ELY- One the last day of November, the Superior National Forest (SNF) filed an official notice that it was initiating what it calls the Fernberg Corridor Landscape Management Project (FCLMP), named after Fernberg Rd. A large part of the proposed project involves prescribed burns and forest fire fuels reduction along the Fernberg Rd. corridor and in Stony River Township east of Highway 1 and north of Forest Rd. 377. All of the forest lands involved are in Lake County.
The areas in the FCLMP are of concern because of conditions favorable to high intensity wildfires. The condition of greatest concern is an abundance of both live and dead balsam fir and dead spruce in the understory zone of the forest. Removing these trees would limit surface fires from climbing up the volatile trees of the current understory into mature tree canopies.
The FCLMP seeks to address this and other fire-conducive conditions, especially along the Fernberg Rd. corridor, which is surrounded to the north, east and south by fire-prone forest.
“One of the goals here is to restore a more natural fire cycle,” Kawishiwi District Ranger Aaron Kania told the Timberjay at the Dec. 7 open house at the district headquarters in Ely. “We want fire to play its natural role in maintaining the health of the forest.”
He explained that pre-20th century natural and indigenous-set fires reduced the fuels that fed blazes. “Historically, the accumulation of fuels would not be this thick,” pointing out fire-prone features of a modern forest area near the district headquarters. A previous USFS policy of suppression of all fires prevailed for most of the 20th century. Realizing that total suppression was causing an accumulation of wildfire fuels in many forests, the USFS started to back away from that policy, leading to initiatives like the FCLMP.
“Our aim is to reduce high-intensity wildfires in drier, windier fire conditions seen during summer and drought.”
Some of the specific fire reduction features of the FCLMP include prescribed burning inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) to reduce high intensity wildfires. Outside of the BWCAW, the USFS will reduce understory fuels with heavy equipment or chainsaws. The project will also reintroduce fire into fire dependent ecosystems within the project area.
Other FCLMP activities
The FCLMP has provisions to improve the scenic quality of trails, campsites and waterways. It will also improve and create new non-motorized trails, and improve access to hunting, fishing, and trapping.
The project will also expand eight gravel pits “to meet future gravel needs” for USFS road and trail maintenance and to provide gravel to “local governments, private citizens, and other agencies.” Also included will be the improvement of Forest Rd. 443, and the decommissioning of Forest Rd. 446 and unclassified road U544601 after the project is completed.
Approximately 32 miles of temporary roads will be needed for project activities, which will be decommissioned afterward, unless needed to by tribal members to exercise their treaty rights.
Also included in the FCLMP is the commercial green timber harvesting of 9,000 acres “at sustainable levels.” The timber harvest not only fulfills the USFS mission to provide viable commercial activities within its forests, it also aims “to create young forests, improve stand conditions while maintaining stand age, reduce potential wildfire impacts, and improve moose habitat” according to the FCLMP scoping report.
Public outreach
The Superior National Forest started its public outreach with a Dec. 7 open house at the Kawishiwi District Headquarters. It also held a virtual open house on Dec. 19.
On Jan. 1, the SNF will load up a new webpage with an interactive map for the FCLMP. To access the site, go to www.fs.usda.gov/projects/superior/landmanagement/projects and then click on the link to the FCLMP. This will take the user to the project website which will host the map. The site also has a library of project documents, including a report of the complete proposed project scope.
The FCLMP also has a public comment page where users can upload their comments and concerns about the project. Included is a library of public comments already uploaded, which currently has 16 submitted letters, all of which can be read online.
The period for commenting on the FCLMP scoping documents ends on Jan. 18 at 11:59 p.m., though the USFS states on the website that “Comments on the Fernberg Corridor project Scoping Report would be most helpful if received by Jan. 15.”
USFS fire policy
The USFS policy of total fire suppression is now believed to have harmfully changed many forests, especially those which depend on fire to support their ecosystems. This policy persisted for almost a century. By the 1990s, forest managers realized that total suppression made forests more vulnerable to catastrophic high-intensity wildfires.
Staring in 1995, the USFS gradually adopted policies to reduce fuels and reintroduce prescribed burns.
The Great Fire of 1910 solidified the USFS’s policy of putting out every fire. The event is still called the Big Burn in Idaho and Montana. One compilation listed the Big Burn as the ninth largest fire in recorded history, the second largest fire in U.S. history, and the largest in the lower 48 states. In just two days in late August, 1910, three million acres burned along 300 miles of the Idaho-Montana border, from the Canadian border to the Salmon river, devasting forests and destroying towns. The smoke and soot fell across the northern part of the country as far as New England.
Many politicians at the time, especially those from western states, saw the USFS as a federal land grab. The result was frequent attacks on the USFS budget, which had been pared back so much in 1910 that the agency ran on a skeleton staff. In the face of the death toll and devastation, public sentiment about the USFS changed overnight and its budget doubled in the space of year.
The USFS embraced total fire suppression in the wake of the Great Fire of 1910. Where the USFS led, other federal and state firefighters followed because of the Weeks Act of 1911, which established collaboration and cooperation among federal, state, local, and other firefighting agencies. Accordingly, in the years that followed, total fire control is what Americans came to expect for most of the 20th century. Now we know better.