Why didn’t Shaver Lake get torched by Creek Fire? One man’s belief in healthy burning
The Creek Fire burned so many acres of forest in the mountains northeast of Fresno (291,426 and counting), areas that didn’t succumb stand out.
Shaver Lake is among them. Not just Shaver Lake village — still standing thanks to the efforts of brave firefighters, three of whom lost their homes — but also large expanses of mixed-conifer forest around the lake owned and managed by one of the state’s major utilities, Southern California Edison.
Take a close look at maps of the Creek Fire. Notice how the burned areas surround Shaver Lake but don’t completely engulf the shoreline. A section of forest north of the lake withstood the fire despite sitting in its direct path when a wall of flames roared up from Big Creek Canyon in the early morning hours of Sept. 5. Three weeks later, areas east and south of the lake remain intact.
Why did the Creek Fire, described by firefighters and scientists as one of the most aggressive wildfires they’d ever observed, spare so much of the timberland around Shaver Lake?
Here’s the short answer: Those forests have been burning for decades — on purpose.
“Total ecosystem management, and that included fire,” said John Mount, the retired SCE natural resources manager at Shaver Lake. “Fire is a natural part.”
In 2020, fire’s essential role in our forests is a widely accepted fact. But in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when Mount studied forestry at UC Berkeley, it was a controversial position. Fire was considered bad for people and the environment. For decades, the U.S. Forest Service went by a “10 a.m.” policy that stipulated all wildfires should be contained and controlled by the morning after they were first spotted.
“Only one of the professors, Harold Biswell, advocated fire and everyone else said, ‘No, you’re crazy.’ They treated the man very poorly. But being a stupid student, I said, ‘If lightning starts fires, who put the fires out before 1850?’
“The answer of course is nobody, and that means fires burned all the time. There was no way to put them out. So if that’s the way natural ecosystems work, that should be the way we’re supposed to do it. From 1960 on I advocated fire.”
Following three bumpy years with the U.S. Forest Service (“I flunked Forest Service 101. Because I believed in fire, I’d get very poor ratings.”), Mount went into business for himself. That lasted until 1979, when SCE recruited him to manage its 20,000 acres of private forest around Shaver.
What did the forest look like when Mount arrived?
“It was a jungle — hadn’t been managed since Edison purchased the land in 1919,” Mount said. “It looked as bad as the Forest Service land. It was a mess. I had my work cut out for me.”
Burning & logging at Shaver
Mount immediately started setting prescribed burns and continued every fall, winter and spring until his retirement in 2010. One year, he only burned 35 acres. In others, he burned 1,000. Besides reducing the impact of wildfires by removing ground cover, the burns stimulate native vegetation like buck brush and mountain mahogany that provide critical habitat for deer.
I asked Mount whether his bosses were supportive of his then-controversial methods.
“They were,” he replied with a hearty laugh. “They didn’t know it, but they were. …
“In those days everybody was against prescribed fire. I had to fight Cal Fire, the Forest Service, everybody. Fortunately there were just enough people who turned their backs to what I was doing.”
Prescribed fire was one facet of Mount’s forest management philosophy. He also employed a specialized system of logging, choosing not the fattest trees, but the ones that made the most ecologic sense.
An average of 7.5 million board feet of lumber was harvested from SCE-owned lands annually, according to Mount. That’s roughly 7,500 trees.
“I didn’t just cut trees to be cutting trees,” Mount said. “I was very selective and had to train the loggers because they weren’t used to logging that carefully. And I was fortunate enough to have a couple real good loggers who wanted to see the program work. They took good care of me.”
Besides prescribed burns and logging, Mount also employed mechanical thinning and in-forest chipping. During the early 1990s, when the California Public Utilities Commission subsidized biomass plants, wood chips were loaded into vans and driven to an incinerator in Auberry.
Shaver threatened on 3 sides
In the decade since Mount’s retirement, his practices and philosophies have continued under Steve Byrd, the current natural resources program manager for SCE.
The difference is that instead of government entities criticizing the company’s methods, they’ve started to emulate them.
“About 15 years ago I noticed a big change within the Forest Service and (National) Park Service. They started doing more and more prescribed burning on their land, and of course they have massive in-holdings to work on,” Byrd said.
“Then probably about six years ago I really saw a change in Cal Fire. They actually came to us and asked, ‘Hey, we would like to come out into the forest with you guys, burn with you and learn how you guys do it.’”
SCE continues to burn about 1,000 acres of its forest annually through a partnership with Cal Fire, though Byrd would like to double that total. In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on downing, piling and burning dead trees killed by the double whammy of drought and bark beetles.
How does SCE decide where to burn? Several factors are involved, not the least of which is topography. Shaver Lake sits on a plateau with obvious fire dangers on three sides: Big Creek Canyon to the north, Jose Basin to the west and Blue Canyon to the south.
“We’ve spent an awful lot of time on those three boundaries just trying to create a safer situation,” Byrd said. “We always knew that fire was a risk coming up at us on federal land. For us it was a matter of what we do when it gets here. How do we get that fire down on the ground so we can stop it?”
Where Creek Fire ‘stopped cold’
During the last three years, SCE and Cal Fire have conducted several prescribed burns of dead trees and brush north of the lake around Ely Mountain. According to Byrd, 800 acres were burned in that area from late November into December.
Nine months later, when the Creek Fire roared up the canyon from its origin near Big Creek, the flames did not burn up and over Ely Mountain, which sits on forest service land but is surrounded by SCE property.
Coincidence? Byrd doesn’t think so.
“All that work that took place on the northern boundary, when that fire came up out of Big Creek Canyon it hit that spot and stopped it cold,” he said. “Right there.”
On the west side of Shaver Lake — the side that contains the village, the dam, Camp Edison, both marinas, popular day-use areas and private cabins — a network of fuel breaks stretches south from Stevenson Mountain all the way past the village.
These areas have also been thinned and treated with prescribed burns in a partnership between SCE and the Highway 168 Fire Safe Council. There is so little ground fuel that backfires deliberately set along the highway hardly spread.
“That preparation, combined with all those firefighters pouring in there behind those homes in what was an absolute dogfight, that is what saved Shaver Lake,” Byrd said.
I asked Cal Fire to lend its expertise and perspective on how the Creek Fire behaved differently on SCE-owned lands versus those in the neighboring Sierra National Forest. A week later, no one wanted to take up the subject. Perhaps they’re too busy.
NEPA ‘never protected a thing’
Mount, the retired SCE forester and fire maverick, lives in Meadow Lakes. The 81-year-old is among hundreds of Creek Fire evacuees who have temporarily relocated to Fresno and Clovis.
A Fresno County consultant on California’s Forest Management Task Force, Mount continues to advocate for prescribed burning and thinning in the state’s 33 million forested acres.
He strongly believes in biomass energy — turning dead trees into wood pellets burned in large power plants — and says the National Environmental Policy Act should be rewritten to make prescribed burning less expensive and cumbersome.
“NEPA is the worst law we ever created,” Mount said. “It never protected a thing.”
A contentious view, to be sure. Here’s one that can’t be disputed: Well-managed forests are more resilient to fire than forests that have been subjected to decades of illogical fire suppression.
Future visitors to Shaver Lake will be able to see the difference for themselves while wondering why the Creek Fire torched some areas but left others unscathed.
“This big fire should have never ever happened,” Mount said. “All that forest should’ve been burned and thinned. There’s so much fuel out there.”
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 12:24 PM.
