Creek Fire ignited in spot where Sierra tree-thinning effort was to begin. Coincidence?
The Creek Fire ignited in a rugged section of Big Creek Canyon choked with standing dead trees, fallen snags and brush.
There are no trails or campgrounds. The only infrastructure (an old telecommunications line and the dirt road that serviced it) was abandoned many decades ago. Getting to the fire’s origin zone from Camp Sierra, a community of 80 cabins on the canyon’s southern rim between Shaver Lake and Big Creek, entails a steep, cross-country hike.
Which is a roundabout way of saying there isn’t much reason for anyone to be tramping around the area where the fire started. Yet in the months preceding the Creek Fire, which sparked to life Sept. 4, 2020, and burned nearly 380,000 acres of the San Joaquin River drainage northeast of Fresno, there were more footsteps in those woods than one might normally expect.
Was any of that human activity responsible for starting the largest single-incident wildfire in California history? Sierra National Forest officials aren’t saying — or ruling anything out — pending the results of their investigation. Leaving interested persons to gather clues and fill in puzzle pieces.
In a previous column, I examined on-the-ground evidence of an illegal marijuana garden being a potential cause of the Creek Fire. (Short answer: There’s some, but nothing conclusive.) While the presence of pot growers isn’t certain, there’s little doubt Forest Service personnel visited the area for a tree-thinning project.
Recall that two months before the fire broke out, Sierra National Forest Supervisor Dean Gould approved a plan (named the Musick Fuels Reduction and Landscape Restoration Project) to remove dead trees and brush throughout a 33,000-acre area north and west of Shaver Lake.
Spread throughout those 33,000 acres are nine “strategically placed area treatment” zones, encompassing some 12,000 acres, that were to receive the most intensive treatments such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning.
Big Creek Canyon is located inside one of the nine SPLAT zones and, apparently, one that officials knew required urgent attention. Because three weeks after Gould signed off on the Musick Fuels Reduction and Landscape Restoration Project, the Sierra National Forest began soliciting public bids for what it called the Musick Stewardship.
Stewardships are contracted agreements between the Forest Service (or Bureau of Land Management) and a private party “intended to achieve key land-management goals that improve, maintain, or restore forest or rangeland health” according to a Q&A posted on the Forest Service website. They differ from timber sales in that the cost of removing saw logs and other material does not equal their value. The federal government then makes up the difference.
Musick Stewardship contains fire origin site
Published July 31, the Musick Stewardship project covered 1,750 acres of Big Creek Canyon from the village of Big Creek to the north to Jose Basin the south. It included nine mandatory work items (and five optional) that would remove an estimated 32,403 tons of saw timber and 4,953 tons of biomass from the area.
Even though the Musick Stewardship expired without receiving any bids (offers were due Aug. 31), Forest Service personnel had to visit the area in advance. During my trip to the origin zone, I saw about a dozen trees tagged with orange spray paint that Auberry logger Tim Messer identified as “a unit boundary.”
In addition, Olivia Roe, a Sierra National Forest silviculturist, confirmed an onsite pre-bid tour took place Aug. 5 — one month before the wildfire.
Roe went on to clarify the relationship between the larger fuels reduction project (33,000 acres) and the smaller stewardship (1,750 acres in Big Creek Canyon).
“The relationship between the Musick Stewardship and the Musick Fuels Reduction and Landscape Restoration Project is simple: The Musick Fuels Reduction Project is the ‘parent’ project where the environmental analysis was done by the specialists and encompasses the entire project area,” Roe wrote in an email.
“The stewardship project, if it had taken place, would have been a subset of that project area. Typically once a forest completes its analysis of a project area, they will then have several smaller projects to complete all the work described in the overall project.”
Creek Fire questions go unanswered
Roe did not respond to further questions about how and when Forest Service personnel surveyed and marked the 1,750 acres contained in the Musick Stewardship, or about the timing and frequency of their visits.
My final query (Did you or any of your colleagues discover an illegal pot garden in Big Creek Canyon while doing site work?) likely killed those chances.
Oh, well. It was incumbent on me to ask.
Besides containing several trees marked with orange paint signifying forest “unit” boundaries, the Creek Fire origin zone is dotted with colored flagging. While some flagging was obviously placed after the fire (we saw white surveyor’s tape dated Nov. 2, 2020, and orange tied around burnt tree limbs), others appeared to have been there before.
None, as I have previously written, more conspicuous than the yellow-green fluorescent ribbon marking a steep embankment between what may have been a marijuana garden and its water source.
Again, I can’t say for certain there even was a pot garden. So far, we only have sketchy evidence. But if growers did return to Big Creek Canyon last summer and their presence was detected by a Forest Service crew marking trees for the Musick Stewardship, that combination may have set the stage for a destructive wildfire.
Am I making a couple speculative leaps here? Absolutely. But this theory fits the information at hand while lending a plausible explanation to why the Forest Service remains silent as its internal investigation drags on.
This story was originally published March 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
