Using Wood Mulch To Combat Erosion In Cornet/Windy Ridge Fire

Seven months after an airborne armada worked to douse Baker County’s biggest-ever wildfire, a helicopter is back in the skies this week.

But this time there are of course no flames to douse.

Instead of dumping thousands of gallons of water on hot spots, the chopper is bombarding the snow-covered Cornet/Windy Ridge burn with hundreds of tons of wood mulch.

The mulch is intended to stabilize steep slopes that the flames stripped of vegetation. The mulch will reduce the risk of mudslides in Stices Gulch and along Highway 245, said Ray Lovisone of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, who is overseeing the work.

The Forest Service hired Mountain West Helicopters of Provo, Utah, to handle the aerial work.

The company’s helicopter is concentrating on about 88 acres east of Stices Gulch where the combination of steep ground and high-intensity fire results in a high risk of slides, Lovisone said.

Trucks delivered 560 tons of mulch in December to a site along the Skyline Road just west of the Dooley Mountain Summit on Highway 245, about 20 miles south of Baker City.

The Cornet fire burned across the summit in mid-August on its way to joining with another lightning-sparked blaze, Windy Ridge, to form the biggest fire, eventually covering 104,000 acres, in the county’s history.

The mulch, mainly from ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir trees, came from Grant County, Lovisone. Those trees were themselves burned, in the Canyon Creek Complex fire that destroyed more than two dozen homes south of John Day.

See more in Friday’s issue of the Baker City Herald.