So where we're standing right now is on top of a stock tank that used to be filled with water, on good years when we'd get rainfall off the slopes that gradually feeds down this drainage into this constructed stock tank for wildlife and livestock to water at. Shortly after the fire was put out, we had a rainfall event that came off the slopes of Kendrick, right in the vicinity of where I initially attacked it with several crews, and the slopes that had burned real hot with extreme fire behavior that stand-replaced, the water hit those slopes and just ran off in sheets, hit the drainages and transported all this material down into the stock tank and further-down drainage. Hundreds of tons of material came off this hillside at that time, filled this stock tank with material and continued to transport it down drainage. This is not a rare event either, nor is it the last of the events that occurred a year ago at this time, where we're standing. It's gonna continue to occur until these slopes are re-vegetated. About a month ago, at an area called Pumpkin Center on the west side of Kendrick Mountain, we also had a large rainfall event that did much the same thing as you're seeing here. It transported hundreds and thousands of tons of material off that west slope, what I'd like to call a geological event. It moved a massive amount of geology off the slopes of Kendrick Mountain. And again, it'll be like this for a decade, maybe more, until these slopes are restored with vegetation.

The unfortunate thing here again, is, we can't do anything to change what's happened. We can try to manage these forest conditions that are left for us to manage now, for future generations, and to minimize the impact of the erosion occurring here. Opportunities exist still to do what we call "contour felling" of trees, where you cut the dead trees on the slopes here horizontally along the slopes, to keep the water from running directly off . We can also be restoring some of these dams to check the water flow along the drainages, building check dams in essence. What we're also planning to do around Kendrick mountain, are conduct prescribed burns elsewhere as well as within the burn area itself. A project I'm working on right now is called the Barrier Kendrick Prescribed Fire Hazard Fuel Reduction Project, we should have that completed sometime around September-October this year, that'll enable us to go back in and do the prescribed fires that we talked about, much like we conducted up on the fire itself. We kept the fire off Newman Hill for the most part, now we want to go in, and instead of waiting for a wildfire to hit Newman Hill like it did Kendrick, we'll do a prescribed fire there, reduce the fuel loading, gradually reduce the density of the stands of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer on that slope, and maybe even restore some aspen habitat. That's a component of the forest structure that we really haven't talked about at this point, the aspen across the Southwestern United States. Because we've suppressed fire, again, and these forests have grown so dense and thick over the last 125 years, its been to the exclusion of the native vegetation that existed here, like aspen. Aspen depends on cooler fires burning across the landscape, allowing for a more open condition to persist, whereas when the conifers grow up in the absence of fire and crowd out the aspen, over the top of the aspen, when fires come through there then, those fires will kill those aspen out and will burn too hot. It'll also just out-compete them, essentially, for nutrients, for water, for sunlight, and the aspen has died out significantly, not just in the southwest but across the intermountain west. There's a lot of work currently going in to aspen management. The best thing we can do for aspen management? Thin the forest and burn it. Burn it under cooler conditions, though, cause too hot a fire isn't good for anything. Ponderosa pine, pine mixed conifer is not familiar with hot fire across thousands of acres. It's more accustomed to having ground fires clean it regularly across the forest floor, providing that healthier nutrient cycling and conditions for healthy aspen stands, more open ponderosa pine savannah, more large diameter tree growth, instead of these dense 100 year old or less than 100 year old trees that have grown to be anywhere, 800, sometimes over 1000 trees per acre, where historically we know from counting the stumps and the large trees that persist on the landscape, which are very few, unfortunately, we know that there only were 20, maybe 25 per acre. In places now that's replaced with 800 to 1000.

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