Fire on the mountain will make forest healthier

It may not last long in the monsoon moisture.

The Finger Rock Fire is one of five burning in Arizona right now that aren’t being actively fought.

From the Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon to the front range of the Santa Catalina Mountains above Tucson, the fires are burning moderately through fire-adapted landscapes, clearing out excess vegetation, making the forests healthier and decreasing the potential for more serious burns.

In Arizona this year, about 60,000 acres of wildfire have been managed for multiple objectives, including their benefit to the ecosystem of the forests. That figure includes the Whitetail Fire, which burned across 31,000 acres of the San Carlos Apache Reservation in June.

The Pusch Ridge Wilderness, where this very visible fire is burning, used to have fires every decade or so, but hasn’t burned in 80 years, said Coronado National Forest spokeswoman Heidi Schewel. The brush is unnaturally thick. “This fire is a tool we can use to deal with that,” Schewel said.

“This is a perfect fire,” said University of Arizona fire ecologist Don Falk, an advocate for bringing back landscape-scale fires to the West’s forests and one of the developers of a Firescape program for the Coronado National Forest.

“It was started by nature and not some irresponsible camper. It’s burning in mixed fuels in the humidity of the monsoon when fires get started and never get very big, and the Forest Service has done exactly the right thing — they’ve been watching it.”

They are not the only ones. Falk said he drove to a friend’s house in the Foothills Wednesday night, where a steady line of traffic brought people to watch the fire like they would the Fourth of July fireworks.

Jim Malusa, a research scientist with the UA’s Department of Natural Resources, watched with his family from the roof of his midtown home. Malusa has mapped the vegetation zones of the Catalinas for the Firescape program.

This fire is burning a variety of vegetation, he said.

“The flamers are mostly in grassland with the evil shin-daggers and lots of other fire-adapted plants. Those plants are primed to jump back up with the rains,” he said.

As the fire burned upward into pinyon-juniper, it burned low, he said. “It wasn’t in the canopy of those trees.”

Malusa said the fire could be “the best one we’ve had in the Catalinas for a long time” — so long as it doesn’t creep down the front slope into desert terrain that has been invaded by buffelgrass.

The fire started with a lightning strike on July 29, but grew little in high humidity and intermittent rain until Wednesday, when the humidity dropped, the wind picked up and the fire moved east, Schewel said. It also “slopped into Finger Rock Canyon,” and covered about 750 acres by late Thursday.

Schewel said fire managers decided last week to monitor the fire rather than engage it, for a number of reasons, the first being safety of firefighters in the rugged, remote terrain.

It was not threatening any structures and it was burning in a location that needed fire, she said.

Crews are available to fight the fire should it begin moving downward toward civilization, she said, but by Thursday morning, it was not moving and a reconnaissance team reported light rain falling.

It’s the nature of a monsoon fire to ebb and flow, said David Robinson, fuels specialist for the National Park Service and the Kaibab National Forest, where a 3,900-acre fire is being managed for resource benefit.

The Burnt Complex of lightning-caused fires has been ebbing and flowing for 30 days on a ponderosa pine landscape of rolling ridges and valleys.

On wet days, a two-person crew is sufficient for monitoring the fire. When things dry out, more crews are called in, Robinson said.

“We’re returning fire to a fire-adapted ecosystem, to promote nutrient cycling, reduce dead-and-down surface fuels and to thin out naturally some of the denser areas where we have understory trees. It’s a natural process,” he said.

The weather this year, with rain in May and an early start to the monsoon in June, kept fire acreage down across the Southwest and it has made management decisions easier.

“This season has provided us with opportunities to utilize fire in its natural role to clear excess vegetation,” Schewel said.

What the Finger Rock Fire does next “is going to depend a lot on the weather.”

“It’s doing what we see these lightning fires do during the monsoon. You get ignition, some burning and then rain that may or may not put it out.”