terrible concoction of high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds would mix with existing wildfires in the Umpqua National Forest to set the scene for an explosive inferno that would destroy treasured trails and recreation sites, more than 100 homes and more than 130,000 acres of Douglas County forestland.
While some green tendrils are beginning to poke through the black in the months after the Archie Creek fire, it’s hard to fathom how much time will pass before the landscape is restored to what it once was. As landowners and public agencies reckon with the damage and work through forest recovery plans, it provides an important window into what it means to create resilient forests in Douglas County and the Pacific Northwest in a changing world.
Rick Sohn has spent his life immersed in the woods. His late father, Fred, founded Sun Studs and later Lone Rock Resources, where Rick spent decades before retiring as CEO and turning his focus to forest management.
Sohn holds a master’s degree in tree physiology and a PhD in forest pathology and mycorrhizae with a minor in soils. He is passionate about silviculture, reforestation and timber and, in 2015, helped found Forest Bridges, a non-profit that seeks a collaborative approach to modern forestry practices across the more than 2 million acres of public land in southwestern Oregon.
Sohn has been paying attention to what the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plans to do in terms of fire recovery and shares his concerns.
“I believe the intensity with which they are logging 6,300 acres, while leaving 25,000 acres without any planned recovery effort, as I understand it, begs a lot of questions,” he says. “In the checkerboard ownership, where fire has been excluded for 100 years and humans are part of the equation, there really needs to be a new look at how we manage these lands.”
Serious logging is already under way on many private land holdings, which represent almost half of the Archie Creek Fire’s affected acres.
Paul Beck is the CEO of Mountain Western Log Scaling and Grading Bureau, a business that provides services to timber companies like Roseburg Forest Products and Seneca Jones Timber Company. Beck believes that the BLM and U.S. Forest
Rick Sohn, Forest Bridges
Service, bogged down by regulations and bureaucracy, will waste an opportunity to not only save merchantable timber, but also to create a healthier habitat that will be more fire-resilient in years to come.
“The clock is ticking,” Beck explains. “If that wood is not green and growing, it is dead and rotting. It will lose half of its value in a matter of months. It is nice and wet out there now, but as soon as the spring sunshine hits that wood and it starts drying out, the fungus will get to working in there and then it deteriorates and splits and it won’t be of any value. It won’t pay for the rehabilitation work that needs to be done. And if they don’t remove the trees that are out there, it won’t be long before it’s unsafe to get under there with planting crews because, as the trees rot, they lose limbs that fall down and land on tree-planting crews.”
Beck recounts hearing the media repeat a line equating salvaging an area of burned forest to mugging a burn victim.
“I would say just the opposite,” he explains. “Not restoring these forests – and salvage is only the first step – is like a doctor refusing to treat a burn victim. We are smart enough to do salvage in a kinder and gentler way than my grandfather would have done it.”
While fire has always been a natural part of the forest cycle in the Pacific Northwest, human presence creates a more complex picture. Forestry in large part replaces fire as the mechanism to remove the fuel load from timber-rich areas, which does have economic benefits for those logging and selling the timber. How much one should remove, even following a fire, continues to be a matter of debate.
“We can argue over salvage, and we have a lot over the past 30 years, but the truth is we need to manage these lands so the fires don’t happen, or they are not as big,” Beck continues. “We have seen fires in the past, like the Tillamook fires in the early part of last century. They are big fires, but they are nothing like what we are seeing today. Spots that we thought were at no risk of fire are all black and brown. There isn’t a green tree out there; it’s all dead.”
Beck believes that, ultimately, laws need to be changed to allow additional harvest on federal lands. High fuel loads will continue to serve as a tinderbox for megafires, he argues, which often start on public lands and then grow large enough that they encroach onto private lands where they can often be contained because private lands are more intensively managed and therefore have less fuel to burn.
Matt Hill, CEO of Douglas Timber Operators, shares Beck’s view that the way the U.S. Forest Service and BLM lands are managed needs to change.
“This isn’t the choice of the current federal land managers,” says Hill. “They inherited these sets of regulations and they are doing the best they can with them. But that doesn’t mean we need to accept them for another generation.”
Hill explains that the federal lands in Douglas County and elsewhere in Oregon are predominantly closed to salvage to protect spotted owl habitat, a default practice that he believes should be reconsidered in light of events such as the Archie Creek Fire.
“We are 25, 26 years into this management plan for the spotted owl, and the fire calls into question the effectiveness of that strategy, as well as what they are doing after the fire,” he says.
Hill estimates that 15 percent or less of the burned lands under federal ownership will see any significant recovery activity, such as removal of dead trees and planting of seedlings.
“They will be left to rot, deteriorate and reburn,” he says. “And we have seen that burn-and-reburn cycle play out over and over in Southern Oregon. Even within the Archie Creek Fire, the fire reburned two different old burns, the 2009 Williams Creek Fire and the 2015 Cable Crossing Fire. Where it reburns, it looks particularly nuked.”
There is consensus that the Archie Creek Fire was unique. It was late in the season, after 100 days without rain, and strong east winds pushed the fire into a fast blaze that destroyed everything in its path, mostly within the first 36 hours. Could it have been prevented, or at least mitigated, by different strategies?
Hill is reluctant to answer definitively.
“Weather, topography and fuel affect fire,” he explains. “We can’t change wind or topography, but we can affect fuel. We just replaced tens of thousands of acres of living trees filled with water with dead trees filled with pitch, which is basically standing firewood for the next fire. That poses a significant risk to adjacent communities in the future. Moving forward, managing fuels and having places where we can defend against fires is critically important and it is something we need to be working with the federal agencies on.”
“I believe the intensity with which they are logging 6,300 acres, while leaving 25,000 acres without any planned recovery effort, as I understand it, begs a lot of questions.” – Rick Sohn
Of these federal agencies, the BLM manages 403,044 acres of public land called the Roseburg District, which mainly falls within Douglas County. Approximately 40,000 of those acres burned in the Archie Creek Fire. Of these, approximately 13,000 acres within the fire area are classified as Harvest Land Base (HLB), which has a primary focus for sustained-yield timber production. The BLM is proposing to salvage 6,300 acres of the HLB by focusing on areas affected by moderate- to high-severity fire in burned stands aged 40 to 160 years old in the Calapooya Creek, Rock Creek, Canton Creek, Little River and lower North Umpqua River watersheds.
“Recovery efforts by the Bureau of Land Management continue to focus on minimizing threats to life and property as well as preventing degradation to natural and cultural resources,” says Field Manager Michael Korn of the Roseburg District BLM. “These efforts began with suppression-repair efforts during the fire and have been ongoing since. Initial actions have included erosion-control efforts through stabilization of fire lines and roadways prior to the winter rains. Continuing activities this winter have been extensive, ranging from working with adjacent property owners and utilities in support of their recovery efforts to tree planting, storm patrol and continued hazard-tree mitigation.”
Other planned activities include stabilization projects and restoration of recreation infrastructure, including various hiking trails. At the time of writing, all BLM lands affected by the Archie Creek Fire are closed to the public.
“We are committed to serving and supporting local communities impacted by the Archie Creek Fire and appreciate everyone’s patience during this long-term recovery effort,” says Korn.
He notes that the public can learn more about BLM’s long-term planning efforts for forest management and recreation opportunities and provide feedback through the organization’s e-planning website (blm.gov).
“Not restoring these forests is like a doctor refusing to treat a burn victim. We are smart enough to do salvage in a kinder and gentler way than my grandfather would have done it.” – Paul Beck
Thomas McGregor, current treasurer of Forest Bridges and a former president of Umpqua Watersheds, believes that the additional regulation and bureaucracy required of the BLM and other public entities serve a critical purpose.
“They have an onus to all Americans when they approach our lands,” he says. “Following the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), following considerations of endangered species, and as the Biden administration looks toward climate as a major factor in how we manage public lands, I think that prudence and taking extra steps are wise things to do.”
McGregor thinks that ongoing dialogue around the variety of concerns, even on a national scale, is important. And he thinks that leaving a good amount of timber is, too.
“We are needing to make a priority of carbon storage and the legacy habitat for wildlife that we have enjoyed and we want our grandchildren to enjoy,” he says. “I strongly believe we need to have variable density harvests and leave gaps and skips, not clear-cuts, when we approach land management, whether it is brown stands or green stands. I do agree that we need to be planting trees, but perhaps we need to also be planting elderberries for elk or trying to create a mosaic on the landscape. I am not an advocate for only industrial activity after a fire. I am an advocate for science-based approaches that bring a diversity of activity.”
He notes that a mixed-age and diverse stand of trees is less likely to burn with high intensity and may allow wildland firefighters to be more effective.
“We now have a completely different climate, and every tree counts,” he says. “I think the Archie Creek Fire is a game-changer for our community. I think all of us can agree that seeing the landscapes that we used to enjoy on the North Umpqua, now after the fire, is a real wake-up call. We need to have dialogue on all viewpoints on how we are going to manage this century of change and how we are going to find resilience for
our forests.
