Warmer, dryer weather in late April and early May made for good prescribed burning conditions on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest’s North Zone. Over the last couple of weeks several hundred acres were burned to reduce fuels – down trees, branches and woody debris – near the junction of Oregon Highway 3 and Forest Road 46 to reduce fuels.
The Starvation Ridge prescribed burn near Davis Creek also eliminated small diameter trees to encourage large trees to continue to grow and reduce the amount of ladder fuels, District Ranger Brian Anderson said.
Following several years of commercial harvest and thinning, the prescribed burn is the first started in the Lower Joseph Creek Restoration Project.
Anderson said the Forest plans to continue to use prescribed burning throughout the entire planning area with increasing scale and frequency.
“We hope to treat multiple burn units in the coming years and increase the size of those units to thousands of acres versus hundreds of acres,” Anderson said. “Prescribed fire, combined with mechanical thinning treatments, is making a huge difference in restoring forest health and fire resilience across this landscape.
Dead and down trees and limbs on the ground, referred to as “fuels”, as well as small diameter conifers competing for water and nutrients from larger trees, were burned on Starvation Ridge last week by the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest’s North Zone fire crews. Because of its distance from the Wallowa Valley, this smoke didn’t impact where most people live and wasn’t as intense as smoke emitted in late summer wildfires when fuels are drier.
Prescribed fires, like this one on Starvation ridge north of Enterprise, removes dead and down fuels in the forest as well as some small diameter trees, opening up corridors for deer and elk, refreshing shrubs on which big game depend for browse and songbirds for nesting, and returns nutrients to the soil.
