It was a hot, windy day. I went up on the ridge and looked at it and
originally I thought "Oh, it's no big deal - it's quite a ways away."
And then with you know kind of set up there and kept an eye on it and then it's like nah, that thing's moving fast.
We're standing here on the western edge of the Cornet Fire
and as ODF was fighting the Cornet Fire
the BLM was working on the Windy Ridge Fire farther to the east.
At the time
we didn't know that there was a third unnamed fire in between them
and over the course of four to five days all three fires would merge into the Cornet- Windy Fire
for about a hundred and four thousand acres.
It's tough to see landowners that you know go through that sort of thing
and see that sort of loss on a lot of
pieces of land that have been in families for generations.
A lot of people were very overwhelmed.
Not sure where to go, what to do.
Immediately after the fire - even while it was still burning - myself and Logan McCrae in the Baker ODF office
we started working with landowners helping connect them with loggers to do salvage logging.
The Oregon Department of Forestry and our stewardship foresters tend to be a primary point of contact
within a community following a disaster like a wildfire and that's really because we have both
a strong set of relationships with local landowners
but we also have
relationships with a broad network of federal, state and local agencies
that have resources to help landowners.
We were talking to NRCS and FSA
before the fire was out about what options were available to help landowners.
So in many cases our federal partners and the Natural Resources Conservation Service or the Forest Service or the Farm Service Agency
have programs that really are intended to help landowners achieve their goals and objectives
on their privately owned forest land.
But they don't always have the staff resources or the technical expertise to actually work one-on-one with landowners out on the ground.
And that's really the the role that ODF stewardship foresters can can help play.
Particularly following a
disaster like a wildfire.
Don't wait until the fire's out. Go in immediately.
First place I went to [was] State Forestry.
We started working together and contacted the NRCS -Natural Resources Conservation Service
and started getting the game plan together
to see if we could get some cost share to offset the the planting cost and then the next thing was
Private Lands Forest Network - PLFN - to start sourcing seedlings to see what was available.
The Department of Forestry has a lot of great local connections that can help landowners
not just put a plan together, but also implement that plan.
Finding consultants and contractors to get work done, locating seedlings,
navigating some of the cost share and other assistance programs through the federal agencies.
First is trying to get a logger
and getting a good value for your salvaged timber.
Second is you know your reforestation. Getting the trees in the ground. Making sure that you have good quality
seedlings and the right seedlings for the right growing site. And then needs to follow up with
brush control or vegetation management to ensure that those seedlings will survive.
In this area there's a lot of ponderosa pine and it doesn't last long after fires.
Most of it starts to to get blue-stain fungus in it by the next spring.
You start having beetles coming in attacking the trees cause they're weakened by the fire and by drought.
So we had loggers in here beginning salvage logging.
You really needed to consider the cost of replanting compared to the income from the salvage logging.
And without the help of both state forestry and NRCS to do a cost share on the replanting
most of these landowners would have gone in the negative if they would have tried to salvage and reforest.
The replanting was a new thing for most of them because
none of them had ever replanted on this scale before.
So that's where ODF played a big role in helping them find those resources.
Through the Farm Service Agency's
Emergency Forest Restoration program we were able to obtain money to do a 75% cost share on helping landowners
replant after the fire.
Financial assistance was critical
in helping them get trees in the ground
and encouraging them to remove their dead standing timber.
Availability of seedlings was a major factor.
Not a lot of landowners in Eastern Oregon do a whole lot of
reforestation or planting and so they usually don't have a large amount of available seedlings on hand.
So the first year we gathered up what we could, which was only about 10 percent of what we needed and
then jumped on with Private Land Forest Network to
Get some more seedlings sowed and get them ready for the next couple years.
On average around here we needed, we need about twenty to thirty thousand seedlings across the district for private land and
Immediately after the fires in 2015 that spiked to around a million trees.
Hancock Forest Management was very, very helpful.
A lot of the property up there was intermixed with Hancock ground, but I got a lot of advice from them.
They actually sold PLFN quite a few seedlings to help the private landowners and that was very, very generous of them because they just had
You know, I can't remember but like fifty thousand acres of their own ground burn up.
When a landowner salvage logs after fire they're required by the Oregon Forest Practices Act to replant.
Normally after a clear cut a landowner is required to replant within two years
but after a catastrophic wildfire
such as Cornet-Windy when the need for seedlings spikes and there isn't enough supply to meet the demand a
a landowner can work with their local stewardship forester to come up with a plan for an alternate practice
to lengthen that time line so they have more time to obtain those seedlings.
We're on the west side of the Cornet Fire in the Denny Creek drainage and
the trees that are growing here, this one behind me, are
Western larch that were planted in 2016 the spring after the Cornet-Windy Fire.
This landowner planted approximately forty acres.
They were able to salvage log the winter after the fire and then get a mix of
Western larch and ponderosa pine to plant the next spring.
When you replant trees, there are several things you need to consider,
such as what seed zone you're in so you're getting seed that is adapted for your elevation, your precipitation, those sorts of things.
The correct species - make sure you're planting a species that is suitable for that site.
And making sure the seedlings are grown well and then handled correctly.
It's really important to the Oregon Department of Forestry that we help landowners maintain a working forest landscape and we recognize that
natural disasters like wildfires really set that back and on top of that they can also have a pretty
significant impact on the local economy.
We really want to help communities recover and that means working with
individual landowners to help them get their forests growing and working again as quickly as possible.