Forest crews are currently thinning more than 600 acres on the western side of the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff.
It’s all meant to stave off a possible catastrophic wildfire in an especially vulnerable area.
On Tuesday afternoon, the claw of a massive machine is nimbly stacking logs in a trailer about a hundred yards off Snowbowl Road.
James Perkins of Perkins Natural Resources — the contractor on the project — watches his grandson operate the machine.
He says working on these slopes is very different from their typical projects thinning ponderosa pine.
“There's a lot of different kinds of trees: doug fir, aspen, spruce. So this is specialized logging here, this is not your typical timber sale. This is hard-to-do logging up here that we're taking on,” Perkins says.
Perkins says a big part of the job has been pulling dead-and-down logs off the forest floor.
Coconino County Forest Restoration Director Jay Smith says removing that potential fuel and thinning the forest should reduce the intensity of any fire that starts in the area.
“It's not if this burns, it's when this burns and we want to be ahead of that. And we’ve done it about as fast as we can and I’m sleeping much better at night because of it,” Jay says. “So, we're not going to say that there'll never be a fire in here. What we're saying is that when the fire does come through, the burn severity will be much lower.”
Jay says the projects also act as a buffer to protect the Kachina Peaks Wilderness.
That area is thick with dead-and-down trees and contains steep slopes where fighting a fire would be difficult. Laws protecting wilderness areas also make forest treatments more complicated above the wilderness boundary.
“Because we can't take equipment into there to treat, we want to treat everything up to the edge of the wilderness so that we have every opportunity to stop a fire from getting into the wilderness,” Jay says.
Three years ago county officials unveiled a study on the consequences of a destructive wildfire in the Rio de Flag watershed north of Flagstaff.
It showed such a blaze could lead to severe flooding through the city’s center and cause $2.8 billion in economic damage.
“So obviously we saw that we could spend several million dollars and still have a really good return on investment here,” Jay says. “The Flood Control District has put in $4.2 million for this project. The Forest Service put in $500,000.”
Jay expects the work to continue through the fall and resume next year on other parts of the San Francisco Peaks.
