Fuels reduction underway in Highlands

By: 
Nathan Steele

By Nathan Steele

The Custer County Conservation District and the Black Hills National Forest have partnered for a hazardous fuels reduction project in the Custer Highlands area on the western end of Custer County. The goal of the project is to reduce the risk of hazardous fire to homes in the nearby Custer Highlands development and to improve the overall health of nearby lands. The project aims to achieve this goal by reintroducing fire to the landscape in the form of prescribed burns or brush-pile burning.
Last Thursday, representatives of the conservation district and the Forest Service gave a presentation on the history and scope of the project and also led a tour of the unit currently being worked on in the project. At the tour, feedback was sought on potential brush-pile disposal options.
“Think about this like you live right next to this project,” said Todd Hoover, Hell Canyon Ranger District Fire Management Officer (FMO).
The area currently affected is on Forest Service land just west of Teepee Canyon near Antelope Road and Mountain Shadow Road. The total project area is broken into five units; work has been done in unit five recently and is ramping up in unit two. Unit one is a 79-acre area in the northwestern section of the project and is the part closest to surrounding homes.
Along the boundary of the unit with the nearby private land, the trees have been thinned to create a fuel break. They did this by spacing the trees to have 20 feet between them. All activity fuels in the unit have been cut and made into dozens of brush piles to be burned.
The forest service has also enhanced meadows in the unit by taking out pines where they had begun to encroach. Timber stand improvement through the unit has also been done with 16-foot variable spacing between trees.
Wildlife Areas to Protect (ATPs) have also been identified. One such ATP in unit one is a turkey roost, for which the Forest Service has created a habitat enclosure.
“So we didn’t do any kind of fuel manipulation in there. We left that for the habitat enhancement,” said Hoover. There are also other ATPs throughout other units of the project.
Some landowners also took measures to protect and maintain the health of their properties by thinning, and many of those made use of a cost-sharing program for thinning by the Custer County Conservation District. It was estimated there are hundreds of homes in the Custer Highlands area, perhaps up to a thousand.
“It opened up the canopy. It’s to allow these trees to become more healthy, more resilient, grow bigger and reduce the fire risk. That’s the overall goal is to make the private lands adjacent lands to the forest more safe,” said Hoover
The project has been ongoing for a few years now, and the process to get the trees cut and piled has happened over the course of a couple years with cutting being done in the winter to minimize spread of ips beetles. Then, in the rest of the year the fuels are made into piles, which need to sit for 2-5 years to dry out enough to burn well.
“We let these piles sit for a couple of summers  to dry out so that when we come back and burn them, we get the best consumption possible. If we let them sit too long, then they start bringing moisture up on the bottom,” said Hoover.
Currently, the piles are to be disposed of through winter-pile burning when conditions allow. For land south of Hwy. 16, that means there needs to be at least four inches of continuos snow cover over a course of three consecutive days. The problem with this, however, is that those conditions are becoming rarer and rarer.
“Odds are in favor that those conditions aren’t going to exist, likely in our lifetimes,” said Chris Stover, the forest fuels specialist from the Mystic Ranger District.
Stover said that winters like the ones the area just experienced—mild and with only sporadic, short-term snow—are likely to be more or less the norm.
“If we wait for four inches of snow that’s going to last for three days down here, you guys are going to have piles for the next fifteen years,” said Hoover.
The lack of snow in  the area during recent years has caused the Forest Service to have a huge backload of piles.
“We’re 3-4,000 piles behind because we don’t get enough snow and we can’t keep up,” said Hoover.
In response, the Forest Service is looking at two other  prescribed burn options to deal with the piles and surrounding land. One option is for a pile use type two prescribed fire, which calls for unit one to be divided into smaller sub-units, creating fire lines, lighting piles early in the winter with minimal snow cover, and broadcast burning when fuels are available.
This plan would light the piles and “allow that fire to move across the landscape at its pace, knowing that we are going to have control features out here,” said Stover.
The other proposed option is a broadcast type two prescribed burn, allowing piles to consume while burning the entire unit. Both plans are expected to be a moderate complexity burn.
Stover gave a short overview of fire history in the Black Hills. He explained how this project fits into a larger effort of reintroducing naturally occurring fire return intervals to the landscape.
The fire return interval is the number of years between successive fires in a specific area. Stover said that across the Black Hills, the average fire return interval is 26 years for any given acre. In an area like Custer Highlands, he said that the natural interval is actually closer to every 10-12 years.
“Historically, this land would have been impacted by fire all the time. Every summer, there would have been smoke in the air. The absence of fire and smoke in the Black Hills—that’s the unnatural state for this ecosystem,” said Stover.
The more fire return intervals are missed, the greater fuel accumulation will be in the forest.
“We are now in a position in the Black Hills where business is no longer usual. With the amount of fuels that we  have relative to the conditions we have, we’re going to have to start getting creative to be able to mitigate the fuels,” said Stover.
Many in attendance were in support of having a plan for the piles to go away.
“If there’s piles sitting here, and they continue to sit here when we have a fire come through, that’s just going to intensify your fire right into homes. We need them gone. That’s my opinion. Burn it,” said Luke Caster, fire chief for the Highlands Volunteer Fire Department.
Representatives also addressed what happens after any possible burning.
It was explained that the fire is considered out when there is no smoke and no heat for three straight days. The area will be patrolled often.
Work will also be done afterward to mitigate the spread of weeds, like Canadian thistle and leafy spurge.
“This is a continuous process for as long as there’s forest service and private property next to each other. It’s a forever deal,” said Derek Olson.
Prescribed broadcast burns are also to be done at regular intervals on the other 700 acres of the project going into the future. This is also to maintain forest resiliency.
The work is funded by a $30,000 Resource Advisory Committee grant obtained by the conservation district.

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