Fire on the Mountain
Sky Jacobs
7-25-07

  In June I trekked with a friend to the top of the Sierra Pinito, a good-sized range just Southeast of Nogales. The Sierra Pinito nudge their way into the pine forest community at 2230 meters, high enough to compete for serious Sky Island status in Sonora. They are just South of the border from the Santa Ritas and Patagonias on the US side, but because of the border they are a world away when it comes to fire suppression, as well as a natural fire regime during this past century.

To drive the point home for me was the fact that the mountain range just to the South, the Sierra Azul, was actively burning.  The fire had burned a significant percentage of the range by the time we laid eyes on it. By the time we left the area it had burned itself out naturally.

 

In my decade 15 years of experiences in Sonora I’ve seen people with a very different attitude toward fire than I am used to.  Little is done to suppress wildfires in Mexico. Fires often burn mountains, grasslands, and even buffelgrass covered shoulders on major highways, just to burn themselves out without much attention from authorities.  Combined with the lack of resources to fight wildfire in Mexico, this has created vegetation communities with a substantially different (relatively recent) past than similar communities on the U.S. side of the border.

 

Of course some issues that affect the spread of natural wildfire are still present such as cattle grazing and logging. These have certainly had effects on how wildfire spreads and affects the landscpe in Sonora. Some rugged or remote locations have even been spared these effects.

 

This dramatic difference in fire management bisecting the Sky Islands offers an opportunity to study the differences as well as the massive problems fire suppression has created in Arizona and the West in general.

 

I've personally always been interested in wildfire and how it interacts with vegetation communities. In the last few years I've had my eyes opened to the vast differences in the on-the-ground reality of forest fire and the rhetoric of fire suppression advocates and the media.  In the U.S. there is an amazing acceptance of anti-fire rhetoric by most everyone, including scientists land managers and others who should know better.  Thankfully there have been some recent advances in management by land management agencies in certain areas.

 

The Rodeo-Chedeski fire on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim, in most people's minds, was a horrible fire that destroyed vast areas of Arizona's high country. The Center for Biological Diversity was fighting a proposed "salvage" logging operation after the fire, which gave me an opportunity to spend several days documenting the "aftermath". What I found (even considering many decades of fire suppression, logging, and grazing) was a fire that did what it is supposed to in Ponderosa country - kill young thickets of pine, burn duff and extra fuel, and burn off lower branches of many of the older pines thus protecting them from future fires.

 

Only a few areas had been utterly destroyed (albeit temporarily). Inevitably these areas had been clear-cut a few decades prior and had grown back with very thick even age stands of pine, which were fairly young and perfect for spreading a hot crown fire.

As seen in the photo above, pines that were logged in this “salvage” operation were the huge old growth pines that are capable of withstanding fires of this caliber, and in fact had withstood many fires in able to be there at all.

 

In the Sierra Pinito, where fire is a very regular occurrence, I saw many hundreds of pines (Apache, Arizona, and Chihuahua) and every single one had a fire scar. I am not exagerating. And considering that, I can’t even say for certain that I saw a single pine killed by fire.

 

Most of the Pinito is dominated by oak and pine-oak forest.  Some areas of oak had been fire-killed and replaced by thickets of younger oak. These were generally in small patches on ridges and a few steep slopes.  These mosaics of fire-kill are beneficial to the ecosystem and create a wider variety of habitat for animals and plants.

 

Unfortunately most pine in the Sierra Pinito had been cut by loggers on the 40’s and 50’s, but enough time has passed that the pines there now, though definitely not old growth, are now big enough to constitute a real, healthy, functioning pine forest community... something that would be nice to see in Arizona in the near future.

Old growth Apache Pine in Sierra Pinito canyon, left uncut by loggers