Forest Service officials called in air tankers to drop fire retardant in August 1996 in an attempt to stop the Sloans Ridge fire, but the blaze continued to spread until it had burned 10,500 acres in the Elkhorn Mountains northwest of Baker City. (Baker City Herald file photo/Jayson Jacoby).

By JAYSON JACOBY

The summer of 1996 was a season of storms in Northeastern Oregon.

There were wet storms and a few dry ones and several times the wind blew a gale and the air briefly smelled of burned wires, as though somewhere a gigantic fuse had blown.

On the second-to-last day of July of that year, the atmosphere over Baker County again became boisterous.

The sun, barely a month past the solstice and still high in the sky, baked the ground and warmed the air. The heat made the air buoyant and it rose thousands of feet, shedding degrees as it climbed, eventually dipping to a temperature at which the air could no longer hold all its moisture as invisible water vapor.

And so there were clouds at first only cottony cumulus, bright white puffs which floated benignly across a backdrop of blue and occasionally drifted across the sun, casting great cool shadows on the ground.

By afternoon, though, the cumulus had coalesced into thunderheads steel-grey towers that soared as high as airliners fly, blotted the sunlight altogether and spat bolts of lightning.

One of these high-voltage daggers slashed into Sloans Ridge and sparked a tiny fire there.

Sloans Ridge, a thickly forested hump on the west side of the Elkhorn Mountains about 24 air miles northwest of Baker City, wasn’t at that moment a noteworthy place. If you weren’t a dedicated reader of maps you might not have known the ridge even had a name.

It certainly isn’t a physically imposing piece of land, Sloans Ridge; and in fact it looks more like a time-softened segment of the Appalachians than it resembles the erosion-defying granitic cliffs of taller neighboring peaks such as Mount Ireland, three miles to the south, or the craggy pinnacles that loom over Anthony Lakes, about the same distance to the north.

Most people who visit the area hikers and hunters, mainly travel either the trail along Baldy Creek or the path that follows the North Fork of the John Day River.

But no trail twists up the slopes of Sloans Ridge, which is the high ground between Baldy Creek and the North Fork.

A few primitive mining roads run along the south end of the ridge, but motorized vehicles have been banned in most of the area since 1984, when Congress designated this part of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest as the 13,700-acre Baldy Unit of the North Fork John Day Wilderness.

Twenty years earlier lawmakers passed the federal Wilderness Act, the legislation that authorized Congress to denote wilderness areas. That law defines a wilderness, in part, as a place which andquot;generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.andquot;

One of those andquot;forces of natureandquot; is fire.

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And specifically, fires kindled by another force of nature lightning just as the blaze on Sloans Ridge was ignited on that penultimate day of July 1996.

Yet in 1964, when Congress named the country’s first batch of wilderness areas, the feeling about fire in the ranger stations of the U.S. Forest Service, the agency that managed many of those areas, was exemplified not by some Aldo Leopold-inspired vision of nature working things out in its harmonious way, but by a cartoon bear who wore blue dungarees and carried a shovel.

Probably you’ve seen this bear, his image emblazoned on a button or a poster or a pencil you got on a school field trip.

His name is Smokey, and rather than glorify fires he strives to prevent them. And he wants us to help.

Fire, Smokey implies, is bad. Flames destroy and ruin and transform pretty green forests into black, soot-stained wastelands.

In essence, Smokey placed a kid-friendly face on the policy that mandated the Forest Service, along with other federal agencies such as the BLM and National Park Service, put out blazes on public land, including wilderness areas, as soon as possible.

Forest Service officials even put a name to this goal they called it the andquot;10 a.m. rule,andquot; which meant firefighters labored to extinguish every fire by 10 a.m. the day after the blaze was discovered.

Nine out of 10 times, the Forest Service beat that deadline.

Over the ensuing three decades, however, scientists who studied the ecological relationship between fire and forest came to understand that Smokey Bear’s message oversimplified the situation.

Fire, despite its nasty reputation, can actually rejuvenate forests.

What’s more, the scientists said, excluding fire from some places hurts rather than helps the forest. Flames are nature’s broom, sweeping through periodically and cleaning the woods of fallen limbs and twigs and other readily combustible stuff.

Despite the fire experts’ conclusions, through the 1970s the Forest Service and other federal agencies bolstered not only by Smokey’s popular message but also by firefighting budgets that were basically blank checks had, in effect, stuffed that broom into a closet and then padlocked the door. And so, like dust that coats the furniture in a room that’s long been closed, those limbs and twigs accumulated.

When a lightning bolt or a carelessly discarded cigarette ignited one of these thickets of tinder, the flames leapt higher and spread faster than they used to.

The fire scientists suggested a remedy: Let fire resume its house-cleaning role in the forest.

In most cases, federal agencies kick started that process by lighting fires themselves.

But in some places officials decided to let lightning do the job it had done for many millennia.

Sloans Ridge is one of those places.

In 1994 Bob Richmond, then the supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, approved a plan that allowed officials to watch, rather than extinguish, lightning-sparked blazes in much of the Elkhorn Mountains, including Sloans Ridge, as long as the flames didn’t threaten people or private property.

The Wallowa-Whitman’s new fire plan didn’t languish for long on the shelf.

The very next summer, in late July 1995, lightning started a fire near Crawfish Lake, about two miles north of Sloans Ridge.

Wallowa-Whitman officials let the blaze burn, and during the next few weeks flames spread across 516 acres.

The Forest Service closed a couple of hiking trails temporarily, and the air around Anthony Lakes got a bit smoky at times.

But no one was hurt, no private property was scorched, and Forest Service experts said the fire did what fires have done in that place for centuries it killed all the trees in some places, but in others flames crept around on the ground, sparing the trees.

Wallowa-Whitman officials deemed the Crawfish blaze a success. It was at that point the forest’s biggest experiment with what the Forest Service branded andquot;prescribed natural fire.andquot;

But it wasn’t the biggest for long.

One year later, on the last day of July in 1996, Wallowa-Whitman fire managers expected the new blaze on Sloans Ridge to behave as the Crawfish fire did.

After pondering the matter for a few days, poring over computer models that predicted where the flames would spread and how fast, officials deemed the blaze a prescribed natural fire.

The weather was unseasonably cool for much of the first week of that August the temperature at the Baker City Municipal Airport topped out at just 66 degrees, about 20 degrees below average, on both the third and the fifth. Rain doused the Elkhorns, and snow briefly whitened the higher peaks.

But even as the fire smoldered on Sloans Ridge, barely bigger than the sort of blaze over which campers toast marshmallows, Forest Service officials publicly acknowledged that the blaze could grow.

andquot;There’s potential for it to be as large, or larger, than the Crawfish fire,andquot; Steve Snider, a fire management officer for the Wallowa-Whitman, said on Aug. 5, 1996.

Snider pointed out that Sloans Ridge was cloaked with a dense forest of subalpine fir trees, which tend to burn hot and fast, and littered with lodgepole pines, many of which were killed during a mountain pine beetle epidemic in the late 1970s.

According to Forest Service fire experts, even before the agency started dousing fires in the Elkhorns early in the 20th century, lightning-caused blazes probably scorched hundreds or even thousands of acres in the mountains, and the flames probably killed all or most of the trees what fire managers call a andquot;stand-replacementandquot; fire because it andquot;replacesandquot; the old trees with new seedlings.

The bottom line, fire officials said, is that andquot;naturalandquot; fires in the Elkhorns often were big fires.

In those early days of August 1996, Snider also noted that temperatures were likely to soon ascend into the 90s, as is typical for mid-summer.

Snider was right.

On Aug. 7 the temperature at the airport rose to 90, and the Sloans Ridge fire expanded from two acres to 40.

But the blaze was moving north, away from the nearest parcel of private property.

Wallowa-Whitman officials said the fire was still a mile or so from the boundaries they had drawn on a map, and so long as the flames stayed behind those lines, officials planned to continue to watch the fire.

They didn’t just watch it much longer.

Thursday, Aug. 8, 1996, started much like the previous day sunny and warm.

But around midday the flames crackled into a place no one knew the precise spot then, nor knows it now where the fire achieved a calculus of combustion, a condition, exacerbated by wind gusts, in which everything that can burn will burn.

A condition which fire experts believe had happened on Sloans Ridge many times in the past, but not once since white settlers came to the Elkhorns in the 1860s to gather gold .

During the next few hours of that August afternoon the Sloans Ridge fire blossomed from a sluggish 40-acre blaze into a conflagration that had sprinted through 1,460 acres including about 50 acres of private property.

By nightfall of Aug. 8, the blaze, which produced a mushroom cloud of smoke and ash visible from Baker City, was no longer a prescribed natural fire.

Richmond declared it a wildfire, and by doing so he roused the Forest Service’s battle-tested firefighting machine.

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By the next morning, Aug. 9, several hundred firefighters were en route to Sloans Ridge. They brought a handful of bulldozers to dig control lines in the fire’s path, and a squadron of two airplanes and six helicopters to douse the forest with flame-retarding slurry and water.

But this army arrived too late.

The fire continued to spread, fed by dead trees and even by live ones, their moisture sapped by the kiln-like heat of the advancing flames:

Saturday, Aug. 10 4,200 acres.

Sunday, Aug. 11 9,000 acres.

Fire crews, powerless to stem the tide, nibbled at the fire’s flanks and savored their few successes.

They spared historic Peavy Cabin by saturating the log structure and its surrounding meadow with fire-stopping foam. They employed the same tactic to save a privately owned cabin.

Then the weather, which had invigorated the Sloans Ridge fire, conspired to kill it.

Scattered showers dampened parts of the blaze on Aug. 13. Downpours doused the fire the next day.

The Sloans Ridge fire had burned 10,500 acres, but it would burn no more.

Yet even while smoke still stained the summer sky and embers glowed orange in the lengthening nights of a waning summer, critics had begun to lambaste Wallowa-Whitman officials for letting the Sloans Ridge fire get loose.

Bob Bowen, a Baker City man who owned 140 acres of forest that was burned in the blaze, approved of the Wallowa-Whitman’s goal of allowing certain fires to burn. But at Sloans Ridge the Wallowa-Whitman officials’ timing, he contended, was lousy.

andquot;We just don’t let fires burn in August,andquot; Bowen said on Aug. 12, 1996. andquot;When they start you put them out.andquot;

In the decade since Sloans Ridge, the Forest Service in almost every case, has put lightning fires out as soon as possible in the Elkhorns.

There hasn’t been a prescribed natural fire in the Elkhorns since Sloans Ridge.

That’s not a coincidence, said Noel Livingston, fire management officer for the Wallowa-Whitman’s Burnt-Powder Fire Zone, which includes Sloans Ridge.

Livingston, who was working for the adjacent Umatilla National Forest when Sloans Ridge burned in 1996, said that blaze convinced Forest Service officials to reconsider the prescribed natural fire program, not just on the Wallowa-Whitman, but on national forests across the West.

andquot;We took a step back,andquot; Livingston said. andquot;We said we still like this program, but there’s risk involved with this, and how do we manage that risk.andquot;

Basically, Forest Service officials decided to reduce that risk by banning prescribed natural fires on hundreds of thousands of acres where such fires had been allowed, at least in theory, before Sloans Ridge ignited a controversy.

On the Wallowa-Whitman, for instance, Richmond had the authority, in 1996, to declare prescribed natural fires on about 1.7 million acres approximately 70 percent of the Wallowa-Whitman.

Today, prescribed natural fires have a different name Wildland Fire Use, or WFU and they’re allowed in just three places on the Wallowa-Whitman: the Eagle Cap and Hells Canyon wilderness areas, and the portion of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area that’s outside the Hells Canyon wilderness.

Those areas total about 907,000 acres about 38 percent of the Wallowa-Whitman.

Sloans Ridge wasn’t the only fire in 1996 that shook Forest Service officials’ confidence in prescribed natural fire, though.

The same electrical storm that sparked the blaze that eventually engulfed Sloans Ridge also ignited the Wildcat fire in the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness south of Prairie City, and the Salt Creek fire in the Hells Canyon Wilderness east of Joseph.

Forest Service officials initially branded both of those blazes as prescribed natural fires too.

And like Sloans Ridge, both of those fires grew faster than the agency’s experts predicted.

As they did with Sloans Ridge, Forest Service officials eventually declared both the Wildcat and Salt Creek fires as wildfires, and summoned hundreds of firefighters to try to squelch the flames.

All told, the trio of fires covered about 85,000 acres, and the firefighting tab totaled about $20 million.

Critics some with considerably more clout than Bowen were not pleased.

Congressman Bob Smith, a Republican who at that time represented Oregon’s 2nd District, which includes all of Eastern Oregon, cited the Sloans Ridge, Wildcat and Salt Creek fires in a July 1997 press release:

andquot;It simply makes no sense to have prescribed fires in July, August and September when our ability to control the fires is minimal,andquot; Smith said. andquot;It’s a reckless policy and it’s endangering our forest resources.

andquot;We can teach our children not to play with fire, but for some reason we can’t teach our bureaucrats.andquot;

Smith wasn’t quite right.

The bureaucrats in this case Forest Service officials obviously did learn a lesson from that trio of 1996 fires. The Wallowa-Whitman, for example, slashed almost a million acres from its inventory of land where prescribed natural fires could burn.

andquot;It made us all take a step back,andquot; said Dave Bunnell, who worked for the Forest Service (though not on the Wallowa-Whitman) for 38 years. Bunnell not only helped craft the agency’s policy of letting certain lightning fires burn, but for several years he supervised how the Forest Service used that policy his last job before he retired in January 2003 was national manager for the agency’s Wildland Fire Use program.

Bunnell, who lives in Montana, was working at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise when the Sloans Ridge fire started in July 1996.

He said he flew in an airplane over the blaze on Aug. 8, the day the fire exploded.

Bunnell said he later was called as a witness in a lawsuit involving the Wildcat fire, which, like Sloans Ridge, burned private property.

Those two fires, along with the Salt Creek blaze, stalled the prescribed natural fire policy in the Forest Service’s Region 6, which encompasses the 19 national forests in Oregon and Washington.

andquot;It did set us back, as it should have,andquot; Bunnell said.

That setback was not permanent, though.

The concept that underlies the prescribed natural fire program now WFU didn’t die after 1996.

In each of the past four summers, for instance, Wallowa-Whitman officials have allowed lightning-sparked blazes to burn in either the Eagle Cap or Hells Canyon Wilderness.

Also, a team of Forest Service employees is writing a new plan that will guide management of the Wallowa-Whitman. That plan, which is scheduled to be finished next year, might add acres, including parts of the Elkhorns, to the inventory of land where WFU is allowed, said Bruce Countryman, who’s a member of that team.

In the meantime, although WFU is banned in the Elkhorns, fire managers can in certain cases monitor a lightning fire rather than fight it just as officials did when smoke first appeared above the treetops on Sloans Ridge.

Less than a month ago, in fact, Livingston said he decided not to send firefighters to douse a lightning-sparked blaze high in the Elkhorns near Crawfish Lake.

That fire, Livingston said, started andquot;up in the goat rocksandquot; a place where not even a gale could have thrown embers far enough to spread the blaze.

Livingston said the fire smoldered for about three hours, then died.

He emphasizes, though, that he would choose that shovels-off strategy only in rare situations when the risk that a blaze will grow is so low as to be negligible.

Just a week or so after the fire near Crawfish Lake, for instance, lightning started another blaze in similar surroundings near Pine Creek Reservoir.

Livingston said he immediately dispatched firefighters to extinguish the fire near Pine Creek.

Although he said it’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the Pine Creek fire would have fizzled as rapidly as did the blaze near Crawfish Lake, Livingston said the Pine Creek fire was within a couple miles of Baker City’s watershed. He said even the remote possibility that the fire could spread into the area from which the city gets its water, persuaded him to treat the Pine Creek blaze like most fires to get it out as soon as possible, in other words.

Livingston doubts the situation will change, at least in the Elkhorns, for the foreseeable future.

Unlike, say, the Eagle Cap Wilderness, where there’s tens of thousands of acres that lie several miles from the nearest piece of private property, the Elkhorns are marbled with dozens of privately owned parcels.

Allowing a blaze to burn in the Elkhorns anywhere except those andquot;goat rocks,andquot; to borrow Livingston’s phrase, simply poses an unacceptably high risk of creating a sequel to Sloans Ridge, complete with the burning of private property, he contends.

andquot;Burning onto private land that’s very significant,andquot; Livingston said significant, in this case, serving as a synonym for bad.

Bunnell agrees.

andquot;What happened (on Sloans Ridge) was not predicted, and because the fire burned private property it was an unacceptable result,andquot; he said.

andquot;The fire showed us that the wilderness area (the North Fork John Day) as a playing field wasn’t large enough for us to be that aggressive with prescribed natural fire.andquot;