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Living with Fire
Lessons from the Salmon Creek Forest

Eileen Ecklund

On the night of Friday, June 20, a rare spring electrical storm rolled in over most of northern California. Jenny Griffin recalled how beautiful it was to watch the dry lightning dance over the ocean from her home in Caspar, a tiny town on the coast just north of Mendocino. “Then I went to bed and had a blissful night’s sleep.” It was the last good sleep she, and many others, would have for a while. That night and into the morning hours, thousands of lightning strikes hit northern California--some estimates were as high as 6,500--and ignited more than 2,000 fires, including more than 130 in Mendocino County.

Early the next morning, Larry Tunzi, chief of the volunteer fire department for the little town of Comptche, 17 miles inland from Mendocino, was out in his truck scouting for fires in his district. As he drove he could see new ones springing up along the ridges and in the valleys--"a bunch of them." He knew then that his department was in for trouble. It was early in the fire season, when the forests were usually still green and moist, but spring 2008 had been the driest on record in northern California.

Griffin first heard of the fires at 10 a.m., when a forester called to tell her that there was one in the Salmon Creek Forest, on land owned by the Conservation Fund, where she works as a program manager. The Fund, a national nonprofit organization, owns three tracts of formerly industrial timberland in the Mendocino area, almost 40,000 acres in all, which it is trying to restore to healthy forests that can be harvested with a light hand and an eye to long-term sustainability. It had approval from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) for a timber harvest plan on its Salmon Creek property in July. Two others, for its Garcia River and Big River Forests, were approved for later in the year.

It soon became clear that there were many fires in the area, though just how many, and where, was difficult to tell. Griffin called contractors to try to round up firefighting help, then drove to Salmon Creek. There she found Rick Hautala already at work.

Hautala, a licensed timber operator, had been one of the first to get to the fire’s point of origin. “When I came around the corner on the road, flames were shooting 30 feet in the air,” he later said. Cal Fire firefighters were also present when Griffin arrived, but the agenncy soon had to shift most of its people and equipment to other, higher-priority blazes. So many fires were burning throughout the northern part of the state that Cal Fire had begun to refer to many of them as fire complexes. Some of the biggest were in Mendocino, Lake, Monterey, Trinity, and Shasta counties.

Tunzi and Cal Fire, together, determined that the Salmon Creek blaze, which was burning on Navarro Ridge and would become known as the Navarro Fire, was the highest priority for Tunzi’s 22-person volunteer crew--the fire closest and most threatening to Comptche. When Cal Fire pulled out, Tunzi was made incident commander.

Firefighting departments throughout the state help each other out when conditions require it, under a mutual aid system coordinated by Cal Fire. Typically, county and local fire departments are not responsible for wildland fires like the Navarro: those are under Cal Fire’s jurisdiction. Now, however, Cal Fire was forced to do triage. Fires that threatened lives and structures were top priority, so many--such as those in forests near Caspar--were fought primarily by county and local firefighters and contractors hired by landowners. Some in areas far from population centers were left to burn unattended.

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