More than 200 volunteers pitched in to plant pine seedlings in a fire scar east of the San Francisco Peaks. The area burned in the 2010 Schultz Fire, was replanted, and then burned again in the 2022 Pipeline and Tunnel fires. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny joined silviculture forester Chris Curley of the Coconino National Forest at the site to talk about why he’s working to restore it once again.
It’s a little heartbreaking you have to replant an area that was already replanted once, back after 2010 Schultz fire. How does it feel to be out here today doing this work?
I’ll say it’s tough. Previously we had a very dedicated forester who put a lot of time and effort into planting those 3,000 acres and for him to watch all that hard work realistically go up in flames, it’s heartbreaking. To hear that even secondhand is just tough. And then to, firsthand, be out here replanting that, knowing that this is an area that in 12 years had been hit by three high severity fires, it’s almost like—people are like, when’s the next one? … But I will say I’m hopeful, because when they originally replanted those 3,000 acres, there was a lot of standing dead wood, which is what caused the Pipeline and Tunnel to burn so uncharacteristically hot through this area, and that heat is what killed the ponderosa. Typically, they are a fire-adapted species, they live symbiotically with the fire, they almost need it.
Why do you think it’s important we do this work? Why does this area need a little help to bring back those trees?
When you’re looking at the existing trees around here, they all have lots of pinecones, and ponderosa pine seeds do travel pretty far. With that being said, most of the studies will show that ponderosa seedlings will travel up to fifty meters from their parent tree… It’s going to take hundreds of years to get back to what this was, and it might never reach it… With us getting these seedlings back in the ground it’s giving it that head start to get back to a healthy ponderosa pine forest.
Can you tell me a bit about how fire scars behave compared to a healthy, unburned, forest. This area is contributing to a lot of the flooding we’re seeing down in town, why does it matter that we have plants on the landscape?
To touch on flooding, the flooding on this side of the Peaks has been impressive to say the least…. Once you get more vegetation on the ground, those roots will help keep the moisture, it will help absorb the moisture, keep it on the site, as well as slow the runoff, just because they’ll be less water moving over the surface…. Another thing that we’re doing is we’re planting at a little bit lesser density, trying to keep the spacing more liberal, verses having these really tight groups of ponderosa, and that’s to help do a bit of fire prevention work upfront, verses reacting to it once it’s already happening.
Are you going to come back out next year? How many years will it take to replant?
To plant this area, probably a few years. To fully replant the Pipeline and Tunnel footprint completely, or to what we’d like to see, could take upwards of a decade.
What’s been your favorite part of being out here working?
Oh, these are long days. I’m out here a little after five in the morning. If you look around, it’s so vast and open. Watching the sunrises and the storms rolling through, cause you really can see everything from up here. I really appreciate that. Especially knowing that hopefully in 20 to 30 years you can’t do that, because they’ll be trees here. Just enjoying that while I can.
Chris Curley, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
